Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 2: 1984-1987 - Britannia Gnomes and the Tower of Doom - Part 1

This week on Super Adventures, my tour of the first ten years of Dungeons & Dragons games has reached its third year: 1984. But I'd like to keep this moving at a decent pace, so I'm also going to write about every D&D game released in 1985, 1986 and 1987.

Though it occurs to me that I don't really have the context for these Golden Age CRPGs. I'm not old enough or American enough to have ever loaded one of them up on an Apple II, so I have no nostalgia and zero fond memories. I did play a few Amiga and DOS RPGs, but it usually only took me 10 minutes to realise that they were not meant for me. The 2000s are when I got into the genre, with games like Final Fantasy IX, Deus Ex, Dungeon Siege and Knights of the Old Republic. That's the era I'm nostalgic for.

So okay, what I'm going to do is research some of the other influential RPGs of the mid-'80s and I'm going to play them as well. I don't promise that I'm going to stick with them very long, I'm not the CRPG Addict, I'm just some millennial writing a retro blog, but I'm smart enough to know that I need a history lesson.

I'm going to play... 16 games I think. About 4 per year. That seems like a normal reasonable amount. I'll even put a number next to each title so it's like one of those 'top 20' internet lists.

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1984

Okay, it turns out that there weren't any new Dungeons & Dragons games released in 1984. The franchise took the year off. It's kind of weird really, as it was D&D's 10th anniversary. Plus the cartoon had only just started at the end of 1983 and they could've made something to tie in with that. Yes I know that this was the middle of the apocalyptic US video game crash, but computer games were still doing alright!

It wasn't a dull year for Dungeons & Dragons players though, as TSR published the first game module and novel for their new campaign setting, Dragonlance. Which is a completely different thing to Forgotten Realms, where Baldur's Gate etc. is set. It's not weird for an RPG franchise to have multiple settings, Final Fantasy jumps worlds with every game, but D&D seems closer to something like LEGO, where the separate product lines have their own video game tie-ins under the same brand name. Dragonlance went on to become a huge success, with countless novels and even a few games... and if I ever reach any of them I'll let you know.

The two big RPG series of the early '80s were Wizardry and Ultima, but neither of them got sequels this year. Though we did get the next best thing, officially licenced from Ultima creator Richard Garriott (because the publishers didn't want to get sued):

1 - QUESTRON (APPLE II)

Questron (Apple II)

Questron was the first fantasy RPG released by wargame developer Strategic Simulations, Inc. Established in 1979, SSI was one of the oldest game developers. In fact, they had practically invented historical wargames, and already had about 50 titles with their name on by this point. They didn't make this one though, they were just the publisher this time. It was developed by a guy called Chuck Dougherty, who knew about as much about what '80s RPGs were like as I do (though he had at least played Ultima.)

The game didn't waste any time with character creation or anything like that. I entered a name, read the opening text telling me I was a serf on a mission to stop Mantor the evil one, and was immediately thrown into a bare knuckle fist fight with a gorilla. Combat is turn based and commands are entered using their first letter (which kind of works until you get to (e)Xamine), so I just pressed 'F' over and over until one of us won. Thankfully it was me and I took my cash over to the town on the left to buy a weapon.

Questron (Apple II)

This is Geraldtown, where the shops are clearly labelled with letters and every NPC is a guard. A is armour, W is weapon and F is food, which you need to keep buying in order to survive. This is a problem as you need money for food, and walking around the overworld fighting enemies for money is going to make you hungry. You won't even be getting any stronger from it as combat doesn't give you XP.

Fortunately there's a gambling minigame! In fact the only guide I could find for the game considers earning enough cash through combat to be more of a theoretical possibility, as the gambling's where the real money is at. It apparently features games like roulette and blackjack, though I didn't get a chance to try it myself as every guard in town suddenly started walking towards me. They'd seen my character chatting to the NPC behind the dotted line, but they weren't coming to give him a warning, they were coming to beat him to death. And they succeeded! Fortunately you get resurrected by a friendly wizard with most of your money gone and just enough food to get your hopes up.

That wizard respawned me a few miles south of the starting town and by the time I hiked back up to a cathedral my resources were basically gone. 

Questron (Apple II)

If you're wondering why this picture's fuzzy, I edited it to get an idea of what it would look like on an actual CRT screen, with the dithering smoothed out and the little pixel people looking more human shaped.

I mostly came here for holy water health potions, as I've read that's the only way to get your health back - there's no resting at the inn in this one. Unfortunately my curiosity took me into one of the side rooms and the game judged me unworthy, slamming the door behind me. So now I'm trapped here forever and I didn't even get far enough to see the sketchy-looking first-person dungeons! Also there's no one to stop Mantor the Evil One from conquering the world, but that's fine as everyone in this world sucks.

Funny thing is, the game apparently has a hint system, so a player would have to be a real idiot to wander around with no idea what to do and get stuck like this! Though I've heard that the game's real innovation for its time is having a good ending, which is a shame as that's the part I was never going to see.

Questron was developed for the 7 year old Apple II, one of the first game machines with a disk drive. It even has colour graphics... kind of. It uses NTSC artifacts to make colours magically appear out of stripes of black and white. Unfortunately the same effect happened to the text, which is why it's all purple and green. I'd tell you what the music's like, but there isn't any.

Left - Apple II, right - Apple Macintosh (right), bottom - Commodore 64

I think the low-cost Commodore 64 (1983) was the best selling computer in the US at this point, though the Apple II (1977) was the home of Ultima and Wizardry and had been well established as the main platform for RPGs. Its cousin, the Apple Macintosh, joined it this year, bringing the mouse-driven graphic user interface into the mainstream. Though aside from that, the Mac's role in the history of RPGs is minimal. With its high-resolution monochrome screen, it was built more for work than for play.

The expensive IBM PC (1981) and its clones were a close second to the C64 in sales, but the machine had always been serious business. People were buying it for its spreadsheets, not its games, and certainly not for its CGA colours. Well, except for flight simulator fans I suppose.

But IBM wanted a piece of the home computer market too, so this year they released a computer less indifferent to video games: the PCjr.

King's Quest (PCjr)

The PCjr had 16-colour graphics and actual music, not just beeping from a speaker inside the case. If you boot up King's Quest on it you can hear a synthy fanfare followed by a noise that's probably supposed to be birds chirping. 

The game was funded by IBM to show off the new hardware, and was probably the best looking game on PC at this point. It was also cutting edge in design, as unlike earlier graphic adventure games, it features animation and a protagonist you can move around the screen. You have direct control and can walk in front of and behind objects, though good luck walking over that bridge.

Okay that was probably my fault, but of course Sierra would put a way to die right there on the first screen. The actual puzzles are supposed to be just as harsh, which doesn't surprise me in the least as it was the '80s, where gamers apparently wanted to struggle, and developers wanted to pad out gameplay and sell hintbooks. Though designer Roberta Williams apparently loved solving frustrating puzzles, so she was making the games that she'd want to play herself and I can't argue with that.

King's Quest (PCjr)

As I was walking around the connected blocks of empty wildness I realised that this game had even more influence on later games than I expected. I mean, that's what Baldur's Gate does! Also the dramatic camera angles in the castle are very Alone the Dark and Resident Evil. It doesn't do sprite scaling though, so you stay the same size as you walk into the distance. More importantly it doesn't have mouse control, so all actions are carried out with text commands like all the regular interactive fiction of the time. That means no dialogue options either. On the plus side, the game did let me eat the cookie fence.

For game based on fairy tales there isn't much of a tale being told here. Though it starts off with you going to see the king and getting a quest, so that part is very RPG at least. He sends you to find a precognitive mirror, an infinite treasure chest, and a really good shield, and I failed at all three tasks, along with some extra tasks like climbing back out of a well. I did find the Dark Lord Sauron's invisibility ring, but that wasn't on the list.

King's Quest went on to be hugely influential, while the PCjr immediately fell into a moat and was eaten by an alligator, partly because of its terrible chiclet keyboard. Fortunately its technology lived on in a PC clone called the Tandy 1000, which brought PCs in the home like IBM wanted... just not IBM PCs. So from this point on PC games didn't have to look and sound terrible, as long as they supported 'Tandy' in their setup program.

IBM lost interest in sound chips after their PCjr experiment and their new 286-powered PC/AT went back to beeps, though they did introduce a similar 16 colour graphics standard for their main line called EGA. However gamers weren't lining up to get their hands on a $400 EGA card that cost twice as much as a C64 and it took a while before it became widely adopted. In fact the EGA shareware games that people remember, like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, came out in the '90s.

Anyway, EGA wasn't even released until the end of the year, so if you got a IBM PC game in 1984 it was going to look like this:

2 - WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD (PC)

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC)

Look at those beautiful CGA colours! Well worth the three year wait for a PC port.

Wizardry was originally released in 1981 and was extremely important link in a chain of RPGs that started 7 years earlier with games developed by American students on PLATO mainframes. The moment the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game came out in 1974, fans got to work figuring out how make a version for computers. One of the most impressive of these PLATO RPGs was Oubliette, but it was sealed away in universities where only students ever saw it. 

So Wizardry's developers took a lot of inspiration from the game (and others like it), then squeezed it all into a relatively humble but considerably more accessible Apple II. The series can definitely take credit for a lot of things though. The PLATO RPGs were often multiplayer, so Wizardry may be the first RPG to give one player a whole party of characters to control.

Okay, I have a confession to make: CGA colours don't really look bright purple, not all the time at least. Like the Apple II, developers took advantage of the quirks of composite video to display different colours by magic. Fortunately DOSBox-X can emulate what the game would've actually looked like at the time:

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC)

Oh, well, no colours so far.

The first thing you do in the game (after figuring out what the 'scenario disk' thing is about), is make a team of six heroes. For each of them you choose one of the standard fantasy races, a moral alignment, and then distribute a random pile of bonus points into their stats. Once you raise an attribute high enough they qualify for a class, so high Strength and I.Q. would get you a choice of 'Fighter' or 'Mage'. Then you get to go shopping for weapons!

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC)

Damn, there's no colours when you're walking around either. There's not even shading! I am starting to realise I didn't give Treasure of Tarmin enough credit for the visuals it was able to pull off on an Intellivision.

Anyway, the game's a first-person turn-based dungeon crawler, I've played these before, I know the drill. You wander the hallways using a map you found on the internet, the first enemy encounter you run into kills half your dudes before you take a turn, and then the second enemy wipes your whole party out as you're running away.

And I mean properly wiped out. Game is autosaved, party is gone. Go make a new team. If your replacement heroes get powerful enough they can drag your original guys back to get resurrected, but not all in one trip as the corpses take up party slots! To be fair, being able to save at all makes this less harsh than most games of its time. The biggest home video games of 1981 were coin-op conversions like Asteroids and Space Invaders.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC) - in composite colour!

I really made an effort here, I looked up the recommended build for a party, I went shopping for weapons and armour, I've even been typing in codes like HALITO and BADIOS to cast spells! You have to look up the codes for each spell you want to cast, and the game doesn't make it obvious what you have or how many spell points are remaining. I think I got two casts each from my surviving spellcasters before they ran out, and there's apparently no way to recover magic in a dungeon!

Apparently what I should've been doing according to the manual, is dash into the maze, fight one encounter and then run out again, over and over. Because if you don't go through a routine to build up your team, you'll be going through the routine of re-rolling and re-equipping new characters over and over instead. The manual also mentions a bunch of stuff like trapped treasure chests and nasty tricks with the level design intended to disorientate players so they'll create inaccurate maps, so a player has that to look forward to as well.

Wizardry spent much longer being playtested and refined than most games of its time, and glancing at the spell list it looks like there's some real depth to the combat. I can tell why it became popular. But it isn't a role-playing adventure, it's a mountain. It's something you climb because you want to see if you can. Unfortunately I'm the guy who fell off the first bridge in a cartoon adventure game made for children, so it's not really for me.

3 - THE BLACK ONYX (PC-88)

The Black Onyx (PC-88)

The Black Onyx is one of the earliest examples of an RPG developed for the Japanese market and was fairly influential. It's basically a simplified Wizardry clone, but it beat the original game to Japanese stores by a year so it makes sense that it got a bit of attention.

You're on a quest to head into a dungeon to find the Black Onyx and unlike Wizardry you get to walk around the town at the start, checking out the shops behind all the yellow doors. There are also a lot of people walking around, though you can't actually see them. I don't speak Japanese, but I think most just want to wish you luck in finding the Black Onyx.

Looking at it, you'd think the NEC PC-8801 was a whole generation ahead of the Apple II, with how its dungeon has actual walls, but it'd just been a while since Wizardry had originally come out and people had gotten better at graphics. Though Japanese computers did have one advantage over many of the Western machines: they were designed to support higher resolutions in order to display Japanese text. So they were able to feature art like this:

Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II (PC-88)

Though higher resolution graphics come with a cost and in this case it was the colours, which is why Japanese computer games used so much dithering. 

So there are actually many sensible technical reasons for why Xanadu's in-game graphics look like this:

Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II (PC-88)

I wouldn't recommend looking directly at it though.

Okay I admit that this whole tangent about the video hardware of early Japanese computers is just because I thought it was funny that this guard likes standing on that woman's head and wanted an excuse to show the picture. There's also a dog that jumps on heads as well, and you can jump on their heads. This is actually revolutionary game design considering it means that this may be the first side-scrolling RPG ever to have a jump button. Anyway ignore all this, Xanadu sold a ton of copies, introduced new ideas and was an influential RPG for sure, but it came out in 1985 and I'm still in 1984.  

Plus it probably looks a lot better if you're looking at it at a screen from the era that blurs the colours a bit. At least, I hope it does. I hope monitors did something to help Black Onyx's characters look less disturbing as well, because they really need it.

But those characters are actually the most interesting part of the game for me...

The Black Onyx (PC-88)

Because Black Onyx features a character editor! You don't get to choose their class or stats, but you can pick their hair and clothing from a wide selection of horrifying clown faces. Then your hero gets displayed in a box on the left side of the screen for the rest of the game.

I don't know if this is the very first character editor in RPG history, but nothing else I've seen was doing this. You can even see them wearing their current weapons and armour.

Anyway, that's what was happening in the US and Japan. I wanted to come up with an interesting RPG from Britain as well, but I guess when the most popular gaming machine has 48K of RAM and its games come on cassette tape, it's not going to be a thriving genre. I did find this though...

4 - KNIGHT LORE (ZX SPECTRUM)

Knight Lore (ZX Spectrum)

Knight Lore was an important game for later RPGs because of what it inspired. It wasn't the first game to feature isometric graphics, there was Q*bert, Zaxxon and Congo Bongo, but once people saw its Filmation technology in action it got a whole genre of imitators. It looks like it should've been some weird one-off, but some of the most well-known games on the ZX Spectrum have been Knight Lore clones, like Batman and Head over Heels. Then we eventually got Solstice on the NES, which inspired Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. 

So this pain in the ass game is a distant ancestor of my beloved Disgaea series... of anything with an isometric view really, in the same way that all platformers have some DNA from Super Mario Bros. Hey, that's coming out next year!

It's actually pretty hard to play due to the tank controls, the slowdown and the lack of a shadow under the character to show their position. Also the colours. But it's bloody impressive what they were able to pull off back in a time when even the legendary Ultima featured a static player sprite that always faced the camera. I mean, look at it in action:

Knight Lore (ZX Spectrum)

What made Knight Lore stand out from previous isometric games is how it uses the perspective to put you in a 3D world. It's not a background that your sprite walks over, it's a 3D environment, with objects that can be pushed around by slime monsters when you're trying to line up a jump. King's Quest was a big deal at the time for putting a character into a world with objects he could move in front of or behind, and this does the same thing.

Oh that werewolf transformation is just something that happens at night, it's pure coincidence that it happened right when the table got knocked. If the monster had actually hit him, he would've disappeared into sparkles instantly, because games in the '80s were cruel. Seriously, I've never made it further than a few rooms into this game, it's way too difficult for me.

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1985

1985 was also a bit light on Dungeons & Dragons games, with a grand total of zero of them getting released.

There were a few notable game machines though, like the next generation Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Released a year after the Apple Macintosh, these computers also featured the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU and a mouse-driven graphical user interface, but they had colour graphics better than anything else on the market. The Amiga's Paula sound chip proved worthy of succeeding the Commodore 64's legendary SID chip, as it could play music built from audio samples like a Super Nintendo back before the Famicom had even made it over to the West.

Unfortunately both Amiga and Atari are entirely irrelevant, for a while at least, as it took time for anyone to buy them, including the programmers and artists who would later unlock their potential. The Amiga really took off in 1989 with the 'Batman' bundle, putting it in position to be a major rival to the Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES... well in Europe anyway. It was never a big deal in the US, not as a games machine anyway. Though video professionals loved it for its graphics capabilities and Babylon 5 fans loved it for rendering the CGI in season 1.

At least the Macintosh got an interesting game this year!

Déjà Vu (Apple Mac)

Déjà Vu is a point-and-click adventure, not an RPG but... it's a point-and-click adventure, in 1985! It's not the first, that was Enchanted Scepters in 1984, but it introduced concepts like the box of verbs you can click on and the inventory full of icons you can drag around. It's also entirely monochrome, because that's all the first generation Mac could do. Nice high-res graphics though.

It's mimicking or utilising the Mac's OS itself, and this mouse driven interface is one of the big things that would start to divide computer RPGs from console RPGs. We're not there yet though, as even though the new generation of computers had mice as standard, you didn't typically see one plugged into an Apple II, IBM PC or C64, and these were the systems that players in the US actually owned.

5 - ULTIMA IV: QUEST OF THE AVATAR (APPLE II)

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II)

Origin Systems' Ultima is one of the foundations of the whole RPG genre, with its commitment to innovation continually expanding the boundaries of what an RPG could be. So it's a bit of a shame that I've never really played any of them. I've put a few of them on for five minutes and walked around, but they're so vague about what it is you should be doing that I decided to go do something else.

For Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, creator Richard Garriott was more interested in telling a philosophical story about self-improvement in a land at peace than about stopping the bad guy. Instead of asking you to roll stats and pick a class at the start, the game determines your character and starting location by posing a series of moral dilemmas. It's funny how a game about striving to embody all the virtues like Justice and Sacrifice starts with a demonstration about how they repeatedly come into conflict. Also half the questions seem to be about whether you would abandon something to fight in defence of others, at least they were for me.

Whatever magic they're using here is bloody clever though; it figured out that I'm British and into music, and stuck me in Britain as a Bard.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II)

The town of Britain I mean. Uh, towne.

Visually the game is almost identical to Ultima III, with the same purple paving stones, the weird line-of-sight shadow effect, and the giant text written on shop counters. But Ultima IV introduced a new conversation system where you can go up to random people in town towne and ask their name, their job and maybe some other topics if you pick up on the keywords. And you have to do this, this is the core of the gameplay. You need clues in order to know where to go and what to say.

So now I know that Richard Garriott is the one responsible for making me talk to every bloody NPC in those old JRPGs I played.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II)

The game has an overworld and I found it a little hard to find my way around as there's no in game map that I'm aware of, or roads to follow. You get the whole world to wander around, though you only see it through an 11x11 tile window and your viewing distance drops dramatically when you enter a forest.

You can just use the moon gates to fast travel around, but I never actually found one. I did find that I'd wandered into a poisonous marsh though, so that's fun. Fortunately I started off carrying the reagents necessary to cook up a cure. Not a cure potion, a spell. Every cast of every spell has to be constructed in advance using alchemy and I can see that getting really annoying when you want to use magic attacks in battle.

The reason I knew about reagents is because I read the controls in the manual. I had to, there are commands mapped to all 26 letters, so trying to figure it out through trial and error would've lead to a lot of error. Don't worry, I haven't read all of the manual, I'm not that bored.

Enemy encounters are visible out here on the overworld and you can just run away if you want. Though it's not recommended to do that once you're on the battle screen as you'll lose Valor, which is one of the virtues necessary to complete the game. The game is based on a morality system where the only way to win is to max out the eight aspects of goodness. So murdering NPCs and stealing treasure is not a viable approach... unless you balance it out later by being really nice I suppose.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II)

The game lets you camp to recover health, which is good, but enemies can interrupt your sleep with an axe, which is bad. Then you have to chase them around this small combat map and kill them.

It took me a battle or two before I realised the battles were working on Superhot rules, where time moves when you do. It's almost a turn-based tactical system, except each turn lasts a single step, and time will carry on without you if you keep it waiting too long. Plus it buffers multiple key presses, so I'm always overshooting and taking actions that seemed like a good idea four moves ago. 

But I haven't lost a fight yet, even though I'm just a humble bard all on my own who hasn't recruited any party members yet (Humility is also a necessary virtue). Okay, I do have the best weapons I can buy for my class, but they're so cheap that the game basically gave them to me.

Unfortunately I haven't exactly achieved anything either. 

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II)

I played the game for an hour or two, learning mantras, following the clues to hidden runes, and getting the locations of ancient shrines. When you reach a shrine it asks how many cycles you'd like to meditate on its associated virtue, and then starts slowly giving you dots . . . . . .  until it's ready for you to type the correct mantra.

I chose 2 cycles here (because it's a number between 0 and 3) and I'm pretty certain I got the mantra right, but it just gave me more dots and asked me again. This surprised me, and when I contemplated it for a second the game kicked me back out to the overworld and wouldn't let me back in. So I hiked across the world to the Compassion shrine instead and this time I tried 1 cycle, with no result. I suppose 3's the magic number? The game's annoyingly vague about things, and so are the walkthroughs I've checked online. 

Just tell me to type "BEH" three times at the shrine if that's what's needed, communicate with me, don't assume that I'll just intuit what's going on here.

Though I did pick up on the subtle hint in the intro that I should've read all of the manual before playing.

There was an article on the Brainy Gamer blog (and reprinted in The CRPG Book) called "Unplayable", in which the author talks about how students in his game design class were confused by Ultima IV and couldn't find the fun because they'd grown up in a different generation. This was written 15 years ago, so I think we're a couple of decades beyond the point where Ultima IV's appeal is self evident. This is the kind of game that you watch a fascinating 1h 48m YouTube video essay about if you want to understand why it was so special and why it was entertaining, because you'll likely get more out of that than spending two hours playing the game yourself.

It really seems to have made an impact on players at the time though, with the revolutionary way it encourages you to treat NPCs with compassion instead of killing them all to steal their money. An RPG without a last boss where your end goal is to become a better person wasn't just unconventional in 1986, it's unconventional right now.

I kind of get why the Ultima games appealed so much to people though, because I had my own Ultima back in the day, called Morrowind.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (PC)

I loved Morrowind on the Xbox back in the day, I was so invested that I filled a notepad with notes. I had the paper map unfolded next to me so I could see all the interesting places to investigate. Elder Scrolls and Ultima are very different series, but also very similar.

Morrowind's got a conversation system based around topics, it's got the open world with nearby fast travel options, it's got the quest to become a legendary figure, and its combat is kind of not great either. (It also lets you leave items lying around everywhere, but that's something you do in the later Ultima sequels not Ultima IV.)

Another thing they have in common is a good soundtrack, which came as a genuine surprise to me, seeing as most of these classic computer RPG don't have music. You needed a pair of expensive Mockingboard sound cards in your Apple II to unleash its full power, but Ultima IV has some really nice tunes for its time.

So there you go, I said something nice about the game.

6 - THE BARD'S TALE (APPLE II)

The Bard's Tale (Apple II)

1985 was also the year we got Tales of the Unknown, Volume 1: The Bard's Tale, which kicked off the third big computer RPG series of the '80s with a really fancy intro sequence for an Apple II game.

Each of the three series had their distinctive style. Wizardry was a pure dungeon crawler for players who wanted a challenge, Ultima was an open world adventure full of NPCs to talk to, and The Bard's Tale... was basically Wizardry again except with better graphics.

The Bard's Tale (Apple II)

I assumed Wizardry was going to be the most bastard-hard of the games I tried, especially after it wiped out my fully-equipped team in their second battle. But The Bard's Tale didn't even let me reach the weapon shop to spend my starting money! My team was attacked and killed on the front step of the Adventurer's Guild as they were coming out.

Okay, I do share some of the blame for that, as I had no idea that 'Party attack' meant 'attack your own party'. That's not a concept I've come across before. You also need to be aware that even standing still puts you at risk, as the random encounters will just come to you.

On the plus side, while you're standing around you're also getting your spell points back, in daylight at least. Otherwise the game seems to have the same magic system as Wizardry, where you type in code names like VOPL and ARFI to cast spells. It's like having the manual check copy protection as part of the gameplay.

The Bard's Tale (Apple II)

Also look at those graphics! I'm not keen on how it snaps to a still image when you get close to a building, that looks kind of bad, but otherwise this is a huge step up from Wizardry visually. I guess programmer Michael Cranford had already gotten the wireframes out of his system when he made Wizardry clone Maze Master in 1983. (I checked his Wikipedia page, and it turns out that his last game was actually point-and-click adventure Dark Seed from 1992, as he quit afterwards to become a professor of philosophy.)

The game takes place in the town of Skara Brae and its many many empty houses (plus a few dungeons underneath), which has nothing to do with the Skara Brae in the Ultima games. In fact, Skara Brae is a real place in Scotland, though both games have taken some creative liberties, as it's actually an abandoned Stone Age settlement dug into the ground.

Speaking of Ultima, the Bard's Tale starts off by asking if you want to transfer characters from Wizardry or Ultima III, like that's just a normal thing that games can do. I love the idea of bringing your team over from an entirely different game, but somehow I don't think my Wizardry characters are going to give me much of an advantage. Especially considering that they're all dead.

Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord (Apple II)

Incidentally, this is what Wizardry looks like on the Apple II, with the character stats on the bottom and the tiny first-person window in the top left, just like The Bard's Tale. It's a very influential layout apparently. The game had a very influential level of difficulty too.

Though Bard's Tale is apparently a little kinder than Wizardry as if you die your saved team will still be in the Adventurer's Guild, sparing you from repeating the character creation. If you live, you'll have other things to worry about as you don't start with healing magic and there's no resting. Even if you make it all the way to a temple to get healing, it may cost more gold than you have. And that's where I turned the game off. 

I know the real game doesn't start until you've persevered through countless failures and gotten enough levels under your belt to tackle a dungeon, but I'm playing these for research, not punishment, and I'm not that curious.

7 - PHANTASIE (APPLE II)

Phantasie (Apple II)

Phantasie for the Apple II somehow manages to have a battle screen even less appealing than Wizardry's, but to be fair you do get a little scene of your team carrying out their attacks, like in Final Fantasy.

This was another RPG published but not developed by Strategic Simulations, and I've already spotted a few similarities to other games. Like how you start by rolling six characters and then go off to look for a dungeon. 

Phantasie (Apple II)

There they are on the left. I didn't dress them, they just started like that.

The interesting twist in this one is that you get to choose "random creature" as a character's race, so I decided to see if I could make a Sprite. Or a Minotaur. Or a Pixie. I kept on rolling a character and cancelling, rolling a character and cancelling, rolling and cancelling, roll, cancel, roll cancel.

Long story short, it didn't happen. I got plenty of humans and elves though, which I can pick anyway. I don't need them to be in the random list, thanks. That Lizard Man I ended up with on my first try was some kind of miracle, and it'll take a miracle to find enough money to train him for level ups, as it apparently costs way way more for non-human characters.

I travelled across the overworld and found a cathedral. Visiting a cathedral didn't work out so great for me in Questron, but I took a chance and headed inside.

Phantasie (Apple II)

Then the map went all black and white, with NPCs represented by white dots. It's like I'm playing the game using the mini map, which to be fair is probably what I would be doing in the other games too if any of them had one. What these RPGs really need is an automap that gets filled in as you walk around, so you can see where you've been and where you still need to explore, and that's actually what this game does! Graph paper is not required for once. 

It's just a shame it looks like this. I'm not expecting real-time texture-mapped 3D on an 8-bit machine in 1985, but it could at least indicate where the walls are so I know if I'm running into a dead end. Rogue looks better than this and its graphics are made from ASCII symbols.

Here's a question: why does this cathedral have a teleporter that sends you directly into the maid's bedroom? Here's another question: where's the teleporter that gets me back out? I can't just wander around this maze of hallways fighting sting beetles or whatever, I need to get back to town to rest!

Phantasie (Apple II)

I escaped the cathedral (bottom right) and headed to the nearest town (Pineville in the top left), but just as I was about to arrive I was ambushed by the Black Knight.

I'm going to assume that diagram on the left side is actual size, because he is kicking my ass, with each hit taking off an entire health bar. The other games destroyed me right at the start, but Phantasie let me win some battles and get some confidence before utterly crushing my spirit. I mean it hasn't been a cakewalk, there's a reason that this guy's called Elf Wiz #2 and it's not because they're twins, but this is just hopeless.

Phantasie (Apple II)

Damn, did the Black Knight tear their arms off? That's just a massacre.

Oh, I apologise for the high quality of this GIF. The actual game is much more flickery, but I chose only the most complete looking frames, so this is not entirely representative of the actual 'game over' experience.

Phantasie (Apple II)

Wait, what? What is going on, why is a great demon bringing my dead priest back as a zombie? 

Unfortunately only three of my heroes returned from this trip to the astral plane with undead status, so now I have to make some new level 1 characters to replace them. Or turn the game off.

To be honest, Phantasie has been one of the more interesting games to me, with its biggest flaw being that it didn't give me my damn Sprite. Actually the biggest flaw is that it runs painfully slow and looks terrible, though I haven't tried any of the ports yet to see if they run any faster.

Both this and Questron got sequels, so they must have done okay, just not enough to become well known. Though I'm still waiting on SSI to develop their own RPG instead of publishing other people's.

8 - ALTERNATE REALITY: THE CITY (ATARI 8-BIT)

Alternate Reality: The City (Atari 8-bit)

Oh hey, real-time texture-mapped 3D on an 8-bit computer in 1985. The game was ported to the Apple II as well, but there must have been some extra magic inside the Atari 8-bit chipset (along with extra colours), as this is definitely the better version.

It apparently features a raycasting engine like Wolfenstein 3D would use 7 years later, though the only benefit you get over a tile-based system here is smoother movement, as you're still locked to 90 degree turns. (And it comes with a negative, as it's harder to draw a map for). That's not the only clever code in The City, as there are apparently disease and blood alcohol systems, amongst other things. The trouble is that there's not much of a game to go with them. 

Alternate Reality: The City (Atari 8-bit)

Sure you can go do RPG stuff, like shopping and fighting and increasing your blood alcohol level, but aside from the surprisingly long intro sequence, there's not really any story here. The gameplay follows the standard 'run into random encounter, take turns hitting each other' Wizardry model (dragged out much longer as you're on your own without a weapon), and I found plenty of enemies to beat up, but it doesn't really seem to have quests or goals. It's just a bunch of streets and shops.

The game was released early before its dungeon levels were complete, so they became the sequel, called The Dungeon. The plan was to make five additional games that you could walk between, with The City being the hub, but that never happened. Programmer Philip Price quit to work on real-time data systems for the B-2 Stealth Bomber instead (it paid more), and the project failed to fulfil its potential.

Speaking of projects that got split into two with each half released as its own thing... this is the end of part one!

TO BE CONTINUED

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I didn't mean this article to be two parts, the picture at the top says 1984-1987, not 1984-1985, however I have come to accept that it's too bloody long and needs two pages. 16 games wasn't a normal reasonable amount of games to cover at once, I realise this now.

But if you're up for it, part two may already be up by the time you're reading this! And if it's not, you could hang around and write a comment about the games so far.