I found plenty of legendary RPGs inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, like Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and The Bard's Tale, but not one of them proudly displayed the official logo of the 'Advanced Dungeons & Dragons' tabletop game:
Not one of them proudly displayed the official logo of the 'Dungeons & Dragons' tabletop game either, which was apparently a different game with different rules and campaign settings:
Personally, I don't mind which one a video game is based on, I just want to play some D&D already.
If you missed the first part covering 1984 and 1985 you can click here: VOL. 2. Or you can go back even further to the two AD&D Intellivision carts from 1982 and 1983: VOL. 1. Otherwise keep reading to see if I do any better with 1986 and 1987. There's got to be a D&D game in this pile of RPGs somewhere.
1986
Though in other news, the 3-year-old Famicom finally got a wide release in the US as the NES, after a successful test launch in New York City. With the US console market in ruins, Nintendo and Sega were able to move in and establish themselves as the dominant video game brands.
This meant that Japanese RPGs were soon going to be an influence on US designers, just as Ultima and Wizardry were having a huge influence on Japanese game design.
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| The Legend of Zelda (Famicom) |
The FDS was a game changer for the Famicom, as adding save games and extra storage allowed for deeper adventures that could be played over multiple sittings. But cartridges caught up so fast, with bigger ROMs and battery backed-up saves, that Nintendo didn't even get a chance to release it in the West. It was never needed.
Plus the biggest RPG release of 1986, Dragon Quest, just used passwords instead.
9 - DRAGON QUEST (FAMICOM)
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| Dragon Quest (Famicom) |
The difference is that Dragon Quest was intended to be more appealing and accessible to mainstream audiences and younger players.
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Creator Yuji Horii took inspiration from his own adventure game The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case and the Famicom port of Portopia Serial Murder Case, providing a simple box of commands instead. In addition to influencing the JRPG genre, Portopia is also credited for kicking off the visual novel genre, along with Hideo Kojima's entire career. But aside from all that, it didn't really have much impact on video game history.
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| Dragon Quest (Famicom) |
A lot of grinding.
The RPG genre already had fans in Japan, but Dragon Quest was an actual phenomenon, like Pokémon would be a few years later. It was the beginning of the JRPG/console RPG genre, because it defined it with its accessibility, manga-style artwork, and its streamlined but traditional gameplay. All its missing is the strong focus on story and characters, and that's coming later. Like I said, it's by the guy who invented the visual novel.
But Japanese RPGs didn't have an exclusive hold on the concepts of appealing graphics and accessible gameplay...
10 - WIZARD'S CROWN (APPLE II)
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| Wizard's Crown (Apple II) |
Wizard's Crown was the first fantasy RPG that Strategic Simulations, Inc. developed in-house, and I can really believe that this was made by a company known for its wargames.
This is the city map, with the white lines being roads and the orange shapes being buildings. A few of them are drawn to stand out a bit, with a black border, but sometimes you just have to walk around paying attention to what it says at the bottom of the screen. That's how I finally found the bandage shop, after getting sick of all my characters dying from bleeding to death. Shame I could only afford one of them.
There are random enemy encounters as you walk around and the game the game features a helpful quick battle feature, which tells you if you won or not. But if you've got 30 minutes spare you can control the battle yourself. Then it switches to a proper turn-based tactics mode where you move units individually, a bit like in Ultima IV, except more complex. In fact at the time this was considered to be one of the most hardcore tactical RPGs ever made.
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| Wizard's Crown (Apple II) |
Though there's still one thing I'm not clear on: which ones are my guys and which are the enemies? You get to pick an icon for each of your characters, which is more customisation than you typically get in these games, but you can't choose their colours.
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| Tunnels of Doom (TI-99/4A) |
Also neither game does a good job of indicating which way your characters are facing and in Wizard's Crown that's actually pretty important information.
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The highlighted numbers show the directions your little guys can move during their turn, so if dude #2 can move either up-right (2) or right (3) then he must be facing right! Though it took me a while to figure out that if I want to use the numbers to move in a direction I have to actually turn the character first. (I still haven't figured out why they chose those particular numbers when no keyboard on earth is arranged like that.)
Facing is important as you want your shield pointing toward your attacker to deflect blows and avoid injuries. Injuries lead to bleeding, that's why you need the bandages. Though of course axes can just break your shield... it's all a bit tactical.
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| Wizard's Crown (Apple II) |
The game apparently has a story, though it's hidden pretty well. I did help a woman who told me about her mansion in the north east of town, so that could be leading somewhere, but the enemies outside the town walls outclass me so much that meeting them is death. Unfortunately the easy fights in town are rare so my levelling up has been slow.
In fact, the game doesn't even have levelling up, instead you spend XP to raise skills. Fortunately I eventually realised that I need to raise the 'karma' stat in order to cast priest spells like 'cure bleeding'. I was hoping to get a proper healing spell too, but boredom defeated me in the end and I turned it off without ever getting anywhere.
The sad thing is, this had the most interesting combat system so far. I mean it's recognisably a tactics RPG, along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics. It's just that combat is so time consuming and awkward that I kept skipping it to speed up the process of getting nowhere in the rest of the game.
11 - MIGHT AND MAGIC: BOOK ONE - THE SECRET OF THE INNER
SANCTUM (APPLE II)
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| Might and Magic: Book One (Apple II) |
Might and Magic: Book One - The Secret of the Inner Sanctum is the beginning of the legendary Might and Magic franchise. It's currently at 10 main entries, though that number gets way higher if you add spin-offs like Heroes of Might and Magic and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic. But this first game is basically Wizardry again, or The Bard's Tale I suppose.
You make six heroes, you start off at the inn, you wander into town with no idea what your quest is and get everyone killed. There is more to it than that, like how you have to keep re-rolling for decent stats when you make a character, but that's basically how it goes.
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| Might and Magic: Book One (Apple II) |
Some of the changes are improvements though I reckon, like how you just press a number for each spell instead of typing in its code. Well, two numbers as you also need the spell level. So First Aid would be 1, 4, then 1 to heal the character in the first slot. It really speeds things up.
You know, it's just occurred to me that none of these games have had Vancian magic like D&D does. I guess Ultima 4 came closest with how you prepare spells with alchemy.
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| Might and Magic: Book One (Apple II) |
Fortunately the game has another helpful feature: you can just rest and recover your health, even get your heroes back on their feet. When characters are taken out in a fight they're not killed, they're just unconscious! Unless they're all taken out, then you've lost. The catch with resting is that it requires food (like in Treasure of Tarmin), so you have to earn enough to keep your backpacks stocked up with snacks. Always press 'S' to collect the loot after a fight!
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| Might and Magic: Book One (Apple II) |
Well the outdoors was boring so I went back to the white brick walls and found that there are some places where you can reliably run into an enemy encounter, like the locked room just around the corner from the inn. I can grind by fighting the battle there, then running back to the inn to save and make it respawn.
Though one time I took a step forward after the fight and fell down a secret trap door into the dark dungeon maze beneath the town. I cast a light spell to illuminate the walls, then headed out and got destroyed by a pack of tough enemies. It didn't come a huge surprise to be honest, as these games are such a bastard that one time I got attacked by 5 skeletons inside the inn. That's my sanctuary where I save the game!
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| The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight (C64) |
I wouldn't say the game is a huge visual upgrade over the original Bard's Tale, especially considering the first person view is still just as tiny as ever. But the original game got ported across to 16-bit systems this year, where it looks like this:
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| The Bard's Tale (Amiga) |
The Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIgs versions are all very similar, while the DOS version was clearly lagging behind even if you'd splashed out for an EGA graphics card. It's going to be a while before the PC catches up with the other systems, but it'll get there in the end.
I figured that I may as well give The Bard's Tale a second chance, seeing as I had to make a new team to record that GIF. This time I found the weapon shop and used the coin they started with to get them all a weapon (or a mandolin in the bard's case). Then 8 dogs attacked them right outside the door and killed half of them! I guess they took a dislike to Sheva's AC-boosting melody.
Turns out that the temple was charging 900 gold per resurrection, so I'm afraid they're going to have to stay dead.
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| Might and Magic: Book One (MS-DOS) |
Soon my party was a much more convincing bunch of warriors, especially when I made enough cash to train them up to level 2 and get my archer a bow. So I decided buy torches and head off down into the pitch black dungeon once more, a far more formidable force than I was when I fell down there through a trap door. And then I got comprehensively owned by the first battle.
It's fine, I can just load my last save at the inn. I was just hoping that I was finally done with the tedious pointless grinding for experience. Your levels must be 'this' high to ride this ride.
You know what the worst part of this game is though? There's a character stat called 'Might' but there isn't one called 'Magic'.
1987
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| Gateway to the Savage Frontier (MS-DOS) |
At this point TSR was finally ready to award the Dungeons & Dragons licence to another video game publisher and there were a lot of big names after it, like EA and Origin Systems. But it was wargame developer Strategic Simulations, Inc. that ultimately won, thanks to their track record with RPGs and complicated strategy titles, and their ambitious plan to release multiple D&D games.
Though there were some notable hardware launches in 1987, like the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, which was basically the Dreamcast of fourth generation game consoles, and the Sharp X68000 computer, which was like a Super Amiga built around arcade technology. Neither system was really known for its RPGs, but they'd each get a D&D title eventually.
However, the most important new computer was the IBM's second generation PC, the Personal System/2 (or PS/2). It wasn't as loveable as an A500 or as cool as an X68000, in fact it annoyed all its rivals so much that they ganged up on it to make sure PCs retained their open architecture and backwards compatibility (because they didn't want to pay IBM royalties). But the PS/2 established some important standards, such as VGA graphics.
We also got AdLib's first PC sound card this year, plus the Compaq Deskpro 386 had already introduced 386DX CPUs, and you could totally put 4 MB of RAM into one of these machines.
Well, barely.
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| Doom (MS-DOS) |
Though it was Origin Systems' Wing Commander in 1990 that first showed the world that whatever they were playing games on, it wasn't as impressive as a high-end PC compatible. (Unless they owned a Neo Geo maybe, those things are pretty awesome.)
Ten years later and the PC was the only computer left standing... aside from the Mac, which is apparently unkillable by conventional means. Even Valve's new Steam Machine is a PC.
But I wouldn't say either game is a candidate for being the most important RPG of 1987. That would be something like Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy, or...
12 - DUNGEON MASTER (ATARI ST)
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| Dungeon Master (Atari ST) |
Then Dungeon Master came out, taking typical first-person Wizardry dungeon crawler gameplay and making it real time. Now you're not locked into a battle screen when you fight an enemy, you can still move around the dungeon. You can even see them wandering the hallways in the distance.
It also takes a big step toward Ultima Underworld's immersive simulation, as you use the mouse cursor to reach into the screen to take items from the floor and press switches like in a point-and-click adventure. It doesn't just support a mouse, it requires one.
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| Dungeon Master (Atari ST) |
But the developers had to come up with a way to make fighting as four characters simultaneously slick and fun, and... well, they kind of failed. You have to click the weapon, then click the type of attack for every character and every swing of the blade. It's not the highlight of the experience, not for me anyway. And casting spells involves clicking a combination of runes, which is even more awkward when giant mushrooms are trying to eat your face.
Oh, the game also has food like in Ultima, and then goes one further by adding a water bar too! Why didn't they add a few more bars while they were at it, turn it into The Sims? Wait, that wouldn't work, the dungeon has no toilets. It has no inn either, or adventurer's guild, or weapon shop, so it doesn't have the gameplay loop of grinding a few battles for XP, then running back out. If you need health, you just rest. Otherwise, you keep moving forward.
Dungeon Master's never been my favourite game, but there are games that imitate and there are games that are imitated, and this is in category #2 for certain. Developers were still using this template for CRPGs all the way up to Stonekeep in 1995.
13 - MANIAC MANSION (C64)
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| Maniac Mansion (C64) |
What the game doesn't have is conversation trees, so you don't get to choose your character's dialogue from a list of responses. This is a bit worrying to me, because I like dialogue options in my RPGs, and if Lucasfilm adventure games don't have them yet, then they're not going to be in a D&D RPG either. Hang on, Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest also came out this year, so I'll check them too... nope, no dialogue options.
Though the three games show that video games were actually getting stories, it's just that RPGs were the wrong place to look for them. In fact Maniac Mansion even introduced a term for the non-interactive narrative sequences that interrupt its gameplay: cutscene.
14 - DRILLER (AMSTRAD CPC)
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| Driller (Amstrad CPC) |
You have to alter your turning sensitivity depending on whether you want to make sharp turns or tiny adjustments. Trouble is the lowest turning angle it'll go is 5 degrees, so my crosshair kept overshooting the target when I tapped a direction.
Anyway, I just wanted to check how 3D polygon games were doing at this point. I wouldn't expect any Dungeons & Dragons games to look like Skyrim for a while, as right now it's just blocks & pyramids, but they're getting there.
15 - PHANTASY STAR (MASTER SYSTEM)
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
The Apple II was over 10 years old by this point, the Famicom was close to 5, but the Sega Mark III/Master System was practically brand new and ready to show off its arcade graphics and sound (in fact it could even do both at the same time). So with Phantasy Star we got perhaps the most visually stunning RPG experience yet!
Okay it actually looks like someone's first RPG Maker game, but the grass is definitely greener than in the Ultima games, plus the hero sprite can turn to face the direction she's walking in, so it's a step above Dragon Quest too. Also there's the dungeons...
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
I didn't actually fight anything in here, I just popped in to pick something up. There were plenty of fights outside though, and if you start getting wild ideas about exploring the starting island before you've levelled up then those fights are going to end you.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
The interface is extremely Dragon Quest, with the box of commands, but these graphics are a step above what you'd get from a Famicom. I take back what I said about it looking like an RPG Maker game. In fact this battle location looks better than it does in the PS2 remake.
Any cutscenes in the game have been very brief chats between characters, but there is a little more going on here than just fights and dungeons.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
Basically the early game is mostly focused around walking back and forth around the place where the monsters spawn, hoping that you'll get a fight you can win. Same as in Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Wizard's Crown, Dragon Quest etc.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
There's just no avoiding this mindless grinding, as you need the money to progress and there aren't any gambling minigames in this one... that I'm aware of. Fortunately you can speed the process up by spending all that money you just earned to buy a better weapon.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
By the way, I like how the background to the menu is always the battle background for the place you're in, even if you're somewhere with no battles like a town. I'm bored of plain black menu screens now.
Alright, I have 36 mesetas and I need a few hundred of them for the next bit, so I'd better get back to the owl bears. How do I know how much money I'll need? Well, that's because I checked a walkthrough! The game likes to be awkward sometimes, like making me ask a shopkeeper about his 'secret' three times before he finally sold me the special item I needed, so I don't feel guilty about getting some extra direction from time to time.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
Speaking of items I need, this cat has the potion I need to cure the dude I'm meant to be looking for. I don't think a stone statue is going to be drinking anything, but we'll figure that out when we find him. Back to the spaceship, we're taking a flight home. The weird thing is that space travel is one of the few things that doesn't cost money. You just walk over to the ship, there's a quick cutscene, and you're on another map. With different overworld music!
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
The good news is that now I get to make three choices each turn instead of just pressing the 'Attk' command. The bad news is that the game has increased the size of enemy parties to compensate so now I'm fighting six of them. I still only see the one on screen, but you can tell by the list of hitpoints in the top right corner that this is going to take a while. At least they're well animated when they attack, which is unusual for the time.
I also like how you get to see the dungeon you're in during fights instead of a generic battle background, even if it's still turn-based. I can't just back away like in Dungeon Master. There's no auto map either, but then there's never a map in these games so I can't be too annoyed about that.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
Did Phantasy Star do anything revolutionary for its time? I can't really say, as I'm only looking at four games a year. It does show how JRPGs started to diverge from CRPGs, as instead of creating a character, you're playing one that already exists.
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| Phantasy Star (Master System) |
How is this relevant to D&D RPGs? I dunno. I guess it shows that American RPGs were introducing more complexity and simulation, while Japanese RPGs were evolving towards simplified mechanics and stronger narratives. But neither had gotten very far down the road yet, so I shouldn't expect the early D&D games to be a revolutionary step beyond what I've already played.
But man, if they could tone down the grinding, that would be great.
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| Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II) |
I know where games were at graphically, I know how the average RPG played, and I also know what features they didn't have yet. Like dialogue trees, skill trees, in-game maps, and quests to kill rats in a basement. Plus I was expecting half the dialogue in these games to be hidden in the manual as journal entries that I had to look up, but I haven't found a single game that asked me to do that. I was sure that was going to be a thing! Maybe I just didn't get far enough.
The important thing is that I'm being thorough when it comes to hunting down Dungeons & Dragons games. It would really suck to miss one out entirely because it lost the D&D licence during development and was released with a different name...
_04.png "Tower of Doom Intellivision title screen")
| Developer: | INTV Corp. |
| | Release Date: | 1987 | | | Systems: | Intellivision |
This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Tower of Doom on the Intellivision!
Surprise, I actually did find a Dungeons & Dragons game for you, kind of. If you look up Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom on Mobygames, this won't be the game it gives you, but it apparently started life as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Mystery, the third volume in the Intellivision AD&D trilogy, following on from Cloudy Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin.
Mattel Electronics fell victim to the video game crash leaving Tower of Mystery half-finished on a shelf for two years, until its successor INTV Corp. decided they could make some money by getting it finished and selling it without the D&D licence attached. At least, that's what I've read.
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Then you have to choose from 10 different classes, with 'Novice' actually having pretty good stats. Though 'Warlord' seems better for new players. There's a 'Wizard' too, but I think they're just better with wand items. They don't have spells to cast in fights or anything like that.
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| Tower of Doom (Intellivision) |
Once you're in a fight you can swing your current weapon with the attack button. Or you can switch to your inventory box on the left and move the little grey hand around to select another item. The trick is to press the 'use' button and not the 'drop' button. The game only uses only three buttons, I don't know how I keep messing this up.
Fortunately this creepy snake thing sucks. What actually got me in the end was running out of food, as once it happened my health started ticking down fast. Though if you do find some floor chicken in the castle and fill your stomach, then your health regenerates instead. The first known game with regenerating health was Hydlide in December 1984 and it seems like Tower of Mystery was planned to be released in the third quarter, so this could've taken its place in the record books. Assuming the feature was even part of the plan back then.
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| Tower of Doom (Intellivision) |
One thing that does seem random is the placement of things like the fire, paralyse and teleport traps. The first time I tried floor 1 there was a teleporter blocking a path and I just couldn't find a way past it. I'd explored the whole bottom of the map, the little mini map on the top left was all filled in, but there wasn't another route. Then I tried a new game and the teleport trap wasn't there any more. I could walk down the hallway to the staircase and carry on to the next floor down.
Man, if this had come out in 1984 when it was supposed to, being able to check a mini map instead of relying on graph paper would've seemed revolutionary. Hang on, it was still revolutionary in 1987!
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| Tower of Doom (Intellivision) |
There is another way to win fights though: bribery. If you drop an item they like, the enemy will just walk off with it and leave you alone. This actually boosts your diplomacy stat, though it does cost you an item, so you won't be doing it much even if you want to.
Alternatively you can just turn around and walk off the combat screen, though they'll still be chasing you around the level afterwards.
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| Tower of Doom (Intellivision) |
It's not necessarily a bad thing that the game starts off easy however, as it gives new players a chance to actually play it and get hooked before it starts getting challenging. It's nice to not have to do two hours of grinding before I'm allowed to do a quest, or any grinding at all actually. Plus with level names like Catacombs and The Challenge, and enemy types like 'owlbear' and 'beholder', I'm thinking it gets harder. Especially if you play as the 'Waif' class, who has 1/4th the health and starts off without anything capable of hurting enemies. In fact I lost on the first floor every time, as getting past the enemies to find a weapon in the maze is really bloody difficult.
Overall Tower of Doom seems pretty decent for what it is, kind of like a cross between the first two games in the trilogy. It's not very Dungeons & Dragons, but then it never said that it was.
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