Game 114: The Dragon's Eye (1981)

      

The Dragon's Eye

United States

Southern Software, Ltd. (developer); Automated Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1981 for Apple II

Date Started: 7 September 2013

Date Ended: 7 September 2013

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 20

Ranking at Time of Posting: 25/114 (22%)

Ranking at Game #455: 152/455 (33%)

     

The Dragon's Eye is one of a group of  proto-RPGs made for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore PET, and other platforms in the early 1980s. I've played a bunch of them since downloading my first non-DOS emulator about a year ago, and while I've held some to a certain level of fondness (e.g., Wilderness Campaign, Dragon Fire), it's not much of a secret why most of them are are ill-remembered today. Nonetheless, it's worth preserving their memories for some of the innovations they offered, few of which made it into the CRPG mainstream.

The game takes place on a single map of 40 areas, separated into seven regions: Fel City, Dark Forest, Lofty Mountains, East Plain, Deep Chasm, Ley Land, and West Plain. The player starts in Fel City and moves from area to area seeking randomly-distributed treasures and fighting monsters. Its basic mechanic--visiting discrete areas, searching for items and encounters--would reappear in Wizard Wars in 1987.

The Seven Provinces

Each treasure acquired and each combat won contributes to the player's overall points. You must return to your origin point in Fel City within 21 days to voluntarily end the game and receive your final score from 0 to 6,000 points, organized on a scale from "Terrible" to "Grand Master." "Winning" the game is about returning with the titular Dragon's Eye as one of the treasures, but you can theoretically achieve a high score without it.

Once again I have to give credit to the fantastic Museum of Computer Adventure Game History for collecting and scanning the 17-page manual for this game, without which I would have been utterly lost. I was a bit lost anyway as to the incomprehensible back story. It's only a single page, but I read it three times and I still don't understand. Something about the Seven Provinces, ruled by a good magician, being threatened by the Evil Necromancer of the Warring Lands, whose amulet, the Dragon's Eye, gives him power over time itself. The idea, I guess, is that the good wizard managed to "freeze," at the cost of his own life, a three-week window of time in which adventurers could repeatedly try to find the Dragon's Eye and thus forfend the coming invasion.

I linked to the manual above because it's worth checking out. It benefits from far better formatting and illustration than the typical game manual of the era (a characteristic of Epyx; they also did a good job with Dunjonquest). It's written with the type of goofy humor that I'd probably decry in an 80-hour epic but don't mind in a one-hour lark. The manual begins with a warning...

It is commonly said that 'they who have not read and followed the Document of Special Instructions regarding the mystical procedures needed to do that which is known in the sacred tongue as !LOADING! are those whose eye cannot see beyond the veil of illusion.'

...and continues in that vein throughout. The keyboard commands are not given as bland actions like "Examine" or "Rest," but rather "Examine the Ethereal Equities" and "Repose in Respiteful Rest." The documentation, as silly as it sometimes reads, is exhaustive, outlining each command and spell and concluding in a little sample of gameplay from  "The Adventures of Willy the Wake."

One of the nice illustrations in the game manual by George Barr.

The game begins with a character name and then a choice of sobriquet like "the Quick," "the Deadly," or "the Strange." There's some suggestion in the manual that the choice of title is something like the choice of a character class in a regular RPG, with consequent effects on combat prowess and spell-casting ability, but if so, this is all invisible during gameplay.

My desire for alliteration overwhelmed other considerations.

 
After the choice of title, you pick from four swords: great sword, thrusting sword, short sword, and scimitar. One thing the manual doesn't explain is the advantages and disadvantages of each, but from trial and error, I determined that these are listed in descending order of how much damage they do, but also of how much strength they sap every time you swing them. You can afford to swing and miss a lot with a scimitar, but not with a great sword.
 

 
The game then gives you a selection of spells. At first, I thought these were based on the chosen title, but I later discovered that they're just random. There are 15 spells in the game. Once you cast them, they're gone for good, but you can find scrolls throughout the map to replenish or supplement them.

After that, it's off to the map, where you want to remember your starting position in Fel City so you can return there at the end.
 

From the moment the game begins, your battle against time is more important than your battle against individual foes. Every action--searching, moving, casting, fighting, resting--takes from several hours to half a day, with actions during inclement weather "costing" more than those made when it's nice. Time even passes when standing still. The essential goal is to move from place to place in the most efficient manner possible, (e)xamining at each location enough times to ensure that you acquire any treasure there, fighting and fleeing from whatever monsters appear, and moving on. If you're feeling invincible in combat, you can switch from normal movement to "bold" movement (or "Broadcasting Brashly the Boldness of your Being," as the manual has it), which increases the speed but also the chance of encounters; "cautious" movement does the opposite.

Many of the spells, though costing time themselves, are meant to tweak aspects of time. "Flying" and "Teleport" move you to other locations without the hours it takes to walk; "Weather" speeds up movement by creating better weather for the day; "Time Travel" resets the clock up to 7 days, but at a huge cost of magic power; "Knowledge" increases the chances of finding treasure on each round (meaning you have to waste time with fewer of them); "Treasure" highlights locations of important treasures; and "Locate Eye" gives you the province in which the Dragon's Eye can be found.

Combat is action-oriented and presented in a side-view, like Crown of Arthain from the same year, but with far more options. You can chop, thrust, smash (a strong overhand stroke), go "berserk" with several attacks in a row, move back and forth a number of steps to increase or decrease the range, "leap" to jump at the enemy and follow with an attack, fire a magic bolt (you only start with 5), fire an arrow (you start with 20), duck or parry, chug a potion, or flee from the battle. In theory, this all sounds great. In practice, it doesn't work perfectly. I found that there was never any obvious link between the choice of chop, thrust, and smash and their chances of hitting or damage, except that you're more likely to miss if you keep doing the same action over and over (this was confirmed by the developer). Ducking and parrying are too hard to time to actually avoid an enemy's attack.
 

 
Throughout combat, you have to watch your three meters: strength (which is basically stamina), health, and "aura" (magic). These can be replenished with vials that you find as random treasure or simply by resting.

If you die, there's a chance the "good magician" will find you and resurrect you at 50% of all of your attributes, but at a cost of a few days of time.
 

Oddly, there are no spells that you can cast in-combat. Instead, there are those that you can cast in preparation for combat. These work best either when you've been moving cautiously and know a particular foe is lurking around the area, or when you've just escaped combat with a foe but want to cast a spell and then take him on again. These include "Killing," which will instantly kill a specific type of creature the next time you meet him, on your first hit; "Protection," a kind of magic shield; "Readiness," which allows you to enter combat quicker. There's a rare spell called "Eradicate" that serves as a parallel to NetHack's "Genocide," killing all creatures of a specific type. Rounding out the spell list are those that replenish attributes: "Cure Self," "Health," and "Strength."

Casting spells is accompanied by a cute animation, after which you're told whether it's successful or not, a determination based on your "aura" plus certain treasures that you may have found.

Including the Eye, there are Ten Treasures of Incalculable Value that you can find scattered among the areas. Each has some effects on the three attributes, combat ability, spellcasting, and other aspects of the game, though the manual is deliberately unspecific about what these effects are, and you can't really tell in-game. A couple of them have negative effects.

Finding some of the Ten Treasures. The Seeking Sword presumably makes you better at combat.

When you find the Dragon's Eye, you immediately enter combat with a dragon. Dragon combats can also occur randomly on the map. They're the toughest foes in the game, and I was never able to defeat one without previously casting the "killing" spell targeted at dragons. Fortunately, you can usually escape from them.

Slain by a dragon before I even got in a blow.

On my fourth or fifth character, I found the Dragon's Eye early and immediately returned it to the location to win the game. I technically "won," but the point total was a bit unsatisfying.
 

 
In subsequent plays, I found that the best strategy was use the "Locate Eye" spell to find the eye first...
 

Looks more like a beehive.

 
...then circle the map methodically to find as many other treasures as possible, escaping from combat wherever I could (treasures are worth more than combat victories in the point total). "Time Travel" helps a lot by giving you more time, though at the cost of essentially never being able to cast another spell (your aura goes too low). Even with these strategies, though, the highest score I was able to achieve was 2,498, having found eight of the ten treasures, including one--"The Serpent's Tooth"--not mentioned in the manual.

A winning game takes significantly less than an hour. In the four hours that I experimented with Dragon's Eye, I fielded eleven characters and won with three of them. I've noticed that a lot of these early RPGs--Dragon's Eye, Dragon Fire, Crown of Arthain, Ali Baba, Fracas, Dungeon Campaign, Wilderness Campaign, Odyssey--were clearly meant to be played in one sitting and to take no more than a couple of hours. Few of the games listed here even offer a "save" feature (Dragon's Eye doesn't). Of the games prior to 1982, only Wizardry seems clearly designed as a lengthy experience. The developer (see below) told me that this was because cassette tapes were "extremely unreliable" for storing save games, and that saving and lengthy adventures only became the paradigm when floppy disks became widely available. Wizardry was one of the first games to use floppies.

Dragon's Eye is notable as the first game from Robert Leyland, and one of the few RPGs produced by Epyx (most famous for their Dunjonquest series) before they abandoned RPGs to concentrate on sports games. Leyland would go on to be a designer on the Star Control series, and a programmer on the ToeJam & Earl series and a host of other games right through the 1990s and 2000s, including Star Wars: Episode I, Madagascar, and Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. No other RPGs, unfortunately. His most recent credited games are the Skylanders series (2011-2013) from Toys for Bob, where he works as a senior programmer.

I had a chance to exchange some e-mails with Mr. Leyland earlier this week. He's originally from New Zealand and says that he began programming Dragon's Eye while still living there in 1980, on his Commodore PET. (The game was released for the PET, the Atari 8-bit, and the Apple II.) He credits his friend, Bernie De Koven, with the fun manual and confirms that Automated Simulations/Epyx "was really into production values." The first version was called The Magician's Hat (which remains one of the treasures), and it was influenced by several board games, including Magic Realm, which featured a rock-paper-scissors style combat system.

On my GIMLET scale, I give the game a 20, which is a reasonably high score for the era. It suffers from a lack of NPCs, no economy, and no real character development, but it gains from making an attempt to give the world a back story, a decent action combat and magic system, and robust, non-linear, replayable gameplay.

If you're wondering why, in my regression to the 1980s to pick up the non-DOS games I missed on the first pass, I'm playing this instead of any of the games you voted on, it's because I wanted to at least finish all the games through 1981 for the purposes of my forthcoming book. After this one, three of them remain, but I'm having trouble with all of them. The interface for EduWare's Empire I: World Builders seems impossible without the game manual, which I can't find. I can't find a downloadable version of Kaves of Karkhan. And while I've been able to find SwordThrust, I haven't been able to find any of the original adventure modules for it. So this might be the last game of 1981 until I make progress.

For now, it's back to my regular chronology and on to DarkSpyre!