Game 137: Spirit of Excalibur (1990)

Excalibur is named as Arthur's sword going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1130s) and Welsh legend, but it's not until the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin (c. 1230-1240) that he's specifically said to have gotten it from the Lady of the Lake. This scene, including the sunset and the Lady's glove, is directly inspired by the concluding scene of John Boorman's Excalibur (1981). Oh, yes. You're getting schooled on this one.

       

Spirit of Excalibur

United States

Synergistic Software (developer); Virgin Mastertronic (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, Macintosh, Atari ST, and DOS; 1991 for Apple IIgs and Commodore CDTV
Date Started: 29 January 2014

   

In about 1988 or 1989--I would have been a sophomore in high school--I caught a bit of Excalibur on some UHF station. I don't think I watched much of it, but it got me thinking that while I'd heard about "King Arthur" and the "Knights of the Round Table" in various places, I didn't really know anything about them. The next day, I asked my high school librarian for her suggestions on a book to read, and she recommended T. H. White's The Once and Future King.

The comparable shot at the conclusion of the Boorman film. It makes sense to begin the game with this shot, since the game takes place after the death of King Arthur.

That book swiftly became my favorite book of all time--it still is--and my librarian's recommendation was a major turning point in my life. It led, directly and indirectly, to numerous life choices, mostly too personal to talk about, but which still have ramifications 25 years later. The most relevant outcome for this blog post is that I studied Arthurian literature throughout college. I read works spanning a thousand-year history, from Nennius to Tennyson. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Mabinogion, Wace, Layamon, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Boron, the Vulgate Cycle, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser--I consumed them all, and plenty more. I read works translated from French, German, Welsh, Italian, Icelandic, even Hebrew, and in a few cases, when no translation was available, I painstakingly read them with a dictionary at my side. To this day, I can remember the text in which Lancelot gets a full story (Chrétien's Le Chevalier de la Charrete, c. 1180s), the first text to mention the Round Table (Wace's Roman de Brut, c. 1155), and the first appearance of the Sword in the Stone (a prose redaction of Robert de Boron's Merlin, c. 1199).

Here are some things you may or may not know about King Arthur:

• "Arthurian literature" consists of more than a thousand books, chronicles, short stories, ballads, poems, inscriptions, sculptures, and plays written over a period of about 1,200 years. Even in the Middle Ages, Arthur was pan-national, with stories appearing all across Europe and beyond.
• We're not really sure Arthur was a real person. The first known text to mention him was written more than three hundred years after he lived. The best evidence that we have for his existence is that a bunch of other historical figures were suddenly named "Arthur" in the sixth and seventh centuries, as if they were being named after someone famous.
• If he did exist, he was probably a British general who fought the Saxons in the late 400s or early 500s. He almost certainly wasn't a king. (Unless you believe in the "Riothamus" connection, which I'll leave you to read on your own.)
• Everything else we associate with him--the Knights of the Round Table, Camelot, Lancelot, Guinevere, the love triangle, Avalon--are creations of writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some is grafted from ancient Celtic mythology, some simply invented by French court poets.
• The Holy Grail exists entirely within Arthurian literature. It first appears in Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval (c. 1180), but it's a dish and has no connection with Jesus Christ or the Last Supper. It doesn't become the "Holy" Grail until Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie of around 1200. It's not mentioned in any non-Arthurian texts until the 20th century. Indiana Jones and his dad were searching for something that 12th-century French poets invented as a plot device for Percival.
• The earliest other figure tied to Arthur is Mordred. A passage in the Annales Cambriae (c. 970) mentions the cryptic "Battle of Camlann" in 537, "in which Arthur and Medraut fell and there was death in Britain and Ireland." The text mentions no relation between them and does not even say they were on opposing sides.
• "Excalibur" is mentioned as "Caliburn" in the earliest Arthurian stories and is called "Caledfwlch" in Welsh legend. It probably comes from the Latin chalybs--"steel." Although it is often associated with the Sword in the Stone (an element that appeared in later French versions of the legend), in about half the sources that mention the Sword in the Stone, it is a different weapon. Arthur pulls it from the stone but later discards it when he receives Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake.

With my extensive history studying the legends of King Arthur, you'd think I'd naturally be drawn to a game like Spirit of Excalibur, but that isn't necessarily the case. You see, I get very agitated at unnecessary variations on the legend (which is stupid considering how much the legends themselves vary from each other). I watch a film like King Arthur (2004, with Clive Owen), and I sit there shrieking, "Arthur wasn't a Roman officer! The Romans had been gone from Britain for 80 years! And what the @#$* is a 'Woad'?!" I bristle whenever anyone mentions Arthur as the king of "England," which didn't exist as a term until the ninth century.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find that the creators of Spirit of Excalibur did their homework. The manual comes with a three-page "historical overview" of Arthur's time and his place in history, followed by a seven-page "survey of the myths of Arthur." The scholarship in this section is quite good, although it gets a few facts wrong, particularly its statement that "the first documented record of Arthur comes to use from Geoffrey of Monmouth's [Historia Regum Britanniae]." This isn't quite true. Geoffrey's book dates from the 1130s, but there are earlier references to Arthur in the Historia Brittonum (c. 830) attributed to Nennius and the Annales Cambriae (c. 970). Certain Welsh legends, though based on texts that post-date Geoffrey, probably pre-date him in origin. There are several others. It is correct, though, that Geoffrey's text has the first full account of Arthur's life.

I also have to admire the game for being a bit ballsy on the theme. You'd think in a game called Spirit of Excalibur, they'd bet the bank on Arthur himself and feature him front-and-center. That's not the case. The game takes place amidst the chaos after Arthur's death, and again the back story is notable in the attention that it pays to its various sources, starting with the opening sentences: "It is the year 539 in Arthurian England. Arthur has been killed at the battle of Camlann, and his realm is in ferment." The "England" part aside (and to be fair, Malory has no problem calling Arthur the King of England), the date can only be based on the Annales Cambriae, which places Arthur's death at 537. If the creators had just relied on Malory as the source, his date of death would have been closer to 500 (Malory says that the Grail Quest started in 479).

Looks like the developers went with 14 seats for their version of the Round Table. The number given by various texts ranges from 13 (Didot-Perceval) to 1600 (Layamon). No source that I can find gives exactly 14.

"You are the Crown Regent, Lord Constantine, King Arthur's successor as leader of the Knights of the Round table." Constantine was first given as Arthur's successor in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and he seems to have been based on a real king of Devon and Cornwall. He doesn't appear in many versions of the Arthurian cycle, but he does appear in the big ones (Geoffrey, Wace, Layamon, Malory). He is notably the son of Cador of Cornwall, who was the son of Gorlois of Cornwall, the king that Uther Pendragon cuckolded to father Arthur in the first place. The legends don't really mention how Constantine became Arthur's designated heir, but I like to think Arthur was trying to make up for the circumstances of his birth.

I'm going to be going on like this for a while, so here's another opening screen shot to keep you interested.

"Much of Arthur's power, however, is not yours to command. Sir Lancelot du Lac, Arthur's great companion, incomparable champion . . . has gone into retreat. He has taken the greater part of Arthur's veterans with him." Now we switch to Malory, who wrote his great work in the 1450s and 1460s. Lancelot doesn't appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth or any of the putative "historical" versions of the Arthurian myth. In Geoffrey, the battle between Arthur and Mordred takes place after Arthur returns from a war against Rome. By the time of Malory's text, the Roman War was pushed to the beginning of Arthur's reign, and the final battle takes place when Arthur returns from France from a brief war with Lancelot (although there's a confusing second Roman War in there as well). In Malory, it is true that most of Arthur's best knights have sided with Lancelot, not because they think he's in the right, but because Lancelot has been their captain for decades, and Arthur's reaction to the discovery of the affair (condemn Lancelot, burn Guinevere) seems a bit extreme.

"To make matters worse, the legacy of Arthur's bastard son Mordred has come back to haunt you. Though Arthur slew Mordred in his final battle, his sons Melehan and Morgolon have grown to maturity and are carrying on Mordred's quest to usurp the throne!" Geoffrey gives Mordred as Arthur's nephew, the son of his sister Anna. Mordred doesn't become Arthur's illegitimate, incestuous son until the Vulgate Cycle of the 13th century. Anyway, I'm most impressed by "Melehan." I had to go online to look this up, but I think the only sources in which he appears by this name are the Vulgate Mort Artu and the Post-Vulgate Mort Artu, which would have been somewhat obscure sources at the time this game was made. Oddly, although many sources say Mordred had two sons, only one of them is ever named. I'm pretty sure the creators made up "Morgolon."

In this general theme, the creators are going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who does say that Constantine finished the war against Mordred's sons (who are unnamed). I hope the game doesn't end the way Geoffrey's account does, in which Constantine personally chases Mordred's sons into the church in Winchester and slays them on the altar--a sacrilege that brings down the Wrath of God and leads to Constantine's murder at the hands of his own nephew and heir, Conan. Though I guess it would make a memorable final scene.

From this game's "map" view, you're occasionally notified of individual episodes that take you to the "scene" view.

 
Spirit of Excalibur was created by Robert Clardy's Synergistic Software, and like just about any game with which Clardy was involved, it resists classification. Like War in Middle Earth (1988), from which its interface evolved, it exists somewhere between an RPG, an adventure game, and a strategy game. The interface is a combination of the campaign level and the local level, and the action chugs along whether you're ready for it or not, switching schizophrenically between episodes and themes. Within the first five or ten minutes, you're navigating the highways of Britain on a map, talking with individual villagers, fighting a one-on-one combat against an evil knight, and fielding an army in defense of a castle--all with very little control over when these interludes begin and end.

The game is an RPG in the sense that each character has defined attributes and personal inventories.

 
The game takes place in five "episodes." The first, "The Kingmaking," is a sort-of tutorial in which you face some pretty basic decisions. It begins with Constantine in York, having a chat with King Clariance of Northumberland. I don't know what Constantine is doing in York, so far from the action, but perhaps he was visiting a statue of his namesake, Constantine the Great, who became Emperor of Rome while visiting York in 306 (both he and his father, Emperor Constantius I, were in the city when Constantius died). Anyway, Constantine immediately hits the road to head towards Camelot to be crowned king.

Some useless advice from a maiden along the way.

On the way, he meets a variety of citizens--a townsman, a monk, a traveler, a friar, a damsel--and gets various bits of information from each. (Each city, no matter how large, has exactly one NPC, it seems.) Your only role-playing options here are to stop and talk or continue on. If you talk, you don't get any dialogue options. The citizens speak their piece and the game continues.

In Lincoln, I find that an evil knight named Lupinus has challenged the noble Sir Villars to single combat, but Villars has been injured fighting some bandits. (I think both names are inventions of this game.) A monk asks me to serve as Villars's champion. I agree and encounter Lupinus in the village.

Ouch, man. That really stings.

One-on-one combat takes place on a Karateka-like screen where you trade actions--attack, defense, use an item, magic, or let the computer fight for you on "automatic." This first fight wasn't tough; I just hit "attack" repeatedly until Lupinus crumbled. The grateful Villars swore fealty to me and agreed to support my claim.

You know who's good and who's bad by our armor color.

The next major episode took place in Leicester, where Sir Gahalantine was besieged by some "Saxon villains." (Gahalantine is a minor knight mentioned only by Malory. By Malory's account, he ought to be with Lancelot in France right now.) I'm given the option to head to the castle and rout the attackers. This is the game's introduction to battlefield combat. Mostly it fights itself, though you can click on individual units and tell them what to do. The units are really tiny, though, and it's hard to tell who's who.

Anyway, I won the battle with no difficulty, and I also got Sir Gahalantine's support. Thus, I continued on to Camelot. The game follows Malory's example by locating Camelot at present-day Winchester. Other sources place it all over the map. There is some archaeological evidence for an Arthurian-era war leader's headquarters at Cadbury in Somerset, about 100 miles to the west of Winchester.

Sir Bedivere met me when I entered the castle and gave me his support, along with several other former Knights of the Round Table. That means a lot, since Bedivere was one of Arthur's most loyal retainers, attached to the legend all the way back to the Welsh Triads, and in Malory the last person to hold Excalibur before tossing it back to the Lady of the Lake.

The game then shows me a map of the lands that I control:

Anyway, this ended the first episode and began the second, titled "The Return of Lancelot du Lac" (spoilers much?). Almost immediately, I hear word of unrest in Scotland, and I've got to send a party to investigate. I have only seven knights to choose from. The game makes a point that I'm having troubling rallying support without a designated champion.

This is an interesting selection of knights. With the exception of Bedivere, the entire lot of them (in Malory) pledged their support to Lancelot when he rescued Guinevere from the stake and carried her off to France. Ector is Lancelot's half-brother, even. Lancelot made them dukes and whatnots of various French lands, so I don't know what they're all doing here. (Dinas, Bellengerus, and Hebes are also all expatriates from the Tristan legends.)

The manual has a glossary listing some basic strengths and weaknesses of each knight, but you really need to get them into a party before you can see specific values. Some have more speed, some more combat ability, some more "nobility" (I'm not sure what that does). The game is a bit confusing, because although it makes you take an initial selection here, it soon becomes clear that I can send any number of these knights, in any combination, to various parts of the map. I chose Ector as the leader the first time. In the legends, he's a decent knight whose adventures are overshadowed by Lancelot's.

Ector and Lavain get ready to head out.

The game then entered into a scenario in which these two knights could walk together around Camelot, talk to various people, and collect items--I guess in anticipation of their journey. Other NPCs in the castle offer to join the expedition, including a friar and Nineve. Various sources have a tough time reaching consensus whether Nineve (or Nimue, Ninniane, and various other incarnations) is the same person as the Lady of the Lake or someone else, whether she's related to Morgan le Fay, and whether her seduction and imprisonment of Merlin is wicked or kind.

I wasn't sure what the advantages and disadvantages of taking the friar and Nineve were, so I took them. It's in this interface that the game seems most like an adventure game. You can select individual characters and have them pick up items, drop them, use them, search, trade, talk and a handful of other actions.

The adventure-style commands available in the game.

There was one room with a key, which let me unlock a door to the castle treasury, where I found a bunch of gold and what sounds like magic items. I'm not sure if I should be looting the treasury, but I distributed the items among my four "party" members.

After that, it was on the road to Scotland! Except that he game map doesn't go as far north as Scotland, so I just headed north. On the way, I met a traveler who told me that a large force of Saxons was gathering in East Anglia.

When I reached London, I switched to "scene" view and found myself talking with Sir Lionel, another supporter of Lancelot (and his cousin), who's supposed to be dead by now whatever source you're reading. Before I even asked, he told me that he wouldn't be able to help Camelot because of the "grave dangers" he was facing--presumably the Saxons to his northeast.

It's at this point that the game has me largely confused. Am I supposed to stay in London and help Lionel, or continue on to Scotland? Does the game have an answer to every possibility that I might choose? Does every other city have someone like Lionel with a problem to solve? Was there a compelling reason not to bring the entire round table with me on this quest, to decline to take Nineve and the friar, or to avoid picking up every item in Camelot to take with me? Is there a specific way to play out each scenario, or is Britain my playground? The game will let me return to the Round Table room and select new parties. Should I be sending people all over Britain? It's quite confusing.

Perhaps by next time, I'll have it sorted, though I wouldn't mind any general (non-spoiler) advice from anyone who's played the game. In the meantime, if you're interested in exploring more about the Arthurian legends, here are my recommendations:

• A full-text version (PDF) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. The "Arthurian" section begins in Book VI, Chapter 5 (Page 94 of the linked text) with a description of Uther Pendragon as a boy. The Merlin story begins on Page 108. Uther begets Arthur starting on Page 141; Arthur first appears on Page 149 and dies on Page 193. Geoffrey's depiction of Constantine lasts but a page after that. It's important to note that despite the title, Geoffrey wasn't really writing a history, and no modern scholar takes it seriously.

• T. H. White's The Once and Future King. A moving adaptation of the cycle, based almost entirely on Malory. The basis of the animated film The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot, though I recommend neither. White does a fun thing and moves Arthur's reign 500 years forward, making Uther Pendragon a Norman conqueror, but it's not key to the story.

• Mary Stewart's Arthurian saga, starting with The Crystal Cave. She manages to tell a great story while being true (in sometimes very clever ways) to the original sources, particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth.

• John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), the best Arthurian film. It crams as much as it can into a limited time, but the depictions of the key characters are mostly faithful to the legend's origins, if at times conflating things (e.g., Arthur himself is the Fisher King). Particularly notable are the preservation of Percival as the Grail Hero and the inclusion of Lancelot's "insanity" episode. Only the depiction of Gawain really suffers. The movie claims that it's based entirely on Le Morte d'Arthur, but certain episodes are lifted directly from Tennyson's Idylls of the King.