Game 157: Super Quest (1983)

The opening screen, oddly, shows a mosquito vomiting.

      

Super Quest

United States

Jeff Hurlburt (developer), SoftSide magazine (publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II, updated as late as 2000 with bug fixes

Date Started: 11 August 2014

     

Most games, good and bad, modern and primitive, generally offer a length of gameplay equal to their complexity. This is true even of games made in the early 1980s, when no one knew that games as rich in content as the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series would even be possible. Indeed, a primary virtue of some of the early games to which I have given middling reviews--Ring of Darkness, Expedition Amazon, Sword of Fargoal--is that you can win them in a couple of days. Games from the same era that take considerably longer, like Wizardry, make up for it with greater complexity in exploration and combat.

If a developer wanted to offer a game that could occupy players essentially indefinitely, they usually didn't include endings. Telengard, Gateway to Apshai, and the PLATO games are good examples. The entire goal of these games is to build characters and increase scores as high as possible before (inevitably) dying.

For years, I've been awaiting the RPG equivalent of Penn & Teller's Desert Bus, a game with virtually no content that takes forever to play and yet still does have an ending. I have found it in Super Quest. Like a six-hour play written by a kindergartener, this is a epically-long, primitive entertainment experience that, having been written in 1983, doesn't know it's primitive. As such, it enthusiastically offers a difficulty, size, and length which might have been mind-boggling in 1983, but which are simply unsupportable given the limited content.

A typical Super Quest screen. My character (the H) has just entered Room #183, which contains five goblins (the G) and a treasure chest (the +). I'm carrying 43 magic quarrels, 54 iron quarrels, 20 units of "tana powder" and 14 healing elixirs. I have treasure equivalent to 154 gold "denars" and I've amassed 297 experience points.

Super Quest takes place in a enormous dungeon of 1,024 rooms--256 in each of four sections. The character navigates through a series of fixed and random combats involving exactly four options: shoot a magic quarrel, shoot an iron quarrel, throw a vial of magic powder, and fight in melee combat, each action mapped to a specific key. The ultimate goal of the game is to find an artifact in the fourth section called the "Mega-Crown," but to do that, the player must first bulk up the character's experience and maximum strength by fighting monsters and collecting treasure.

Returning from the bazaar after a successful expedition.

I would guess that in 1983, actually finding the "Mega-Crown" was a pretty far-off goal, and the more practical quest was simply to jostle for positioning on the scoreboard stored on the disk. I say this because the game is ridiculously hard, with rules far more draconian than even Rogue. It adopts Rogue's permadeath--all deaths are immediately written to the character file--but adds to it the difficulty of limited save points; to save the game, you have to return to the opening "bazaar" or one of the rare "hospices" in the dungeon. In between, gameplay occurs in real time, with absolutely no way to pause, so you can't even take a restroom break. Add to this extremely limited tactics and inventory, and you have a game in which only luck and extreme caution keep your character viable.

The introductory screens provide a needlessly long framing story for the quest. The setting is supposedly on Earth, in the future (2275), but in a world in which magic and monsters are real. The "Mega-Crown" was created to achieve balance between magic and technology, but it worked too well and both magic and technology "were held not merely in balance, but in stasis." Frustrated by lack of progress, a king accidentally found a way to put a cap on the crown and negate its effects, then had it hidden in a huge labyrinth in Africa, surrounded by monsters and traps. Now, centuries later, magic has all but overwhelmed technology, and it's time for a hero to brave the dungeon and remove the cap from the crown.

One of 12 back story screens, or about 10 more than necessary.

Character creation is a simple process of specifying a name and choosing a race from among four classes. You will be shocked at the game's originality when I tell you that those races are humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits. Each has various strengths and weaknesses associated with both attributes and skill in melee and ranged combat.

The game does have fairly good in-game documentation.

  
In addition to name and race, you specify your "sponsor" in three characters. At first, I didn't understand what this was; then I later realized that the "sponsor" initials appear in the scoreboard after the character's name. The back story gives some palaver about "nobles who sponsor heroes . . . as an opportunity for competition in the accumulation of [status]," but the mechanic is clearly for the player to tag each character with his initials, I guess with the idea that multiple players would use the same game disk. I'm not sure if that happened in real life.

After creation, the player starts in the "bazaar"--basically, a shop at the top of the dungeon where he can purchase the few bits of equipment offered by the game:  iron quarrels, magic quarrels, tana powder, healing elixirs, and strength potions. Strength is the only attribute, so amassing enough money to purchase strength potions is a key mechanic of character development. In addition to combat effectiveness, strength determines how many arrows the character can carry at a given time; raising strength to the point that you can haul hundreds of arrows is a key element of long-haul dungeon exploration.

Money doesn't come easily. You don't get it simply from killing enemies. Instead, you have to find the rooms that contain treasure chests, but around the opening area, you're lucky if the treasures you find are worth a few dozen gold pieces--almost all of which you need to replenish arrows and healing potions. It's a long time before you have the 1,000 gold you need to buy that first strength potion (it technically sells for 2,000, but you can almost always haggle down to half the value for anything).

Bargaining for quarrels in the bazaar.

Movement in the dungeon uses the WAXD combination. Hitting one of the movement keys moves you continuously until you change directions or hit "S" to stop, which of course adds another level of difficultly. Monsters can move diagonally but you can't. Other keys are mostly intuitive: (F)ight, (I)nformation, (H)ealing elixir, and so forth, with the exception of the keys used to shoot arrows (<) and magic arrows (>), which are unintuitive to press and easy to get mixed up.

Facing vampires in a long corridor. I can't get the screen capture to show the line streaking from me to the target, which lasts only a microsecond.

There are only 13 monster types in the dungeon, and most of the rooms have fixed numbers of them, although random encounters can pop up at any moment. Each monster has different levels of response to different attack types. Imps can be defeated in melee combat or with tana powder but aren't injured at all by quarrels or magic quarrels. If you want to fight a wraith, on the other hand, you'd better have some magic quarrels in the quiver because regular quarrels and melee attacks won't do anything. "Afreets" respond to nothing but tana powder. Fortunately, there are a few enemy types--skeletons, zombies, vampires, mummies--that will fall to just about anything. The game gives a rundown of these various strengths and weaknesses when you start, which is good, but remember that everything is in real-time, so when a creature appears, you only have a second to figure out what type of attack you want to use before he starts dismembering you.

Monster strengths and weaknesses. Despite the "relative strength," there's a lot of variance among individual monsters. Some vampires go down in three arrows; others take a dozen.

The one advantage for the player is that you don't have to line up arrow attacks; when you fire, the arrow automatically streaks toward any enemy on the screen as long as you have line-of-sight. Only one enemy appears at a time, but more might be waiting in the wings and will immediately attack as soon as his predecessor is killed.

Killing monsters increases experience, which supposedly affects accuracy and power of attacks. I didn't really notice this happening, but perhaps you need quite a bit before it becomes palpable. Your own health meter is represented in percentages, and it decreases shockingly fast once you enter melee combat. Against an imp, for instance--the weakest monster in the game--it disappears in about four seconds if you aren't actively fighting back. Yes, this is at authentic machine speed. You start with 15 healing elixirs which restore full health, and you can also get full restoration by returning to the bazaar, saving the game, and restarting.

I'm not even going to pretend to play this one straight. I did for about two hours, creating and losing a variety of characters, before resorting to save states just so I could make some progress and properly document the game. I also checked out a fan site run by Kipley Fiebig, who went through an impressive process to make image maps of the game.
  

The enormous first section, courtesy of Kipley Fiebig. I haven't explored more than 10% of it. The other three are stacked to the north of this one.

  
Looking at the map above, I have no idea how you were supposed to create this as a 1983 player when you couldn't look away from the computer for a moment without risking death by a random encounter. The rooms are numbered, so I suppose it's possible to create a cruder map like a node graph. Since rooms reset when the player exits and returns to the dungeon, the player would also want to take  notes about where to find certain monsters and treasures.

So far, I've invested about five hours in the game and--again, using liberal save states, though mostly to allow myself to take breaks--I've managed to get up to 1,497 experience points and 1,100 gold pieces. I just bought my first strength potion, which raised my human character from 25 to 39 strength, thus allowing me to carry 97 quarrels (of each type) at once.

An unwelcome message while limping back to base.

  
There are certain aspects of the game I've yet to experience:

• Magic lamps, which are randomly-appearing treasures. Rubbing them transports you to a random location, and then the lamp disappears. These are apparently the key to speed-winning the game, assuming you're lucky enough to teleport someplace near the crown.
• Though most of the dungeon is fixed, some of the rooms have a random configuration that changes every time you enter.
• There are special "puzzle" rooms scattered among the levels, though I don't know what the puzzles are.
• If you kill dragons, you take their ears as trophies. If you collect 60 of them, you automatically get a suit of "dragon fire armor," which is apparently the only equipment upgrade.

Super Quest was published in SoftSide magazine, Volume 5, Number 6, in 1983. The magazine itself just had a description of the game; to actually obtain it, you had to send in an order card stuck in the magazine as an insert. I was surprised to see it described as "shareware" on the credits screen (I didn't think the term had yet been coined in 1983), with a retail price of $3. The author, Jeff Hurlburt of Houston, Texas, is credited on only one other game that I can find: Instant Software's Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio (1978). But of course this is the Dark Ages, and we might be missing a lot of titles.
  

The copyright and credits screen.

  
The credits screen is unique in giving attribution for the various "ideas" in the game, and it cites Brian Reynolds's Quest 1 for the "original game idea." This is another game published in SoftSide, but as 400 lines of BASIC code rather than an ordered disk. I declined to play it because I couldn't find a digital copy, but the instructions indicate that it did have fairly similar gameplay, including WAXD movement, fixed rooms that respawn when you leave the dungeon and re-enter, and the same basic attack options (with arrows instead of quarrels and holy water instead of "tana powder"). Super Quest adds five more monsters, a lot more rooms (Quest 1 had only 58), a few special features, and an actual main quest (despite it's name, the only "quest" in Quest 1 was to get stronger).

I suspect that even cheating with save states and Mr. Fiebig's maps, we're looking at a long game time before I can get the Mega-Crown, but I'll play for a while longer and see if I can at least experience the elements above.

*****

Posts on Super Quest: One | Two

Further Reading: After finishing this game, I took a look at its source, Quest 1. For a later (and inferior) game in the same family, check out Dungeons, Dragons, and Other Perils (1984).