Game 158: Quest 1 (1981)

Quest 1

United States

Brian Reynolds (developer), SoftSide magazine (publisher)

Published August 1981 as code for three platforms

Date Started: 14 August 2014
Date Ended: 14 August 2014

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 12
Ranking at Time of Posting: 12/158 (8%)

              

I had originally rejected Quest 1 as too simple to be an RPG. I also felt that it wasn't really a "game" unless it was compiled, pressed, and sold, rather than offered as code. But Joe Pranevich was probably right that it needed to be played, if only because I just finished playing Super Quest, which builds upon it. Also because it was written by Brian Reynolds when he was 13, long before he would go on to win fame as the lead designer of Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, Colonization, and a host of other strategy games developed under the direction of Sid Meier. It should probably be my policy to play the first games of anyone with a Wikipedia profile.

Like Super Quest, Quest 1 was published in SoftSide magazine, though two years prior, in August 1981. Unlike Super Quest, Quest 1 was small enough that the magazine could simply publish the code for readers to type rather than require them to send for a disk. Reynolds wrote the original version for the TRS-80, but the magazine also offers versions for the Apple II (by Rich Bouchard) and the Atari 8-bit (by Alan J. Zett), the latter being the one I'm playing.

The magazine offers illustrations that have nothing to do with the game.

There is, admittedly, quite a lot packed into these 400 lines of code, and in general I'm more impressed with Quest 1 than with some of the other titles published in gaming magazines. Oh, it's not going to rate high on the GIMLET, but it it's an impressive effort for a 13-year-old, and it has at least one idea that I haven't seen anywhere else in my chronology.

The game takes place in a dungeon of 58 rooms through which the player traverses with the WAXD keys (perhaps for the first time in CRPG history), fighting monsters through one of four mechanisms: melee combat, shooting them with regular arrows, shooting them with magic arrows, and throwing a vial of holy water. There are eight different monster types: skeletons, orcs, zombies, ghouls, spiders, mummies, giants, and wraiths--listed here in order of difficulty. Various attacks work better on some monsters than on others; for instance, holy water only works on undead, wraiths aren't affected by normal arrows, and giants can't be defeated in melee combat.

      

Exploring the Quest 1 dungeon. I've entered a room occupied by a giant. There's a treasure (the *) in the room. The edges of the screen tell my current inventory and attributes.

          

All of this ought to sound familiar for those of you who read my entries on Super Quest, as Jeff Hurlburt kept essentially all of these core features and mechanics. The one feature that didn't make the translation is perhaps the most original that Quest 1 has to offer: the effects of dexterity. The game actually slows down for characters with high dexterity, giving them more time to move and react to threats, which Joe characterized as an early version of "bullet time." It's an interesting mechanic, and the differences are quite palpable, though everyone's game speeds up as the character accumulates experience (which, come to think of it, is another original idea).

By affecting your speed relative to the monsters', a high dexterity score also enables a different method of gameplay by which you run around collecting treasure and escaping rooms before the monsters can even get to you. The magazine article suggests the player may want to adopt a fighter approach or a rogue approach depending on how the statistics roll.

Character creation is entirely random; the game chooses your strength, dexterity, race, and starting arrows, magic arrows, holy waters, and healing potions. It's very possible to get an essentially unplayable character. Assuming you don't restart, you give yourself a name and immediately find yourself in a shop, where you can use your gold to buy more of anything.

The brief character creation process.

Followed by shopping.

After that, it's out to the dungeon and its associated monsters and treasures. At any time, the player can return to the shop to cash in and buy more equipment.

Returning to the shop after a successful expedition.

By operating at a slower pace, the game is a little easier than Super Quest, although it compensates with a few additional variables affecting difficulty. First, random monsters can spawn right next to you instead of always entering from an edge of the room. Second, the number of enemies increases as you gain experience. Third, you're always limited to twice your strength in arrows, and there's no way to increase your attributes.

I have to say, I think the animation is a little impressive given the sparseness of the code. When you fire an arrow, a line of ++++++ shows it streaking from the character to the enemy. When the enemy dies, a jumble of random characters heralds its death. These aren't commercial-quality animations, but they're nice touches for a 1981 game by a 13-year old published in a magazine. (Super Quest had them, too, though I don't think I commented on them.)

My arrow streaks towards an orc. It took me a while to screen-capture it in-flight.

Alas, the game offers no main quest: just a general goal to get as high as possible. (It also doesn't offer the slightest attempt at a framing story.) Rooms don't respawn in between saves, so I suppose you could consider it a general goal to clear all 58 rooms. I trust you'll forgive me if I don't play long enough to do that. My best character got to 307 experience points before he died because I was typing this entry and failed to notice a giant appear on the screen.

It's nice that I get to go to heaven, though.

If nothing else, Quest 1 served as a good base for a more elaborate game, which is what we got in Super Quest. In the second game, Jeff Hurlburt kept the core mechanic but added a main quest, a much larger dungeon, more monster types, special rooms, the ability to develop the character with strength potions, the dragon armor sub-quest, a scoreboard, and generally a faster, deadlier gameplay experience. With the exception of not porting over the dexterity statistic (and associated effects on game speed), everything is very similar, including the layout: the area around the bazaar in Super Quest seems to use the same layout as the 58 rooms of Quest 1.

In a GIMLET, I can only give Quest 1 a 12, but it's an interesting piece of the past with some original ideas and at least two CRPG firsts. It also forced me to learn an Atari 8-bit emulator (Atari800Win, if you care), which will come in handy for some future games.

In an interview with his elementary school, Reynolds indicates that he wrote Quest 1 during the week of spring break in 1981 and got $100 from SoftSide for it. The title suggests that he had other Quest ideas for the future, but we never saw any sequels from Reynolds; in fact, it appears he never worked on another RPG at all. He has a couple of adventure games that Trickster will probably play.

This is a short review, but really there isn't a lot of game to cover. We'll get back to the regular program with alternating postings on Captive and Keys to Maramon. Incidentally, Secret of the Silver Blades just popped up on the "upcoming" list, so I have something to look forward to.

*****

Further Reading: Make sure you read my full series on Super Quest, which I published before this one. But it turns out that Super Quest wasn't the only spawn of Quest 1: in 1984, we had Dungeons, Dragons, and Other Perils, which manages to under-perform Quest 1 despite being released three years later.