Game 209: Sword of Kadash (1984)

      

Sword of Kadash
Dynamix (developer); Penguin Software (publisher)

Released 1984 for Apple II; 1985 for Commodore 64; 1986 for Atari ST and Macintosh

Date Started: 29 December 2015
Date Ended: 30 December 2015

Total Hours: 7

Reload Count: >100

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 40/206 (19%). Obligatory disclaimer that it performs better as an action game than an RPG.

The earliest arcade games, like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, featured limited gameplay, but they weren't deterministic. Random variability in enemy movement and unpredictability in player movement meant that no two games were exactly the same, and players had to respond to an ever-changing game board to succeed.

At some point, a new kind of game became popular: the platformer. In the earliest incarnations, platformers differed from other games by being completely deterministic. Instead of quickly reacting to the presence of enemies who had some artificial intelligence, however rudimentary, platformers prized the ability to navigate a series of obstacles that fundamentally never changed. Every screen of Pitfall or Super Mario Brothers looks exactly the same for every player every time he plays it. (Perhaps I should say "almost every screen," since it's been years since I played either and I may be forgetting a small number that had some randomness associated with them.) Enemies always emerge from the same places at the same times; the same blocks always hold the same treasures, and the moving platforms that give the genre its name always start in the same positions and move at the same speeds.

It's going to be a while before I start talking about the game, so here's a typical Sword of Kadash screen. This room has multiple entrances and exits, a shield, a demon guarding it, and a couple of other enemies in an inaccessible room. (There is undoubtedly a secret door.) I am "shooting" my +1 axe at the demon.

    

Because these games are so deterministic, victory almost always comes through experience rather than skill alone. I suppose it's not impossible that a skilled player might be able to fire up Super Mario Brothers, learn the controls, and cruise all the way to the end on his first try, using his perception to suss out the best path through each screen and anticipate obstacles and surprises. It just seems very unlikely. Too many enemies appear suddenly, and the results of too many actions are essentially arbitrary. Instead, most successful players win after a long series of failures in which, through trial and error, they memorize each screen and know exactly what to do when they get there.

In spirit, Sword of Kadash is this kind of game. It doesn't have the same jumping puzzles as platformers, but it has the same approach to trial and error. No player could make it through on the first try by skill alone because too much of what happens is completely arbitrary. Only through extensive experimentation do you know which items are cursed, what traps go off when you pick up certain items, what enemies appear when you touch a certain wall, and so forth. Reflexes won't save you every time. Players are manifestly meant to make maps, take notes, and through a long process of dying and learning, eventually plot a path through the game to the end. 

There are no jumping puzzles in Kadash, but you do have to time your way past a lot of rolling things.

      
Sword of Kadash is an action RPG, although as with most action RPGs of the era, we're being a bit generous on the "RPG" part. In its basic interface, it's not a million miles different from Caverns of Freitag (1982),  Sword of Fargoal (1982), or Gateway to Apshai (1983): you run around a multi-room map, killing enemies in real-time, earning experience for each kill, and picking up useful items. (I wanted to record some video, but I'm having problems with my recording software; I recommend checking out this YouTube video if you want to see the game in action.) It hangs on to RPG credentials by a hair: experience causes you to increase levels and perform better in combat. Your maximum hit points increase by 100 per level. The only flexible inventory it offers is a supply of magic scrolls that the player can use as he deems necessary.
  
The framing story uses a Persian theme. The character is a nameless wanderer, lost in the desert, captured by a band of brigands. In return for sparing his life, the brigand king orders the character to enter the Fortress of the Dragon, overcome its demon and lich guardians, and return with the Sword of Kadash, former property of "an almost invincible Templar Knight." The king apparently doesn't want the sword for its power: "Faithful followers of Allah, they seek not to use the sword [but to] restore it to its holy resting place in the Vizier's Palace as a symbol to all true believers of the vanquished Crusaders."

There's no character creation process (an awful lot of action RPGs don't even let you name your character), just a selection of among three difficulty levels. The character starts at the entrance to the Fortress, armed with a dagger, a shield, and 2000 hit points. Gameplay takes place in a maze of 256 discrete rooms.
   

The game begins. There are a few hidden objects in that tree.

    
Combat is a bit weird and reminiscent of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Intellivision cartridge. While you can fight enemies in melee range, it's a major failure on your part if an enemy ever touches you, as you take swift and constant damage. Instead, you fire three-round bursts of "darts" at enemies from a distance, with the ability to bank the darts off many of the game's walls. Despite this, the weapons you pick up are daggers, morning stars, and swords, as if such items can just be infinitely thrown. (One wonders if the developers of Ghosts and Goblins ever played Kadash.)

The dungeon is littered with weapons, pieces of armor, magic scrolls, keys, treasure chests, first-aid boxes, and holy symbols. Each item allots you some experience when you pick it up, and if the weapon or armor is better that what you already had, it replaces your existing item. (There is otherwise no way to "drop" anything in the game.) Other than the experience points, I don't think there's any point to keys or treasure chests--the game has no doors and no economy. Scrolls add to your spell total.

This room has one of each of the game's treasures except for a first aid box.

    
Where Kadash differs from other action games is in the insidious number of traps and other bad things that can happen to the character as he explores. Clearing out the initial group of monsters that might occupy a room is the easiest part of the game. The hard part is trying to anticipate and react to what happens when you pick up certain items or even just walk in certain places. Some of the possibilities include:

• Arrows shoot out of the nearby walls and pierce you for major hit point damage unless you quickly step out of the way.

All I did was pick up a holy symbol.

   

• More enemies spawn around you.

• A rolling wall or ball appears and rolls back and forth, crushing everything in its path. 

    

Picking up a first aid kit caused this rolling ball to spawn and crush me. Even if the wall to my right was a secret door (it's not), there's not enough time to avoid the damage.

      
Truth be told, one of these things almost always happens when you pick something up. Perhaps you're a better player than I am, but I did not find that I could react fast enough to the appearance of these objects to save myself unless I already knew what was going to happen. This is what I mean by "success by experience" rather than success by skill.

Even if nothing awful happens when you pick something up, there's a decent chance--about 1 in 4, I think--that the item is cursed. When you pick up a cursed item, you remain in "cursed" status until you find a holy symbol. While in cursed status, you don't gain any experience and your weapons and armor are far less effective. There aren't very many holy symbols in the dungeon (and many of them are, themselves, cursed), so a first-time player would spend an awful lot of his time cursed. Again, only experience tells you which items are safe to pick up and which must be left alone.

Late in the game, there's an entire hallway of cursed items that you can't avoid. Only if you left a single holy symbol untouched in an earlier room can you approach the endgame uncursed. Trial and error.

Every item in this hallway is cursed.

    
Oh, how else does the game screw with you? Some walls are secret doors, and you have to find some of them to get to key places. When you touch them, they disappear, brick by brick, but some of them you have to shoot first, and all of them will refuse to open if you're off by one pixel. There are also invisible walls in many rooms that you have to navigate around; again, you have to shoot some of these first to pass. A few of the smaller monsters refuse to occupy the same plane as the darts you fire at them. Finally, you take damage if your own weapon rebounds against you (at least, if your weapon rating is higher than your defense), which happens more often than you might think.

This empty-looking room is actually a maze of invisible walls.

Against all of this, you only have a couple of advantages. Enemy pathfinding is poor, so you can sometimes get them trapped behind walls or lure them around corners one-by-one. Some of the rooms feature a weblike latticework that traps enemies but lets you shoot through it, allowing you to shoot them as they futilely try to reach you. Banking your shots works in a few key locations. Enemies don't follow between screens, so if a room has multiple entrances, you can stand by one exit and shoot at them as they approach, then pop out the door and come at the screen from another entrance, repeating until they're dead.

If I'm very patient, they'll come around the corner one-by-one.

I can kill every spider in this room without them coming anywhere near me by shooting holes in the latticework.

   
The only "spell" in the game, cast from your accumulated magic scrolls, is a kind of "Fear" spell that sends enemies scurrying to the farthest corner. There are a few locations where none of the above tricks work, so you essentially have to use a spell to avoid being overwhelmed.

Each character theoretically has a number of "lives" for each game, but success--particularly in the later screens--largely depends on accumulating as much experience, and the best items, as possible. When you die, you start over at Level 1 with a sword and shield again. This is not a survivable condition in the late game.

The game sounds exasperating, and it is--but in a way that you don't quite mind. It's small enough that starting over isn't that bad. The player makes maps, notes his mistakes (if only mentally), and charges once more unto the breach. After all, if it wasn't so hard, it would only be a 5-hour game, and players would feel like they'd wasted their money. I could see buying Sword of Kadash in 1984 and having lots of fun with it as I slowly learned its pitfalls and perils, finally winning after a few months of effort. When you think of it, doesn't Dark Souls take essentially the same approach?

The very act of walking into this room sends rows of daggers flying at you. There's a secret pit to avoid them, but good luck finding it when you have only a second to react. This room must have been the end for a lot of players.

    
Not willing to simulate the length of this process in 2015, I used save states rather liberally, but I tried not to play like a complete jackass. On my first play-through, I took save states every 5-10 minutes and reloaded if I died, but otherwise tried to adapt to the game's difficulty. By the time I reached the end after about 4 hours, I was too weak to get through the final screens, and I was hopelessly cursed because I didn't know about that final corridor of unavoidable cursed items.

Towards the end of the game, you face a few tough foes. First, there are a couple of liches capable of summoning other monsters around them; I couldn't defeat them without spells. More important, you come across a dragon that you need the Sword of Kadash to kill. The first time you cross his path, you don't have it, so you have to cross his dragon fire (which is unavoidable, unless I missed something) and open a secret door to progress to the sword. Later, you have to stand in his dragon fire and throw the sword at him until he dies. In both cases, you have to have a boatload of hit points to survive the fire. This business about having to dash across a dragon's breath has appeared in two other action RPGs--Caverns of Freitag and ICON: The Quest for the Ring. Author Chris Cole told me that he had played the former.
    

One of the liches, guarding a couple of holy symbols, surrounded by traps. I forgot to talk about the traps.

      

When I first reached the dragon I was down to a couple hundred hit points and had no way to get any more. I had to retire the character.

My first ill-fated character. He doesn't have enough hit points to cross the dragon's breath and open the secret door to the north.

   
The second time, instead of being conservative with my save states, I pretended like I was a player who had already been through the game a million times. I saved before every room, tested what happened with each object and pathway, and then re-loaded and completed the room like a pro. I reached the endgame with over 7,000 hit points and defeated the final enemies with ease.

The Sword of Kadash! I forgot to screen-shot the room while the lich was still alive.

To win the game, you have to stand right in the dragon's breath and shoot at him with the Sword of Kadash.

    
The end game screen, I'm pleased to report, has the character contemplating using his accumulated experience to take the Sword of Kadash and kill the bandits rather than deliver it to them.

I don't quite get the "more must be claimed" part,  but I like the last bit.

    
For GIMLET purposes, it's never a good sign when the totality of the game's controls are the directional pad and a fire button, but this is going to be a case where the GIMLET--designed for classic RPGs--doesn't quite tell the whole story.
       

• 1 for the game world, a basic framing story that has little to do with gameplay.

• 1 for character creation and development, offering the bare minimum necessary to be an RPG.

• 0 for no NPCs

• 3 for encounters and foes. I thought the liches were creative, and the rooms can be seen as a type of puzzle "encounter."

• 1 for magic and combat, again offering only what was necessary to be considered in the category in the first place.

• 1 for equipment which you can only accumulate, not drop.

• 0 for no economy.

• 3 for having a main quest and a couple of "side quests" involving the collection of better equipment from rooms you don't otherwise have to explore.

• 4 for graphics, sound, and interface. All are good enough for the scope of the game.

• 4 for gameplay. It's quite hard, but I suppose its difficulty is sensible for its length and scope.

        

That gives us a final score of 18. That's pretty low by RPG standards, but the kind of player who enjoys Sword of Kadash is probably not the same type of player who enjoys Wizardry. Kadash is a fun game, just not a great RPG specifically.

   

    

Sword of Kadash was the second offering from the Oregon-based Dynamix, a company that would soon become famous for solid action and games like Skyfox, Arcticfox, The Crimson Crown, F-14 Tomcat, and Red Baron. They became a division of Sierra in 1990 and shut down in 2001 (although the founders have started new game companies since then), and in all their years, the only return to RPG territory seems to have been 1993's Betrayal at Krondor.
     

The production values of the game were nice. This fold-out included a rundown of the game's enemies.

      
Author Chris Cole was nice enough to respond to my e-mails and talk a bit about the development of the game. He was only 15 when he started working on the game and 17 when he finished. (When I was 15, by contrast, I wrote an 80-page science-fiction novel that featured the line, "We have to stop those Martians before they kill my dad!") Chris and two friends, Paul Bowman and Clark Fagot, frequented an Oregon computer store called the Computer Tutor, run by Dynamix founder Jeff Tunnell. Lacking the funds to buy much, they would simply visit and "salivate over the cool games." Tunnell, who thought they were shoplifting until he got to know them, called them "the three hoodlums."

"We didn't have any money and $30 was a big deal for us," Cole wrote. "We felt burned when we got a bad one...and we seemed to get burned a lot. So I started mouthing off that I could write a better game in two weeks. Well, the gauntlet was thrown down, and Jeff...said that if I thought I could do better, he'd publish it." Tunnell and Damon Skye had already started Dynamix and were about to publish Stellar 7; Kadash would be the company's second game.

In writing the game, Cole says he was influenced by Stern Electronics' Berzerk (1982) and Williams Electronics' Robotron: 2084 (1982), but he was exposed to basic computer RPG development via Caverns of Freitag and overall RPG mechanics via a number of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons sessions with his friends. While Cole wrote the game interface, several friends--Paul Bowman, Damon Slye, and Bryce Morsello--helped with the designs of most of the rooms. "We had a lot of fun playing each other's rooms," Cole said. "It was really like how we played AD&D at the time."

Cole agrees that he deliberately set out to create a game that required an accumulation of experience to finish. "I meant to make a tough game. Those were the types of games I liked and felt like there was a real investment in your character." As for the name: "It was a girl! I had a teenage crush on a girl in my school whose name was 'kinda' like 'Kadash.'"

A shot from the Apple II edition of the game.

   
Cole was hoping that Tunnell would be able to work out a publishing deal with Electronic Arts, but "Jeff's relationship with EA at the time of negotiations for Kadash were not so great," so he approached Penguin Software instead. The Persian motif was a late addition. Cole had intended it to have a high fantasy theme, but someone at Penguin made an association between "Kadash" and the ancient city of Kadesh and insisted on a Persian framing story. Cole thought it was a bad marketing decision: "This was 1983 and the Iran hostage crisis had just ended. Americans had little love for the area at the time. I tried, unsuccessfully as a 16-year-old, to have them change the setting back to high fantasy. I've always wondered if that would have made a difference in sales." He was also a bit underwhelmed by Penguin's marketing and distribution.

But it could have done worse. Magazines at the time praised it and referred to it as an original action-adventure. Apparently, an expansion with more rooms was released--something I've not otherwise been able to find anything about. The game made Cole enough in royalties to pay his living expenses through five years of undergraduate school and two years of graduate school (he had a full scholarship for tuition and books); he thinks maybe $25,000-30,000 total.
  
After getting his master's degree at the University of Washington in 1991, Cole returned to Dynamix to work on titles like Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (1993) and Hunter Hunted (1996). He co-founded Monster Studios (1999-2003), Mad Otter Games (2008-Present), and DaedalusForge (2012-Present) and has credits on a couple dozen games during the 1990s and 2000s. His only return to the RPG world was in his last credited title, a 2011 MMORPG called Villagers & Heroes of a Mystical Land.
  
He remembers Kadash very fondly: "I've always felt Kadash was a genre-buster. It had legitimate elements of RPG, arcade, adventure, and maybe even a little open world, as the player could do anything in the dungeon with several sub-quests that were completely optional. Of all my games, I've always really liked how Kadash was my game."

This last bit, I'll quote without paraphrasing:

The only thing I'd like to add is that working on games in the 80s was pretty challenging as the Apple II+ had 48K of memory with a lot of that taken up by OS and screen memory. We all had to be pretty frugal with anything we did and we had to come up with some pretty interesting solution to technical problems.

I've recently worked on the Android and iOS systems and the tools available today for kids in the 15-18 year range are so much more complete. In 1983 I had to enter machine code (not assembly) into the memory directly. Today kids don't even know what machine code is. I think more kids should be encouraged (by teachers, parents, and society) to make games as opposed to simply playing them. You might be in a great position with your blog to push some of these teenagers into actually making software. I encourage you to do so.

     
I don't know how many readers I have in that age range (seriously, if I have any, please comment), but if any 16-year-olds out there think they can make an RPG of the same quality as Kadash, I promise I'll play it and write about it.