1984/1985

When I made my first pass through the 1980s, following my "DOS-only" rule and looking only at Wikipedia's list, 1984 didn't even register. I went right from 1983's Ultima III to 1985's Alternate Reality: The City. Later, thanks to the revelation that Wikipedia had only a fraction of RPGs, I discovered a couple of games (Caverns of Zoarre and DND) that I covered quickly in a "backtracking" series, but I still missed two that were available even for DOS: Adventure Construction Set (I had it in the wrong year) and ICON: Quest for the Ring (it wasn't in MobyGames yet). Thus, when I retroactively awarded "Game of the Year" titles in my 1988/1989 transition posting, I left 1984 blank.

Even though I've now gone back and played 17 games from 1984, it's hard not to regard it with the term I used in my 1978-1983 review: a "lost year." The early years gave us Ultima, Wizardry, and a bunch of fun branches like the Robert Clardy series and the Stuart Smith series, culminating in the genre-defining Exodus: Ultima III. 1985 feels strongly like it begins the next era, with The Bard's Tale, Phantasie, and Ultima IV all exploding onto the scene. 1984 is a gully between these landmark years, with a final sputtering of titles that feel like they belong in an earlier era (Dungeons, Dragons, & Other Perils, DND, Out of the Shadows) and knock-offs of Wizardry that don't perform nearly as well (Tyrann, The Standing Stones, Shadowkeep) and introduce elements that deserved to be left on the cutting room floor.

Still, we have to note two major trends that, for better or worse, defined 1984. The first is a quick flare of gamebook adaptations, two from the Fighting Fantasy series (The Citadel of Chaos, The Forest of Doom) and two from the Lone Wolf series (Flight from the Dark, Fire on the Water). It's easy to see why these titles didn't start a popular sub-genre: they were too literal. They offered a lesser experience than reading a paper book, and they failed to use the computer for its advantages.

The "player" reads text on a screen instead of a book (where it presumably wouldn't have been in ALL CAPS) and hits a number instead of flipping pages.

  

Second, we had the advent of the first enduring Japanese RPGs, including The Black Onyx, Dragon Slayer, and Hydlide. Although Onyx took a different approach from the others, together these games ignited the Japanese imagination and helped usher in the explosion of JRPGs later in the 1980s--most of which I'll be unable to play because they were console-only or only in Japanese.

Dragon Slayer and Hydlide are two early entries in the "little guy runs around and charges headlong into enemies" subgenre.

   

From among none of these titles will I be selecting my "Game of the Year." Instead, I look to a small number of games that represent none of the three categories already discussed--gamebook adaptations, clones of better games, and early Japanese games. For 1984, instead of looking for a game that defined the year, I'm going to look for one that defied it.

I have three worthy nominees:

1. Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set, Rivers of Light module. Rivers of Light is not only one of the best games of 1984; it caps Stuart Smith's career as one of the most iconclastic RPG designers of the early 1980s. His fun, fast-paced, frentic titles, all based in classical mythology roots, with their blurred lines between monster and NPC, deserved greater success. I'd give a lot to see what he would have come up with in the late 1980s and early 1990s if he'd found RPG development more fruitful. I haven't awarded the title to any of his previous games, so this is my last chance. It also deserves the award for introducing the first construction set to a classical RPG, something that certainly influenced later attempts. Finally, it was my top-rated game of the year overall.

With a full set of statistics, skills that increase with use, and a complex inventory, Adventure Construction Set is the least "Smith-like" of the Smith series and most "RPG-like."

     

2. Hack. I gave Game of the Year to NetHack in 1987, but that was before I played Hack and discovered that very little had changed between the editions. By moving this honor to 1984, it not only assigns the elements I liked to their proper era; it allows me to re-allocate 1987 to Dungeon Master.

3. Questron. It's tempting to give the award to the game that started my addiction. Although I complained about 1984 featuring knock-offs of better titles, I think Questron narrowly escapes this designation. The character development and combat are arguably worse than Ultima, but Questron has a much better sense of plot and pacing. Its gambling mini-games are some of the earliest in the RPG market, and of course there's that ending. 

Questron made Ultima both better and worse, but overall was good enough to start  me on the path to addiction.

   

Two other games are worthy of mention. ICON: Quest for the Ring had perhaps the most interesting plot of any game in the early 1980s, and Sword of Kadash set a gold standard for action RPGs. Unfortunately, they both lacked enough classic RPG elements for me to rate them high, and they fail the GOTY test for that reason.
 

While we wait for the verdict, I should note that the average GIMLET score for 1984 is 20.35, a decrease from the average of 1983 (22.94) and even 1982 (21.27) and 1981 (24.44). 1985 is currently at 34.63 (without the non-DOS titles), enhancing the sense of 1984 as a valley between better years. The lowest score I gave was 10, to the ridiculous Dungeons, Dragons & Other Perils; the highest were to my three nominees.

The highest individual category score went to Rivers of Light's game world (7) and Hack's equipment (6). Those were the only scores I gave above 5. The average GIMLET category score was 2.0. In particular, games of this era really needed to work on NPCs. Only one game scored above a 2 in that category and more than half scored 0.

1984 Game of the Year

  

As convenient as it would have been for me to award it to Hack (thus properly recognizing Dungeon Master later) and as satisfying as it would have been to award it to Questron, I have to do the right thing and give it to Stuart Smith. Adventure Construction Set is the culmination of his short but fantastic career, and the only game where he starts to make concessions to more classic RPG mechanics without giving up his unique approach. It is one of the few games of the era to break away from the D&D mold, and its Mesopotamian setting actually doubles as a learning tool. Finally, it's hard not to see Smith's considerable influence on the later Bard's Tale Construction Set and Elder Scrolls Construction Set, among others.

That doesn't mean I won't reconsider Dungeon Master when I make another pass through 1987. That's a weird year to have awarded the title to NetHack--neither the first version nor the best.

Looking Ahead

  

1985 is full of games that I played briefly in those early first months of my blog but did not give their proper due. Coming up, we're going to revisit a lot of them, including Autoduel, Alternate Reality: The City, and Wizard's Crown, probably for better platforms, as well as a host of non-DOS RPGs that I've never heard of.

There will be no suspense on Game of the Year for 1985, alas. I can't possibly imagine a game that would take it away from Ultima IV.

1985 gives us only one Japanese game that makes my list--Dragon Slayer II--and I think even that's only because of a fan translation. We have one French title--Mandragore--but France won't really take off until 1986. Instead, 1985 offers a surprising number of UK games: City of Death, Enigma Force, The Evil Crown, Fairlight, Journey into Darkness, Runestone, Seas of Blood, Shadowfire, and Total Eclipse. The ZX Spectrum is far from my favorite platform, but I guess I'd better learn to love it.

All told, I have 29 titles to look at for 1985, but of course some will fall to the definition axe. When I'm done, we'll have a much more robust picture of the era than we do with the 5 or 6 I've already played.

Here's something I haven't really admitted before: more than once in the past year or so, I've had to resist the urge to making my blog all about these earlier years until I catch up. The games in the early 1990s are only getting a little better while simultaneously getting a lot longer and more complicated. It took me two months to win Disciples of Steel.

A game needs to rate in the 45-50 range, at least, before I actually start to look forward to my playing sessions. That describes less than 15% of the total games I've played on this blog, and only five games have rated that high in the last 18 months of playing. Now, don't get me wrong--I still enjoy the process of cataloging and documenting these games, but if I'm not really going to enjoy playing, wouldn't it be better to blast through a series of shorter, easier titles than to keep trudging through the swamps of titles like Antares and MegaTravller?

I'm not going to do that, but you can see why it's been tempting. What I have done is fall in a predictable routine of one post on a 1991 game followed by one post on an earlier game, and I'm naturally moving through the latter ones faster. I completed Shadowkeep, The Standing Stones, Dungeons of Death, Sword of Kadash, Tyrann, and Xyphus all while Disciples of Steel was happening.

Let's get to work on continuing to close that gap, starting with Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive, which is a decent metaphor for blogging about every CRPG that ever existed.

*****

Call for help: if anyone has a version of Alternate Reality: The City for Apple II, Commodore 64, or Atari 8-bit that they know for sure is successfully and fully cracked and works with AppleWin, VICE, or Atari800Win, respectively, please e-mail me. I've wasted a ton of time with the versions found on various download sites, and they're all either bugged or not cracked, meaning the copy protection eventually kills the character.

In other list news, I've moved the game usually called Amulet of Yendor (as we'll see, there's room for doubt) to 1986 after finding enough evidence that it was published in the same shovelware package as Swords of Glass. No great loss on that one.