Game 402: Theseus and the Minotaur (1982)

 

Since this game never references Dungeon!, I'm not sure why TSR wants us to know that it's a trademark.

         

Theseus and the Minotaur

United States

TSR Hobbies (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for Apple II

Date Started: 6 February 2021
Date Ended: 7 February 2021

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: User-adjustable, but ultimately very easy (1/5)

Final Rating: 9
Ranking at Time of Posting: 11/404 (3%)

     

Although TSR never tried to bring Dungeons & Dragons to computers on their own, they did make a brief one-year foray into computer game design. In 1981, the company hired a couple of young programmers to write three games for the Apple II: the awkwardly-punctuated Dungeon! Computer Adventure Game, Theseus and the Minotaur, and Dawn Patrol. None of them are RPGs, though they're close. Dungeon! is a computer adaptation of a 1975 TSR board game that might be considered a "lite" version of Dungeons & Dragons. Dawn Patrol is a fighting simulator that draws themes from TSR's World War I RPG of the same name. Theseus is an original maze game that recounts the adventures of the Greek hero as he saves King Minos's daughter from the labyrinth.

      

The games are important to CRPG history for a couple of reasons. The lesser one is that TSR must have been dissatisfied with the experiment, because they never tried to make another game on their own after 1982. They would partner with other developers from here on. More important, one of the young developers, Bruce Nesmith, discovered that he liked designing games more than he liked programming them. He stayed on at TSR for the next 13 years, writing modules and books for the various Dungeons & Dragons settings. When he left the company during its mid-1990s decline, it was to return to computer gaming--as a senior game designer for Bethesda Softworks. He worked on The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall (1996), left the company for a few years, and returned in time to write quests for Oblivion (2006) and Fallout 3 (2008) and ultimately serve as the lead designer for Skyrim (2011). 

         

One of the minor denizens of the labyrinth.

          

Little of Nesmith's future glory is evident in Theseus, a minor maze game meant to be random and replayable. The backstory of Theseus generally follows the myth: The son of King Minos of Crete was assassinated in Athens during the Olympic games, leading to a war between Athens and Crete. As a peace condition, Minos demanded that Athens annually send seven boys and seven girls to Crete, where they were fed to the minotaur, a shameful product of Minos's wife's coupling with a bull (there were extenuating factors not worth exploring, but it was ultimately Minos's fault). To stop the carnage, Theseus, son of King Aegeas of Greece, volunteered to go with the next tribute so he could slay the beast. Whereas in legend, Minos's daughter Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of string so he could find his way out of the labyrinth, here Ariadne has been kidnapped by the minotaur and must be rescued.

       

Enemies include a female minotaur in a dress with a rolling pin.

       

The game takes place in a labyrinth of three procedurally-generated levels, each taking up no more than 10 x 10 spaces. There are multiple up and down stairways connecting the levels. Somewhere in the complex are Ariadne, the Minotaur, about half a dozen other minotaur-esque foes, and a handful of snakes. You start with 100 hit points and no equipment.

         

The game asks you some questions as you set up.

        

At the outset of the game, the player specifies a maze "complexity" from 1 to 100. You get more points for higher complexity, but it's supposed to be a lot harder. In truth, I didn't find more complex dungeons any harder. They just had more staircases. Since you have to map no matter what, extra staircases don't mean very much. Neither do the other settings that you get to tweak during setup. One is whether the maze has any secret doors. If so, you have to bump into walls to search for them; if not, you don't. The other is whether the maze has "mirror rooms." These are like combinations of teleporters and spinners from other games; when you enter one, you get confused, and your next move immediately casts you out of the room in a random direction and then faces you a random direction. Both elements make the game longer, but not particularly harder. Since you get more points for more complex dungeons, you might as go hog wild--although not all the way, because I found that the game crashed when I tried to create dungeons with a complexity of 100.

     

The top row represents the three levels of the labyrinth with a complexity of 1. The bottom row are the three levels with a complexity of 50.

        

That brings us to the biggest issue with the game, which isn't evident in a modern emulator: it's slow. The 2-3 minutes it takes to build the dungeon is nothing compared to the roughly 7 seconds it takes the game to register your commands and redraw the screen. Only by cranking the emulator to about 700% did I find it tolerable.

   

Mitigating all of this is an opposite factor: the game is easy. Technically, your only winning condition is to escape the dungeon. The moment you enter, you can turn around and leave. If you set a relatively high complexity level, you'll even get a pretty high score. The other supposed quest elements--rescuing Ariadne and killing the Minotaur--simply serve to increase your score when you do leave. Other killed monsters also add to the score, but every turn you spent in the dungeon subtracts a bit from it.

        

The Minotaur attacks as I turn a corner.

       

Even if you decide to stay and handle the other tasks, the game isn't very hard. For the first roughly 150 turns, you can restore any lost health by simply hitting the W)ait option, so in the early game, you just want to charge through the corridors, killing everything you see, then waiting to restore health afterwards. There are two types of enemies: snakes, which must be fought within the same square as you; and other enemies, which you fight from one square away. Either way, you only have one option in combat. You start only with fists, but once you kill a creature, you can search his body for weapons. If you find one, it's usually a bone (yuck!). Eventually, you'll come across a message with a "magic word." If you use T)alk to say that magic word out loud, you get a magic sword.

        

An inventory check after looting a slain foe (on top of a down stairway) reveals that Ariadne is in my inventory.

           

After the game stops letting you rest and heal, it becomes more strategic. You generally want to save your health for the Minotaur, so you simply map until you find him (it's best to get the magic sword first), taking alternate routes to avoid enemies when you see them. They don't pursue you. Ariadne is hidden in a random square, and you can't see her from a distance, so you have to explore every square until you find her. Both times I found her, the message flashed so quickly that I didn't notice. I just happened to notice later that she was in my "inventory." If you rescue Ariadne before you meet the Minotaur, he'll kidnap her again when you run into him, and after you kill him, you'll have to find her wherever he stashed her the second time.

         

Winning the game after rescuing Ariadne and killing the Minotaur on a complexity of 50. On a complexity of 1, rescuing Ariadne but not killing the Minotaur, I got a score of 1,345.

            

That's about it. A winning game on a high complexity takes no more than about 30 minutes, and most of that is mapping. There are a couple of mysteries. In addition to the message telling you the secret word, you get another that says, "Flee from the magic word" (maybe it's trying to trick you), and still another offering you the "secret." For instance, in my last game, the message said, "The Secret is the Zebulon." I have no idea what that meant; speaking the word causes the screen to redraw, but I'm not sure what actually happens. There's also a note in the manual about not killing friendly creatures, but I don't think I ever encountered any.

         

I have no idea what this is about.

         

I've seen some web sites claim that Theseus is a computer adaptation of Robert Abbott's 1962 pen-and-paper logic maze of the same name. In the game, one "character" (Theseus), who has the ability to move wherever he wants, tries to escape a maze in which a second character ("The Minotaur"), moves each round according to fixed rules. If the first character encounters the second, he loses. The problem is that while Abbott published a logic maze of that type in 1962, he didn't call it Theseus and the Minotaur until his 1990 book, Mad Mazes. This version has been adapted to a number of computer applets of the same name, but the 1982 game is really nothing like it.

          

The halls of mirrors have a fun in-game graphic, but they don't amount to much.

         

However, it does seem to me that Theseus draws a lot from the previous Apple II game Dragon Maze (1978), which plays a lot like a pen-and-paper logic maze. In general, there was an early fascination on the Apple II with 3D mazes and the associated graphics. The point of Theseus is not so much to kill the Minotaur and rescue the Princess but to map the dungeon. As I made the maps above, it occurred to me how trivial a task it was for me, having done hundreds of them, but it must have been relatively novel for many players of the era. Simply figuring out a path to follow, aligning staircases, remembering that right is east, and getting oneself untangled from the "halls of mirrors" would have been challenges by themselves. On the other hand, I don't want to over-emphasize this. When Theseus was published, Akalabeth, Ultima, and Wizardry had all been out for at least a year, and they offered the same sort of maze challenges in the context of the type of role-playing to which you'd think TSR would have aspired.

          

The box art is the best part of the game.

       

The game GIMLETs poorly. Like many non-RPGs (it fails all three of my criteria), it gets the highest rating (3) in "Gameplay," as it is meant to be replayable and short. Nothing else tops a 1. The total is 9. When we next encounter Bruce Nesmith, we should see those numbers go a lot higher.