Revisiting: The Bard's Tale (1985)

 

The game's title screens shows--get this--the title of the game.

     

The Bard's Tale

United States

Interplay (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1985 for Apple II; 1986 for Commodore 64 and Amiga; 1987 for DOS, Apple IIGS, and Atari ST; 1988 for Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and PC-98; 1989 for Macintosh; 1990 for NES

          

Let's get one thing straight right away: The full name of this game is not, was not, and was never Tales of the Unknown: Volume I - The Bard's Tale. Tales of the Unknown is the series title. Plenty of games have series names that are not part of the game name. The only place that Tales of the Unknown appears is the box and manual covers for some of the original releases of the game. On those covers, it is clearly distinct and separate from the game title. (By that logic, we should insist that Pool of Radiance's official title is Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Computer Product: Pool of Radiance - A Forgotten Realms Fantasy Role playing Epic, Vol. I.) Everywhere else--the manual text, the title screen, advertisements for the game--it is simply called The Bard's Tale. 

    

The manual and box covers make (to me) a clear distinction between the series title (Tales of the Unknown) and the game title (The Bard's Tale).

    

Still, the series title does give some support to developer Rebecca Heineman's later claim that the original intent was to offer multiple games featuring different character classes under the Tales of the Unknown series heading. She has claimed in interviews that the second game would have been The Archmage's Tale and the third The Thief's Tale. But principal author Michael Cranford has contradicted this account by saying that the first game was going to be called Tales of the Scarlet Bard until EA got involved and that there was never any plan to name the second game The Archmage's Tale. He has also said that Heineman (who doesn't appear in the credits for the first game at all) sat in the corner, didn't talk to anyone, and wouldn't have been in a position to know what the plans were for the series. Frankly, the developers have thrown so much shade at each other over the years that it's hard to separate fact from fiction with this series. It's possible to fuse the two accounts in thinking that the second game would have been called The Destiny Knight but with the Tales of the Unknown series heading. Whatever the case, EA (probably correctly) assessed that once The Bard's Tale was successful, that should be the series name, and Tales of the Unknown was dropped not only for the sequel but for later ports of the original.

    

What's clearer is that The Bard's Tale started with a Wizardry basis. Michael Cranford had grown addicted to the game while playing it in his dorm room at UC Berkeley. (Much of the following comes from Cranford's own recollections on the birth of the series.) Convinced he could do better, he began work on a title that would eventually become Maze Master. In the meantime, he dropped out of college and began working for a local company, HES, and sold them on the game. The limitations they put on development (in particular, requiring him to build solely for a 16K cartridge) ruined Cranford's vision, and the company was apparently inept at promotion and marketing. When Maze Master inevitably tanked, Cranford took what would have been the sequel, Shadow Snare, to Interplay, a company started by Brian Fargo, with whom Cranford used to play Dungeons and Dragons in high school. (While still in high school, they had released a text adventure called Labyrinth of Martagon for the Apple II.) Such began the partnership that not only produced The Bard's Tale series, but also the Interplay approach to combat that held through Wasteland (1988) and Dragon Wars (1990) and even extended to non-Interplay games like Antares (1990) and Escape from Hell (1991).

    

The Bard's Tale approach to combat influenced about a dozen other titles.

      

The Bard's Tale was one of the earliest games I played for this blog, my coverage starting in March 2010. It was the first game to which I applied the GIMLET right after playing. For years, I've remembered it and its relationship to Wizardry as if Wizardry was the cherished black-and-white classic and The Bard's Tale was the vapid color remake, so in reviewing my coverage recently, I was surprised to see that I had rated both games the same, and that I had said things like, "It's going to be hard to go back to Wizardry [referring to the sequels] after this." At the time, I think I was speaking primarily about The Bard's Tale's improved graphics and sound. Over the years, I would gradually come to realize how little I really valued those features--at least until they get really good in the late 1990s--and how much I valued Wizardry's difficulty and sense of tactics. A few years ago, in my entry on The Bard's Tale Construction Set (1991), I wrote that:

    

[The Bard's Tale] was adequate for its era but only adequate. It offers nothing on Wizardry except for graphics. More than any other series, I think The Bard's Tale benefits from a nostalgia factor that overpowers the reality of average games with minimal lore, goofy plots, and far too much grinding.

     

I now realize this paragraph was wrong in a lot of ways. The Bard's Tale offers a lot beyond improved graphics. The first thing is right there in the title. Cranford didn't invent "the bard" as a character class (it first shows up in the February 1976 Strategic Review, a TSR magazine), but The Bard's Tale is, I believe, the first game to put a bard in a CRPG, beating Ultima IV by a couple of months. You may protest that the PLATO Oubliette (1978) had "minstrels" and Ultima III (1983) had "larks," but that gets to my second point: The Bard's Tale doesn't just feature a part-thief, part-fighter, part-spellcaster of that title; it actually makes use of the bard as a bard by giving him musical instruments and attaching magical effects to his performances. Even better, those performances become the "background" music of the game, making The Bard's Tale one of the few games--and definitely the first--in which the game music is diegetic. 

   

The second major deviation from Wizardry is the ability to summon an ally. The Bard's Tale didn't invent this feature--it goes back to the PLATO Avatar (1979)--but what is unique here is the sheer number of ways in which it can happen, including spells of conjuration, spells of mind-controlling, magic items like figurines, and simply meeting friendly creatures. Any monster in the game can become an ally, complete with its special attacks and defenses. 

       

"You can join, but people in that position have a near-100% mortality rate."

      

The third major contribution of this series is in the conception of its spellcasting classes. Where most CRPGs offer only two sets of magic (divine and arcane), the original Bard's Tale offers four: conjuration, magic, sorcery, and wizardry. Each has its own spellbook, with remarkably little overlap in their capabilities. Fortunately, you don't need to enlist all four classes, since spellcasters can switch classes flexibly, working their way up to "archmage," master of all four books. Later, archmages would get their own set of spells.

     

Mabon has achieved the highest spell levels in three classes and is about to change to the fourth.

      

Lastly, I should mention the plethora of usable items. Wizardry has a rather restrained approach to inventory. At high levels, you might find +2 weapons and armor if you're really lucky. Usable items are mostly limited to potions and scrolls. The Bard's Tale introduced a lot more variety, including instruments (which only the bard can play) with protective, offensive, and summoning effects (e.g., Fire Horn) and weapons and wearable items that could replicate the game's spells, boost attributes, regenerate hit points and spell points, summon allies, and more.

     

I also like some of the interface improvements, such as the way MACO causes a compass to appear on the screen, and you have other indicators for light sources and magic shields.

      

Spell symbols and "flavor text" put this game a notch above its Wizardry roots.

     

To be fair, I mentioned all of these things in my original review and was very complimentary towards the game. It just degraded in my memory since then, influenced in large part by the sequels, both of which allow the party to get so powerful that there's no growth or challenge. Although Cranford was only responsible for this situation in The Bard's Tale II (he left the company after he finished programming it), it strikes me as a negative side of his game-design philosophy: "We want to be immortal and unbeatable . . . People want to grab the balrog and drag him into the abyss." Even to the extent that this is true, I think what the series forgot is that people want to throw the balrog into the abyss at the end of the game, not for its entirety. But this is really only a problem in the sequels; in The Bard's Tale, gameplay remains challenging throughout.

    

It's so challenging, in fact, that it's nearly impossible to get past Level 1. When your party of six hits the street and starts encountering orcs, mad dogs, kobolds, hobgoblins, spiders, and other creatures, the laws of probability take hold fast. You might not face 4 berserkers or 5 swordsmen in your first combat, but the chance of such an encounter exists, and it will almost certainly mean death. This game isn't quite as strict with permadeath as Wizardry--your characters' deaths are only saved if you go back into the Adventurer's Guild--but whether you clean out the dead characters, make new ones, and try again, or reboot and reload (there's no in-game reloading feature), you're talking about a big time investment. The DOS version and some of the others took the edge off the early game difficulty by allowing you to summon a stone elemental with a single key.

   

There are no healing spells on the first level, so you spend most of your gold at the temple, where it costs 10 gold to heal each hit point. As if earning experience without dying isn't hard enough, you also have to make sure to do it in a way that you can afford. If a group of enemies does 15 total damage but only delivers 60 gold pieces, you're in the red. You learn to prioritize enemies likely to offer a good return (gnomes, kobolds, orcs, hobbits) and run (which works about half the time) from others. As agonizing as this is, the flip side is that every victory is a real thrill, and you're practically ecstatic when you can train to Level 2. 

      

You spend a lot of the early game in the temple.

   

This dynamic never really ends. I recently finished Abandoned Places 2, where I remarked that the dungeon's navigation puzzles are a far greater obstacle to progress than the enemies. The reverse is true of The Bard's Tale. Each dungeon has only one or two items or pieces of information that you must find; the greater difficulty is surviving the accumulation of combats. Even a thorough explorer who maps every corner (as I did the first time I played) probably doesn't encounter enough enemies to avoid some level of grinding.

        

Let me back up and recap the game from the beginning. In The Bard's Tale, you control a party of six characters on a quest to save the city of Skara Brae from the machinations of an evil wizard named Mangar. The main quest is summarized nicely on the title screen, as a little ditty played by an animated bard:

The song I sing will tell the tale

    Of a cold and wintry day.

Of castle walls and torchlit halls

    And a price men had to pay.

When evil fled and brave men bled

    The Dark One came to stay.

Till men of old for blood and gold

    Had rescued Skara Brae.

      

This near-perfect iambic heptameter, not to mention the animation, is missing from the title screen of later versions, including the DOS version that I originally played. Although the DOS version had better graphics in general, this omission is a bit of a crime.

   

The party of six (or up to six) is all-male. (Heineman claims that Cranford said, "Girls don't play games." Cranford says that never happened.) Character creation blends Wizardry, which came indirectly from Dungeons & Dragons, with material from D&D directly, but it offers some original material in the class list. Races are human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, half-elf, half-orc, and gnome; classes are paladin, warrior, monk, hunter, rogue, bard, magician, and conjurer (wizards and sorcerers can be promoted from the latter two). Attributes are strength, IQ, dexterity, constitution, and luck. There are no alignments--I guess the nature of the quest presumes they will be good. 

    

Race, class, and name are the only options you get during character creation.

     

Gameplay begins in the Adventurer's Guild, which is the only place that you can save the characters. If the entire party is killed, it automatically returns here (and is saved), which is an expensive situation to rectify. The game only saves the character files, not any sort of "world state." All fixed encounters in the city and dungeon respawn when you leave and return, including the final encounter with Mangar. If not for the inventory items you collect, the game would have no idea that you'd made progress or hit key encounters.

    

Outside the doors of the Adventurer's Guild is a 32 x 32 city instead of the "menu town" of Wizardry. The city comprises streets with names like Emerald, Trumpet, Stonework, and, in a tribute to Star Trek, Corbomite. Sinister Street keeps teleporting you backwards so you never reach its end. From most squares you can access the doors to at least one building. Most of the buildings are generic empty houses, which like the street itself may carry a chance of a random combat. Fixed locations include several temples and inns, an armory, Roscoe's Energy Emporium (where you can pay to recharge spell points instead of waiting), a house where you can see the credits for the game, and the Review Board, unmarked on the game map, where you level up, change spellcaster class,  and buy new spell levels. The exit from the city is blocked by a snowdrift.

     

Skara Brae. The map shows some locations, but you have to find others.

   

Each of the city's corners and its center has one of the five dungeons that you explore: the wine cellars of the Scarlet Bard (the game's working title) in the southeast; the Mad God's Temple and Catacombs in the center; Harkyn's Castle in the northwest; Kylarean's Tower in the northeast; and Mangar's Tower in the southwest. The roads to most major locations are blocked by statues that turn into golems and must be defeated. Each dungeon provides the clue or item necessary to access the next one. 

   

Some of the level designs are slightly intriguing, but for the most part, dungeons are empty and boring, full of random encounters, navigation hindered by the occasional spinner, anti-magic square, dark area, secret door, invisible wall, or teleporter. In this, it doesn't grow much from its Wizardry base. It misses the opportunity to pack its dungeons with content, like Might and Magic (1986), or more complex puzzles, like Dungeon Master (1987). That said, I did appreciate the occasional bit of descriptive text and the riddles, which are an improvement over the Wizardry base.

       

For this replay, I allowed myself to use my notes and maps from my 2010 experience, making it even more grindy than the first time. But I also allowed myself to use the "warp" mode and save states of my C64 emulator, which took most of the edge off. I visited key locations in each dungeon, either to collect something I needed or check and see if it was the same as the DOS version.

      

Hey. Buddy. We're trying to save the city. Less laughing, more helping.

   

The wine cellars of the Scarlet Bard are just down the street from the Adventurer's Guild, past a statue of a samurai that you must defeat in combat. (Like everything else, it respawns when the map reloads.) You enter the dungeon by ordering wine at the tavern, something the bartender himself will clue you into if you give him a tip. The cellars are four levels, the first plausibly organized like a large wine cellar. A message about "fine wines" appears in front of one door, "rare wines" in front of another, but in neither case can you actually find any wine. There's a spinner in the middle of the level and a stairway down.

    

Level 2 has the mysterious IRKM DESMET DAEM message that has bothered players for years, a mystery that only got more puzzling when we discovered that The Bard's Tale Construction Set (1990) version of the text is IRKM DESMET DAGM, which provides a lot more potential anagrams. I confirmed that the message was the same here as the DOS version in which I originally experienced it. I can't find any information suggesting that Cranford has ever commented on it. In the room on the level below, in a nearly-identical position, we get the message, "Heed not what is beyond understanding," so I guess we may have to leave it there. Elsewhere in the dungeon, we learn that, "Thor is the greatest son of Odin," that we should, "Seek the snare behind the scenes," and that an ancient insane wizard named Tarjan declared himself a god.

         

After all these years, this still bothers me.

      

The name TARJAN is necessary to get past the door of the Mad God's Temple, where players find a three-level dungeon full of undead, including Tarjan's old high priest and high mage. The third level is well-designed to evoke a series of catacombs, culminating in a battle with King Alldrek, who leaves an eye when he dies. This eye is necessary to get through the third dungeon, Harkyn's Castle.

   

Harkyn's Castle is another three levels. By now, most parties have the conjurer's APAR spell, "Apport Arcane," which allows you to teleport around dungeons. This is necessary to maximize use of the game's best grinding opportunity: a fight on the third level with four groups of 99 berserkers each. They deliver 60,000 experience points. You can't hope to defeat them until your armor class is -10 or greater (at which point the game displays it as "LO") and your spellcasters' dexterity is near-18. Otherwise, with 400 berserkers getting a chance to swing at you first, almost certainly enough will hit that everyone is killed. Once the spellcasters have mass-damage spells like DRBR ("Dragon Breath") and particularly MIBL ("Mind Blast," which affects all foes in all stacks), you can start mining them for experience. Experienced Bard's Tale players will remember the routine: enter the castle; APAR 5 squares north, 12 squares east, and 2 levels up; engage the berserkers (keeping a handy book to read while the game describes the effects of your MIBL on 400 foes one at a time); APAR back to the exit; leave; and start the process over. I must have done this 50 times before heading to Mangar's Tower, and I was probably still a bit under-leveled.

        

The most famous grinding spot in CRPG history.

       

There are moments in Harkyn's Castle and the next two dungeons in which you have to answer riddles based on lore you've found in previous dungeons or the game manual. "Name the endless byway," one magic mouth wants to know (SINISTER).

    

The difficulty level of this riddle did not age well.

     

To get to Mangar's Tower, you have to go through the original wine cellar. A staircase on Level 4 takes you up into the southwest quadrant of the city (otherwise blocked by gates), and Mangar's is just a few steps from the exit. In the tower, you can buy a "master key" that not only gets you through the gates but also into every other dungeon in the game, obviating the other individual items. Level 3 of the tower has a series of messages that together spell out "LIE WITH PASSION AND BE FOREVER DAMNED," a passphrase you need to move on to Level 4. 

         

In the future, I'll be sure to lie in a monotone.

       

Level 4 has an interesting trick in which stepping on a square turns all the level's doors into walls and vice versa. Getting up to Level 5 is a bit cruel, requiring you to remember a command in the manual that you use nowhere else--hitting the "E" key to levitate upward (a "Levitate" spell must be active). I should mention that the keyboard commands are otherwise very intuitive in the game. The Bard's Tale avoids the sub-menus of Wizardry and adopts a more Ultima-style approach in which each command is mapped to a unique key.

      

The good wizard Kylearan greets us in his tower.

       

A treasure chest in Harkyn's Castle provides a silver square, and one in Kylearan's Tower (mercifully only one level) gives you a silver triangle. Level 2 of Mangar's Tower has a magic mouth that comments on the two shapes you've already found and asks you to speak the third. You can deduce the answer, CIRCLE, by just assuming that the three shapes are all the simplest geometric forms, or you can figure it out by studying the Electronic Arts logo. This isn't the first time that the EA logo will be used as the basis of a puzzle, although when it happens in Ultima VII: The Black Gate, its usage is less homage and more middle finger. You must put the three silver shapes in the wall before the final battle on Level 5 of Mangar's Tower.

   

If you go in the front way, you have to pass through anti-magic squares to reach Mangar, undoing your protective spells. There is a back entrance that I never found back in 2010. In the square "behind" Mangar, you're asked: "What can bind the mightiest foes?" The answer, SPECTRE SNARE, is discoverable only by tipping the bartender more than 100 gold pieces. A correct answer gets you the weapon, which can be used to draw any enemy into the party. 

       

Unlike last time, this time I end the game with the Spectre Snare in my inventory.

    

Mangar attacks with a few greater demons and vampire lords. I found that my fighters were mostly useless in the final battle, as they couldn't really hit the enemies. I had the bard use a Fire Horn every round. One wizard targeted enemies with DEST ("Destroy") or DMST ("Demon Strike") while the other kept up with BEDE ("Resurrect"), REST ("Restore"), and using his Exorwand to reclaim party members possessed by the demons.

      

Mangar looks like a hobo in this version.

      

Once you defeat Mangar, Kylearan appears to congratulate you and reward you with 300,000 experience points. He assures you that Mangar's "spell of winter" will soon unravel, but as discussed before, the game doesn't save any kind of world state. The town disk doesn't "know" that Mangar has been defeated, and the party remains snowbound in Skara Brae. They can keep returning to Mangar's tower and defeat him indefinitely.

     

This snow drift will never clear.

    

Miscellaneous notes on the experience:

   

• I tried to design a party that I thought could carry me through all three games (if I chose to replay the others). I forgot that I need a thief for the third one.

• You need a bard to get past a certain square in Harkyn's Castle. I otherwise felt it was important to have one given the name of the game. Mine was somewhat useless for the early game, since I had three other front-line characters and there are no missile weapons. I used him for his strengths--playing bard songs--until I found enough magical instruments that he could really contribute in combat by using them.

    

My bard became a lot more useful when he got a fire horn.

      

• The utility of fighters (paladins, hunters, monks, and warriors) starts to drop about mid-game and is almost entirely gone by the end. I probably won't keep all three for the sequel. Another spellcaster would be a lot more useful.

• I wouldn't mind if the game had been a bit more sparse with its use of both anti-magic squares and "dark" squares. Having to repeatedly recast exploration spells gets old. One of the two sequels offers a spell called BASP ("Batch Spell") that automatically casts all five of them at once, which is handy.

• Mage's staves are supposed to regenerate spell points, but they never worked for one of my characters and only worked for the other one for a little while.

      

One of my spellcasters kills Mangar with a "Destroy" spell.

      

• It's particularly frustrating to get stoned or withered because no spell cures those conditions. You have to take the time to backtrack out of the dungeon and visit a temple. It's tempting in those situations to just let the entire party get slaughtered so they all re-appear in the adventurer's guild. This gets expensive, though.

• One random attribute increases by 1 each time you level up. By the end of the game, all my spellcasters were at 18s (maximum) for everything, and the other characters were close. My first four characters were at Level 26 at the end of the game. My spellcasters had cycled through all four spell classes and were archmages.

• I'm not sure it's possible to level up enough to breeze through the encounters in Mangar's Tower. There are too many creatures that can just completely mess you up. Depending on enemy composition, you might have the entire party possessed by demons, pounded to goo by cloud giants, stoned by gorgons, crispened by dragons, or drained a dozen levels by vampire lords. An awful lot depends on luck, like a dragon deciding to make a physical attack instead of breathing, or a wizard deciding to cast a buffing spell instead of a nuke.

• For most of the game, the developers stuck with familiar monsters from Dungeons & Dragons, with special attacks and defenses that every RPG player has memorized. Only in the next two games does the bestiary go completely bonkers, with all kinds of new creatures that you have to log and learn.

        

Admittedly, the developers' conception of a "balrog" is a bit odd.

       

• Winning the DOS version automatically returned me to the adventurer's guild, whereas the C64 version allowed me to continue exploring. I was able to finish the map of the level and find Mangar's treasure chamber, guarded by two dragons, in which there was a magic ring that regenerates hit points. If I hadn't gotten the Spectre Snare before defeating Mangar, I could have gotten it immediately afterwards. When I played the DOS version, I never got it at all.
  

        

The party returns to the guild to retire and wait for the sequel.

      

Many of my readers are no doubt wondering why I've taken the time to replay this game, and if they can therefore anticipate replays of other games I've already covered. The answer is generally no on the latter question, although there will be one exception coming up. As for the former, there are a couple of reasons. I recently decided to thank my Patreon supporters by soliciting their desires for special topics and re-visits of abandoned games, and there were several votes for The Bard's Tale II and even a couple for III. I'll give at least II a second shot soon, but even thinking about it made me realize my coverage of the first game was inadequate, as most of my entries were during that first year. My secondary reasons are less important: I never finished mapping Mangar's Tower the first time; I never got the Spectre Snare; and I was annoyed enough about the Tales of the Unknown thing that I wanted to refute it.

    

I finally finished my map of Mangar's Tower, Level 5.

    

I'm not interested in replacing the GIMLET from my first experience with the game, but I was curious if my approach to rating had changed significantly. Running through it now, I decided that the game would earn a 39, or two points higher than the 37 I gave it. I was two points more generous with the "game world" (4 vs. 2), one point more generous with "character creation and development" (4 vs. 3), and one point more generous with "graphics, sound, and interface" (5 vs. 4) in 2021. However, I ranked the economy two points higher in 2010. I didn't start to look for "complexity" as an economic consideration until sometime after I designed the GIMLET, so that makes sense. Everything else was the same, which makes me feel good about how consistently the GIMLET has held up, even if readers continue to have problems with its specific categories.

      

The game's "winning screen."

  

The Bard's Tale was both commercially and critically successful. Scorpia was relatively early in her career when she rated it "not to be missed!" Compute! called it a "masterpiece." Dragon gave it 5 out of 5 stars. The basic engine, its arrangement of windows and icons, its combat system by which enemy and character actions scroll slowly by, would serve Interplay for nearly 10 years. It didn't have as many imitators in the U.S. or the U.K. as I would have expected; first-person games in those countries tended to favor Dungeon Master or the original Wizardry for their lineages. However, it was big in Germany, and we saw its approach in games like Antares (1990), Legend of Faerghail (1990), Dungeons of Avalon (1991), and Spirit of Adventure (1991). The Australian Citadel of Vras (1989) is also a clone.

   

I continue to believe that the series went off the rails in the sequels, mostly because they allow importing of already-godlike characters, but we'll check that out later. For now, this exercise has re-cemented The Bard's Tale in my memory as a titan of its year.