Game 432: The Lords of Midnight (1984)

    

The Lords of Midnight

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by Beyond Software, Amsoft, and Mindscape

Released 1984 for Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum; 1985 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 17 August 2021
Date Ended: 29 August 2021

Total Hours: 7
Difficulty: Easy (2/5) to literally win; hard (4/5) to win the hard way
Final Rating: 26
Ranking at Time of Posting: 226/444 (51%) 

     

We often hear about how memory and media limitations put hard lids on what developers were able to accomplish in the early era of microcomputers. In some interview, an RPG author will say that they wanted to offer more sound effects, or better visuals, or an extra dungeon level, but they couldn't because of some hard cap. Usually, the things they say they would have liked to add are not things I feel are obviously missing from the game. The graphics and sound may be a little primitive, but that's normal for the era. An eleventh level would have been cool, but ten levels was fine.

    

The Lords of Midnight is one of the only games I've played where you can almost see the program rattling the bars of its 48K prison. There are moments when the screens seem to be pleading with you: "Look, if I had another 16K to work with, or a proper disk drive, it's obvious what I'd do here. But I can't." I'm well aware that I may be projecting. It's possible that author Mike Singleton accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish, and fans are perfectly happy with the result. I played the game admiring it for what it did but also wishing for more.

  

Lords is hard to classify. It doesn't have the character development (or even character attributes), inventory, or combat of an RPG. There are strategy game-like qualities, but I've never played a strategy game with so few variables and no in-game campaign map. There are those who will default to "adventure game," but I'm sensitive to adventure gamers' arguments that the genre isn't just some default category to be used when nothing else fits. Lords doesn't really have puzzles--inventory or otherwise--that I think adventure gamers would require. Yet it feels vaguely like all of these things. Singleton tries to solve the genre issue by proposing a new term: "epic game." I don't know if that works for me, but I agree that it perhaps needs its own sub-genre, much as I recently argued in relation to Fortress of the Witch King.

        

Morkin alas gets no experience for slaying those ice trolls.

    

The game starts with strong production values, including a 16-page novella that sets up the plot and main cast of characters. The game world is actually called Midnight, meaning that the title is disappointingly literal rather than metaphorical. If I read things correctly, Midnight is a world whose solar year is so long that seasons last for eons. "Summer" is a distant, millennium-old memory. (Specifically, summer was "ten thousand moons ago," which would be 767 Earth years, but of course we don't know for sure what the moon cycle is on this world.) As the last summer waned and famine started to spread across the land, a lord named Ushgarak united the lands under the efficiency of his rule. Unfortunately, he ruled only for a short amount of time before his advisor, Gryfallon the Stargazer, killed him and took the crown. Gryfallon soon adopted a new name: Doomdark, the Witchking. Doomdark has ruled the northern half of the land since then. The southern kingdoms who oppose him (or remain neutral) are known as the Free.

   

The Witchking's power is based on cold, which means that he'll be most powerful at the coming solstice. During this period, he intends to make one of his periodic wars on the Free, but this time there's every chance he'll be successful.

   

The game begins as Luxor, warlord of the Free, has been summoned to the Tower of the Moon for a council of the Wise. Accompanying him is his squire, Morkin, a foundling who Luxor has raised since childhood, and Corleth the Fey. When they arrive at the tower, they find that there is no "council" except for one of the Wise, Rorthron, who is determined to take action while the rest of his colleagues cower. There are all kinds of revelations at Rothron's little council. Luxor is revealed to be the last heir to the House of the Moon and is given the Moon Ring, which will allow him to command and compel enemies from afar. Morkin is revealed to be Luxor's actual son, the product of a fling with a fey woman, and thus the prophesied half-blood hero who can shrug off Doomdark's fear-based magic.

       

Luxor begins the game at the Tower of the Moon, looking southeast.

    

The Tolkien analogs are obvious, but the story is still well-told, and it sets up the main quest well. Rorthron outlines two ways that Doomdark may be defeated: Morkin can sneak into Doomdark's lands, find the Ice Crown in the Temple of Doom, and destroy it; or Luxor can lead the other lords of Midnight to a more conventional victory by having his armies conquer Doomdark's citadel at Ushgarak. The power of the Moon Ring is a plot device that explains how one person (i.e., the player) is able to coordinate the actions of armies scattered across the world and presumably have no instant communication with each other.

   

The game's manual, as well as every site dedicated to the game, repeats the fact that it can be played "three ways": as an adventure game from Morkin's perspective, as a strategy game from Luxor's perspective, or both at the same time. But the game doesn't make you choose explicitly. "Playing as an adventure game with Morkin" just means ignoring the other heroes. "Playing as a strategy game with Luxor" just means ignoring Morkin or treating him like any other hero. "Both" means sending Morkin after the Ice Crown while Luxor raises armies, and you win by whichever succeeds first. No matter what you choose, you only lose definitively if Morkin dies and either Luxor dies or Doomdark conquers the southernmost citadel, Xajorkith.

      

Recruiting new heroes and soldiers is vital to winning the game.

      

During gameplay, the idea is that your heroes move during the day and Doomdark's move at night. The heroes move independently and have their own timers, so you can reach "night" with one of them but switch to another and still find it early morning. Each one can cover around 4-7 squares per day depending on terrain and whether they move laterally or diagonally. The game comes with a crude world map, but you never see top-down map in the game. Instead, every square is experienced like an RPG in 3D view.

    

Midnight is completely surrounded by an impenetrable frozen waste. The explorable part is 61 squares north-south and 64 east-west, for a total of 3,904 (technically a few less because the wastes sometimes "bump out" into the map, but you get the idea). The squares have forests, lakes, mountains, plains, cities, citadels, caves, and ruins, and in these area a variety of encounters, enemies, and items are found.

     

About as much of the game world as I mapped.

      

The game's gimmick is that when you stand in a square, you can look in any one of eight directions, and what you see is the terrain and encounters in the next square and a few squares beyond. Singleton called this graphical perspective "landscaping." I guess maybe it's the earliest we see it. Games were showing distant objects in 3D view going back to the PLATO games, but those were mostly wireframe, and I gather it's harder with full graphics like mountains and castles. Singleton and his publisher were very proud of these views, and the manual suggests you could have fun just wandering around looking at things. The system is impressive for the time and especially the platform, but obviously it wasn't destined to age well, and hanging your hat on some graphical innovation is never a good idea in the long run.

        

While they seem menacing, those monsters are actually in the next square, so I can avoid them. I won't meet them unless I move forward once. If i move forward twice, I'll reach the Cavern of Shadows.

       

When you arrive in a square, your options are just to 1) look at your own stats; 2) change facing direction; 3) move forward; or 4) bring up a contextual menu. The contextual menu includes "seek" (search); this is usually the only option, and in the average square it produces nothing. If there are monsters in the square, "fight" will appear on the contextual menu. If there are other unaligned heroes or soldiers (usually found only in keeps or citadels), you can "recruit." If the square is a cave, ruin, lith (stone), or other special location, there's a chance that you'll find a special object like the swords Dragonslayer or Wolfslayer, the Cup of Dreams (which restores movement points), and the Shadows of Death, which sap all your health. Lakes often contain "Waters of Life," which fully heal you. Towns will also heal you by providing shelter. Towers often contain Wises who provide hints as to the locations of other heroes or objects. Wilderness squares can contain horses, which speed up the journey if you don't already have them.

       

Farflame finds the worst thing possible.

 

Luxor gets an important hint.

Mounted, Morkin will be able to move faster.

       

In these squares, we see what I suggested in the opening paragraphs: interesting material blocked by somewhat frustrating limitations. Consider, for instance, that many of the squares can have random creatures like dragons, ice trolls, wolves, and "skulkrin," this game's version of orcs or goblins. You can fight those creatures, but there's essentially no point in doing so. (It's also somewhat frustrating to do so, since the game tells you only if you won or died, offering no feedback as to how close the battle was or exactly what variables helped you win. When Morkin, supposedly the weakest of the heroes, slays two dragons, it's as unexpected as when Luxor and a company of 265 warriors somehow fall to a few wolves.) There would be a point if you got experience, or items, or treasure, and it's hard to believe that wasn't the original intention. But since they give you nothing, and since you can see them from a square away and thus avoid them, they don't add much to the game.

    

I feel similarly about the limited "inventory" you can acquire--basically just swords that automatically defeat wolves and dragons. How about expanding this just a little bit? There are so many ruins across the landscape; why fill so many of them with identical copies of the swords (which replace each other as you find them)? Why not magical suits of armor or artifacts that boost the power of your armies? Anything to make it a bit more like an RPG.

    

Lord Brith finds one of two magic swords in the game.

    

One of the more puzzling aspects of the game to me has to do with character "attributes." There seem to be two basic ones: the character's fatigue level (which also serves as a health meter) and his courage or strength. The former is represented on a scale that starts with "utterly invigorated" and ends at "utterly tired." The second begins at "utterly bold" and ends at "utterly terrified." The courage level seems to be partly an intrinsic variable but partly affected by the presence of Doomdark and his "Ice Fear" ability. I'm not entirely sure. There are a lot of things the manual leaves unanswered. If some characters are otherwise stronger than others, or better leaders, or harder to damage, the specific attributes are left hidden by the game.

         

What Lords does preserve from most RPGs is the joy of discovery. To win the game, you have to map a good portion of those 3,904 squares and annotate what you find there. I initially thought the game would randomize object and ally placement for each new game, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Thus, as you map things, your power grows. You learn where to find key allies and key resources, like Cups of Dreams.

   

I won the game the way I suspect everyone first does: the adventure/Morkin way. Over several games, I mapped a few areas and routes, including most of the borders. It became obvious early that to get Morkin to the Tower of Doom, I'd have to loop him above it and come in from the north, since Doomdark's armies patrol heavily in the south. Going up the west side seemed shorter and safer than cutting across and going up the east. Along the way--basically due north of the Tower of Moon--I met a key ally: the dragon Farflame, who lurks in a ruin in Coroth. Farflame, it turns out, is one of four ways to destroy the Ice Crown. The other three (hinted by NPCs in towers) are to drop it in Lake Mirrow, which I never found; give it to Logrim, who I never found; or give it to the creature Fawkrin (a reformed skulkrin--basically Gollum). The strategy I used was to collect Farflame, continue north long enough to recruit the Lord of Lorothil, send Lorothil to distract Doomdark's armies, and hook Farflame and Morkin up around the Mountains of Ugrak to come in at the tower from the north. Morkin leaves Farflame one square behind while he heads to the tower and grabs the crown; then he returns to Farflame's square and ends the turn, which allows Farflame to destroy it.

         

Finding the Ice Crown is a bit anti-climactic. You just have to reach the tower and search.

The "winning screen."

     

In contrast, I didn't even come close with the armies. Every time I met one of Doomdark's forces in combat, he had an overwhelmingly larger force than I did. I suspect the best strategy is to send one "recruiter" through the keeps as fast as possible, then send each hero and army to a central location so that multiple forces at once can engage Doomdark's allies. Or maybe it's to spend a lot longer recruiting soldiers. (Any keep or citadel can have a hero, and all keeps have soldiers.) From what I've read, players debate to this day the optimal path to victory on the "strategy" side of the game.

     

I'm probably going to want to go around.

      

It's particularly difficult to track where everyone is, since you don't get a campaign map. This is doubtless a limitation rather than a feature, but I admit it creates an interesting challenge. I made my map as a grid in Excel like I usually do, but I used text boxes hovering over the cells to annotate where my heroes were at any given time. To win the game strategically, you probably want to do the same for enemies, also perhaps annotating what keeps you and Doomdark control. Otherwise, it's all too easy to step out of the forest and find a phalanx of horse soldiers waiting for you. 

        

Annotating the squares I've explored, and which ones contain my heroes.

     

Other notes:

   

• After all your heroes exhaust their movement for the day, you hit "U" to finish your turn, at which point Doomdark goes. I found it awfully easy to accidentally hit "U" when I meant another key.

• After night passes, the game asks whether you want dawn to break so you can take your turn. Why in the world would you ever say no?

       

Has anyone ever answered "no" to this question? Why?

       

• You don't actually see battles being fought. You end your turn committing yourself to battle and you start the next turn with the results, which might be a victory, a defeat but the hero is still alive, a defeat with the death of the hero, or the battle is still going on. Just like individual combat with monsters, it's often not clear what factors led to a victory or defeat.

      

A report of a battle in progress.

     

• Dead heroes don't get removed from the ultimately long list of heroes, so you either have to remember they're dead or skip them manually each turn.

      

My list of heroes seems solid.

But Corleth is already dead.

     

I can't see prioritizing this game over more advanced strategy games of the 1990s, like Warlords, but I do see why ZX Spectrum owners of the 1980s remember it fondly. More important, I see its influence on other games. There's no way the creators of Warlords didn't play it. Some of the faction and place names are the same as in Lords or the sequel. The Kingdom of Krell (1987) would adopt the same use of perspective. More directly, Singleton would apply his strategy game experience in War on Middle Earth (1988). There's a history to that game that hasn't been written, but what I guess is that development started with Singleton in the U.K., and somehow Robert Clardy and Synergistic Software found out about it, and bought the rights to make it for more advanced computers in the U.S. Clardy's version offers a lot of features that Singleton's doesn't, but Singleton's work still would appear to be the genesis of Synergistic's "World Builder" engine.

  

Accounts of Lords' development all say that Singleton (already in his mid-30s at the time) wrote it himself in about three months. He presented the completed result to Beyond for publication. He had a similarly quick turnaround time for Doomdark's Revenge, published the same year, which amps up the complexity and uses a bigger map. A third promised title, The Eye of the Moon, was never completed, but a different sequel--titled simply Lords of Midnight--was published for the PC in 1995. Windows remakes of the original and Doomdark's Revenge were published by GOG in 2013. 

         

The game title was a lot cooler before I found out how literal it was.

     

The original game manuals enticed players to compete in an unusual contest. The game allows players to print each screen with the COPY key. The contest encouraged players to use this feature to assemble a record of a winning game, then send their reams of paper to the publisher. The publisher, in turn, would then hire a fantasy novelist to complete the novella started by Singleton, using the first winning player's screenshots. The winner was promised co-author credit and a share of the royalties. Singleton himself related the rest in a 2004 RetroGamer interview: "The first person to complete the game had actually sent in his roll of thermal paper within about two weeks of the game hitting the shelves, which amazed us all . . . but in the end, no willing publisher was found . . . I know Beyond gave him some sort of other prize but I really can't remember what that was." I find that account a bit unsatisfying. Was self-publishing really such a daunting experience at the time? Ultimately, an "official novel" did come out in 2018, written by English author Drew Wagar, though not based on the original winner's documentation.

   

I'm not sure my coverage has added anything to our collective understanding of this well-covered title (Jimmy Maher's 2014 article is particularly good), but I agree that it is a game that anyone writing about this genre should experience, even if it technically doesn't meet my criteria. I may check out the sequel later this year if time allows.