BRIEF: Fire King (1989)

I did not get far enough into the game to find out who either of these people are.

     

Fire King

Australia

Micro Forté (developer); Strategic Studies Group (publisher)

Released 1989 for Commodore 64, 1990 for DOS

        

In my youth, I had a lot of fantasies about what I would do when I made enough money to afford it. I would have all the Star Wars figures and Lego sets that I wanted. I would buy the all-access wristband to the local zoo and amusement park every weekend. And I would take a literal bucketful of quarters to the arcade and stand in front of the Gauntlet cabinet until I won it. (Life would be so much simpler if those were the things I still wanted. But nooooo: once you get to the point that you can afford those things, suddenly what you want instead is a boat.) If I close my eyes, I can still hear the narrator. "Elf needs food, badly"; "Warrior is about to die."

     

It surprises me how rarely I've had to refer to Gauntlet during my 12 years of blogging about RPGs. It's not an RPG, lacking the character development so core to the genre, but it's certainly adjacent enough that I would have thought we'd feel its influences on action RPGs. (Gauntlet, it must be said, is not the first game to do what it did, but it is arguably the most popular.) Yet any RPG that seems remotely similar, like Origin's Times of Lore (1988) can trace its lineage to earlier action games (some RPGs, some not) without passing through Gauntlet. I'm curious whether Diablo (1996) has any acknowledged Gauntlet debt. I'll research that when I get to it, but I imagine commenters will fill me in now.

        

A shot from Fire King. Ghosts swam me as two wizards at cauldrons continue to make more. There are several treasure chests in this room, but a lot of them will turn out to be monsters in disguise.

     

But let's differentiate a game that we might call "gauntlesque" from simple action games in which the player attacks swarms of enemies, like Hydlide (1984). I would suggest that there are four key elements to this sub-genre:

      

• Action gameplay in which players swing and fire with a single button against essentially unending streams of foes.

• Multiple character archetypes to choose from. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but they do not develop during the game.

• Cooperative multiplayer, with each player choosing a different character type.

       

Right outside my house, I start encountering enemies.

   

• A large initial pool of hit points that is meant to sustain the player through the game. You may find potions or other mechanisms of bumping your hit point total during the game, but the overall trend is consistently downward. In the arcade Gauntlet, your hit points dropped over time even if you didn't get hit. I wouldn't consider this an essential feature, but it is an extreme version of this theme.

       

Fire King is this kind of gauntlesque game, developed by the Australian studio Micro Forté, now known as Wargaming Australia. If it were an RPG, it would be the first commercial title from the country. I still get questions about it because MobyGames lists it as an RPG, but oddly not its predecessor, Demon Stalkers (1987), which features almost exactly the same game mechanics.

   

The difference is probably in some of the external trappings that Fire King develops. Demon Stalkers had no story, just 99 levels to fight through. Fire King tries to be less linear--its world consists of multiple interconnected areas with a variety of transitional portals and stairways. It also has a detailed framing story, shops and gold, and NPCs. But all the slaughtering you do never gets you any stronger except as you improve inventory. This isn't just a pedantic distinction for me; it makes a huge difference in my enjoyment of a game, and it's why I'm a CRPG addict and not an action game addict.

       

The game begins with a detailed backstory.

    

The titular Fire King is the head of a cabal of wizards who rule the peaceful valley in which the game is set. Monsters attacked a recent conclave of these wizards. The Fire King was killed; the wind mage was wounded; the water mage is MIA; and the earth mage went insane and fled. The wind mage brought the Fire King's body back to the city. A beast attacked the funeral, drove everyone away, and now prowls the catacombs. Monsters are suddenly flooding the streets. The city's greatest hero has been lost in an attempt to kill the beast. It's up to one or two players to save the day.

     

Shops and gold differentiate this game from a lot of "gauntlesque" titles.

     

Players choose from six heroes--Brodric Broadaxe, Hubert the Just, Sally the Slaughtermaid, Mungo the Magician, the Enchantress Emily, and The Shadow--each with different levels in the game's three "attributes": strength, armor, and magic. The manual gives a little bio of each of the characters, making it clear that they fit into common archetypes: warrior, paladin, barbarian, mage (I see little distinction between Mungo and Emily except sex), and thief. 

       

The manual's description of "The Shadow."

      

Gameplay begins in the characters' house in the center of town and continues out in the town square, from which characters may enter various shops and city buildings, and ultimately the catacombs. Gameplay requires only the numberpad for movement and two keys to fire the primary weapon and to use collected objects; it really feels like it was meant to be played on a console with a directional pad and two buttons.

         

The six character choices.

       

Enemies are already swarming the city streets as the game begins. Each batch of enemies is replenished endlessly by a wizard at a cauldron; killing this conjurer (which takes multiple hits) is the only way to permanently clear the infestation. Gameplay otherwise consists of running around and collecting gold and useful items like keys, food, armor upgrades, bombs, and various spells. These items accumulate in your little inventory belt. Books occasionally give you hints and clues or fill in parts of the story.

      

Books occasionally offer hints and lore.

      

Getting back to combat, there's a level of abstraction in gauntlesque games that I've never liked. The player takes on literal armies of interchangeable enemies who have no individual agency. They just "swarm." Killing them feels like stamping out insects. Games based on Hydlide or Zelda are similar in this regard, probably accounting for my inability to take to them. I see a big difference between such games and those (whether RPGs or action games) in which a realistic number of enemies are situated in realistic locations and act like realistic foes. (I realize I'm still allowing for a fairly flexible definition of "realistic" in saying this.) The enemies in Fire King feel like they would have no trouble conquering the world if they would just organize rather than blobbing around in random directions. Success strikes me as depending far more on controller acumen than anything we'd call "tactics." I understand that lots of people like that, but it's just not my cup of tea. It would be tough to blog about, too. I'd have several entries that just went: "Four hours spent today. Mowed down another 150 enemies. Dropped from 12,086 health to 10,245. Found 3 bombs." 

    

I realize I will eventually arrive at such gameplay with Diablo, although I'm holding out hope that it will have elements that make it a little more interesting. Between here and there, are there any "gauntlesque" games that also qualify as RPGs?