Game 458: The Fountain of the Gods (1988)

 

         

The Fountain of the Gods

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1988 for Atari 800

Date Started: 14 May 2022

Date Ended: 15 May 2022

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 128/460 (28%)

     

The Fountain of the Gods is an independent creation by a West Virginia developer named Joe Butner. He sold it for $14.50 via magazine ads. In the ads, he says that it's a "tribute to the classic TELLENGARD [sic]," which at the time was only six years old. How quickly things used to become "old" or "classic" back then. Imagine someone calling Grand Theft Auto V or Assassin's Creed: Origins a "classic."

    

Fountain does evoke a bit of Telengard (1982) and the entire DND line that came before it. In some ways, it's simplified, but it also has its own surprises. What isn't lost in the adaptation is Telengard's insane roller-coaster ride from rags to riches to death. I remember standing at the bottom of the entry stairs in Telengard and immediately finding jewelry worth 25,000 gold pieces, then just as immediately getting fried by a Level 8 dragon. In Fountain, three of my initial four characters died in the first or second rooms; the fourth found a chest with 5,000 gold pieces and immediately went to Level 3. Fountain lets you save anywhere, unlike Telengard, but in 1988, saving and reloading took so long that I would have given up on the entire game quickly.

    

A typical Fountain screen. I'm Level 2, and I have 2 potions. There's a key on the other side of this room (I have a red key anyway), but potentially a couple encounters before I get there.

     

The documentation for the game has been lost, so I'm not sure if there's a backstory. [Ed. See the end for more about this.] At the beginning, in lieu of any real "character creation," you're asked to choose from among four defined characters: Varzak, Baaloff, Abrasai, and Celestial. Each has a different balance of health and magic points and a different starting weapon. No explicit classes are given, but Varzak is clearly more of a "fighter" type, Celestial more of a "mage," and the other two in between.

   

Gameplay starts in a large room with an altar where you can turn in accumulated gold for experience points. From here, you branch out to explore a large dungeon full of enemies, treasures, and secret doors.

     

Late in the game, I return to the altar to donate my gold. I have explored 43.5% of the dungeon.

     

Movement is a bit odd in that once you specify a direction, you keep moving in that direction indefinitely until you hit an obstacle, change directions, or hit the space bar to stop. Everything else is pretty easy to pick up. Your small selection of commands includes O)pen (a chest), E)xamine rooms or chests for traps, D)isarm, and take a P)otion. T)eleport has a chance of returning you safely to the starting room, but an equal chance of putting you in the middle of a wall. L)isten and S)mell are a bit mysterious, as I never found a use for either.

    

E)xamination identifies a line of traps between me and that chest. I'll have to thread a narrow path if I'm going to make it.

      

Exploration strikes a good balance between fixed things, room-level randomness, and immediate randomness. The layouts of the rooms and the positions of doors and secret doors are fixed. So I think are the positions of some traps. Whether a room has a treasure chest or a key is rolled every time you enter. Encounters with monsters, NPCs, or small treasures (usually healing potions or handfuls of gold) are rolled with every step, which means enemies never become apparent until you're right on top of them.

     

I encounter a fighter in a room with white and red doors.

      

Enemies are the standard Dungeons & Dragons list--goblins, trolls, orcs, ogres, minotaurs, skeletons, wraiths, demons, dragons, and so forth--with some misspellings like "knoll" and "kobald." They don't have explicit levels as in Telengard, but since all action in Fountain takes place on a single floor, they can't increase in level as you descend. Instead, their difficulty is tied to your own character level, meaning they never really get easier.

In combat, your only options are to fight, cast a spell, or try to evade by walking away. The latter almost never works. Just as in the original DND for PLATO (1975), survival almost entirely depends upon casting the right spell at the right time. There are 18 spells in the game; you acquire them two at a time as you achieve each level. Each costs as many "spell units" as its level. These spell units are spent fast, and even worse only replenish when you gain a new level or find rare magic scrolls. Careful management of these spell points is vital, which makes you reluctant to spend them on otherwise-useful navigation spells like "Detect Passages," "Teleport Safely," and "Deposit," which automatically sends your accumulated gold to the altar without you having to trek all the way back with it. "Turn Undead," fortunately a low-level spell, is absolutely essential. It reliably works on all undead of all levels, turning them before they can drain your levels. (In a mechanic that I wish every game featured, you still get experience points for turned undead.) "Sleep" and "Web" are as useful here as in D&D. Once you hit Level 9, you get "Death Word," which reliably kills anything at a high cost. You have a couple of healing spells, but healing is best accomplished with potions.

    

About to cast "Turn Undead" on a specter.

     

Fortunately, leveling occurs fast. I was already Level 7 with 8 kills, plus some undead-turning and a lot of treasure turned in to the altar. Healing potions are also relatively plentiful. The real danger is encountering a single monster like a dragon or demon that just eviscerates you.

      

I level up after a successful combat.

     

There are a few friendly denizens like elves and dwarves who may give you items, and traders often appear to sell you weapons and potions (though gold is almost always better saved for experience). The game otherwise lacks the variety of Telengard's random encounters: fountains and thrones and chests-with-buttons and inventory upgrades. In Fountain, you only have a weapon for which you occasionally gain an additional "+." There are no suits of armor, shields, boots, rings, scrolls, or potions other than healing.

   

Looking over a trader's inventory.

     

The ostensible goal of the game is to explore 100% of the rooms. Every room gives you an average of about 0.3%. This is clearly rounded, as occasionally I had total completion values not evenly divisible by 0.3 (nor is 100 evenly divisible by 0.3), but it's close enough that I'm sure the game has around 330-340 rooms. If the game enforced permadeath, this would be functionally impossible. With era technology, you'd have to reload dozens of times. With modern quick save states, it's a lot less challenging but still challenging.

  

Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to 100% anyway because the game is a bit broken. I don't know whether it was always broken or it's just that the disk images that have survived are bad copies. I tried several versions. The basic problem is that the game often gets confused when you move from one room to another and load the next screen. Sometimes, it loads the wrong room, but you can otherwise navigate it. Sometimes, it loads the wrong room and puts you in the middle of a wall. Sometimes, it just crashes on a blank screen.

 

Related oddities include rooms that load with configurations that don't make any sense, such as areas that have no way to reach them. When you find a secret door in the game, it causes the entire room to reload, only sometimes it reloads a different room completely, often leaving you (again) embedded in a wall.

      

Blame the contractor.

      

These problems become particularly acute during the game's water sequences. There's a large underground lake in the south of the map that requires a boat to cross. I found a boat in a random hallway; I don't know whether its location is fixed or by design. Either way, having a boat in your inventory makes you automatically transition to a little sailboat when you enter a body of water. But the game almost always crashed if I tried to sail the boat off the screen. I only got up to around 50% of rooms, and I'm sure the other 50% are on the other side of that lake.

      

In the underground lake. If I try to sail off the screen to the east, it will crash.

    

As to what happens when you hit 100%, I couldn't find any congratulatory text or graphics in the file package, so perhaps nothing. I was hoping it would at least give a hint as to the game's title, as I never found a fountain, of the gods or otherwise. I give the game 18 on the GIMLET; it does best in "Economy" and overall "Gameplay" (3s), worst in "Game World" (0) unless a manual is discovered that offers one, and 1s and 2s in everything else. It has a main quest, which Telengard lacks, but otherwise this is an homage that doesn't quite rise to the level of the original. 

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Addendum from 19 May 2022: After this article was already publish, I heard from Mr. Butner. He sent along the original documentation for the game. A few additional points:

• The "Fountain of the Gods" is what I took as an "altar" in the starting chamber.

• The framing story is that you're in the service of King Methusa of Odessa, whose kingdom has been bankrupted by greedy gods demanding constant tributes of treasure. You've agreed to go into some ancient ruins and clear them of treasure to get the kingdom back on its feet.

• "Smell" is supposed to help identify nearby dragons, which give off an odor of brimstone.

   

Mr. Butner couldn't explain the bugs I experienced but said he was trying to set up an Atari 800 development environment to figure it out. I'll report more here if we learn more.