Game 485: Vault of Terror (1986) and Some Related BRIEFs

       

Vault of Terror

United States 

Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine

Released 1986 for Commodore 64
Date Started: 11 February 2023

Date Ended: 11 February 2023

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 9

Ranking at Time of Posting: 20/508 (4%)

    

The game's primary developer, a man living in Australia by the name of Cleveland Mark Blakemore, has a reputation to match the remarkable title he is working on. A legend of the RPG Codex and other CRPG internet-bastions, Cleve has over the years shared many of his exploits. Not only as a developer of RPGs but also as a life-adventuring alpha male of near supernatural powers.

--Zed, RPG Codex Interview, 28 October 2012

     

Cleveland Blakemore is relatively well-known in the RPG community as a  . . . character . . . who in 2017 (five years after the interview linked above) released Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar after 20 years of development. It received mixed but generally negative reviews; I haven't had a chance to take a look at it. For years, Blakemore maintained that he had worked for Sir-Tech in the 1990s, as the lead programmer on a scrapped game called Wizardry: Stones of Arnheim (more on this in my summary of Wizardry VII). His claims were ridiculed online until documents came to light that proved his accounts and more. 

    

One of Blakemore's many problems is a gift for hyperbole. He has--unironically, I think--called himself the greatest RPG developer of all time and Grimoire the greatest RPG of all time. That hyperbole is on fine display here in October 1986, when he offered Vault of Terror as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine, a short-lived (1984-1989) monthly focusing on Commodore computers. "I think you will agree that it is superior to most commercial games of this type, both in speed and quality," he says. "You can play it for weeks before winning it."

         

Starting out in Vault of Terror. Those coffins are just for show.

      

The 490 lines of code in question create a "lite" version of Dungeons of Daggorath (1982). It's not the worst game that I've ever seen in type-in format, but no, it's not better than commercial games being released in 1986. It's not even better than Daggorath from four years prior. It's not faster than anything--at 100% speed, it's excruciatingly slow. And even accounting for its difficulty and the fact I used save states to speed up the process, it's not a game whose time is measured in "weeks." It's also not an RPG, although to be fair, that claim comes from Gamebase64, not Blakemore himself.

      

[Ed. When this draft was initially published, I made some comments to the effect that Blakemore had not credited Dungeons of Daggorath as his clear inspiration. Commenter Busca sent me an email pointing out that I had overlooked a paragraph in the July 1988 Ahoy!, the one where Tomb of Horror was published, in which he does just that. "I'd like to pay tribute to the game Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy TRS-80 as the driving force that compelled me to create my own 3-D games for the C-64," he says. "Ever since I saw this game back in the summer of 1985, I've been striving to create a 3-D game as good or better."]

      

The backstory presented in the magazine is that the Kingdom of Sarnoth was invaded by a serpentine race called the Naga'an. They ousted the king from his castle, kept his crown, and slaughtered the other inhabitants. Now a hero is needed to go root them out and recover the crown. With no character creation, attributes, or even a name, you're dropped into the northwest corner of a two-story dungeon. The first thing you have to do, paying homage to the game's Daggorath roots, is light a torch.

        

Can anyone identify this artwork? I doubt they commissioned it for the magazine.

     

Where Daggorath used text inputs, Vault is controlled entirely by the joystick. It takes some practice. Outside the menu, the joystick moves you through a 3D dungeon, with the fire button using the active object. If you hold down the fire button and pull back on the joystick at the same time, you enter an icon menu at the bottom of the screen, with the icons representing, in order, a torch, a sword, a shield, a ring, a rope, a wand, a key, gold, and the crown. You can hold one of each item at a time. If you want to pick one up, you press the joystick forward; if you want to put it down, you move the joystick backward; if you want to use it (and it's already in your inventory), you highlight it and press fire. You can only move right through the icon menu, for some reason.

    

The dungeon consists of only two fixed levels, both 16 x 6, using a "worm tunnel" configuration. There are maybe 70 navigable squares. The floors are connected by multiple ladders and pits, but there are invisible walls and locked doors preventing progress on all but a relatively linear path.

   

To win the game, you have to find the crown and, for some reason, a separate bag of gold. To find these items, you have to find a wand to dispel the invisible walls, a key to open the locked doors, and a rope to climb up and down the ladders (yes, you need a rope to use the ladders). Items are all held by monsters, so you have to kill them. To have any chance of killing them without dying yourself, you need a sword and shield. Everything happens in a linear manner. Enemies near the entrance drop a sword, shield, rope, and ring; enemies on the lower floor drop the key and wand. The crown is behind an invisible wall near the Naga emperor, who you must kill.

     

Not a promising start.

      

There are only one or two of each enemy type, each holding a fixed treasure.

      

• The brown recluse spider carries a torch
• The red tarantula carries a sword
• The blue crypt rat carries a shield
• The brown carrion rat carries the ring
• Two purple goblins carry ropes
• The light blue revenant has a wand.

   

I guess this is the revenant.

      

• The green Naga either has nothing or a redundant wand
• The Emperor Naga has the sack of gold

    

There's no respawning. For combat, you have to wait until they get in your square and then mash the fire button, ideally while you have the sword selected. As the enemy hits you, the edges of the screen change from black to yellow to red before you die. You can flee combat to heal, watching the colors regress to black as time passes. Again, this is all taken from Daggorath, with colors taking the place of the audible heartbeat in that game.

        

Fighting the Emperor Naga.

      

In Daggorath, you "leveled up" as you killed enemies. Each kill made you stronger, although the specific number wasn't visible to the player. That doesn't seem to be happening here--not that there's enough foes to make a difference. The hardest part of Vault is the beginning, before you've found a sword. I lost about six characters in a row trying to attack with my torch. Once you have the sword, and particularly once you have the shield, the rest of the game gets easier. The light blue revenant steals all your stuff (except your torch) when you face him, but he drops a magic wand, and you can get replacements for everything he stole at the bottom of a ladder on his level.

   

Some other gameplay oddities:

   

• The torch gets dimmer over time, as in Daggorath. When the torch is bright, the walls are white, but they fade to gray and blue before everything goes black. But all you have to do is drop the torch, move one step away, move back, and pick it up again, and it's like new.

• Doors occupy full squares. When you're "inside" a door, you see doors in all directions even if you can't actually go through doors in those directions. I don't know if that makes sense.

     

Facing a doorway.

      

• Blakemore's solution to offering "music" is to have the game play an unending string of random notes atop a constant drone. There is something weirdly effective about it.

• If you put on the ring, you're invisible to enemies, but the world goes all wonky as you try to navigate. The manual specifically likens the effect to the pros and cons of Bilbo wearing the One Ring. I have to admit, this is kind of cool.

      

I'm not getting attacked, but it's also pretty hard to find my way.

    

• There are ladders on the first floor that go nowhere. Maybe the original intention was to have a third floor.

• You can't go up a ladder with both the crown and the gold, so you have to take one up, drop it, and go back down for the other.

       

Finding the crown.

      

You win when you return to the entry point with the gold and crown and use the rope. A winning game takes less than an hour, and since the game allows saving and reloading, I'm not sure my use of save states artificially sped up that process at all. It gets only a 9 on the GIMLET. I should start taking off points when the title makes no sense. There's nothing about a "vault" in the game.

       

You know this is a quality winning screen because of all the color.

           

Vault of Terror is one of 35 games that Blakemore wrote for Ahoy! between 1985 and 1988. Gamebase64 classifies three others as RPGs:

   

• Crypt of Fear (February 1988)
• Mines of Merlin (June 1988) 
• Tomb of Horror (July 1988)
  

     

In fact, these are all just variants of Vault of Terror using nearly-identical interfaces.

    

The alternate spelling "dunjon" always enhances the gameplay experience.

     

Crypt of Fear

United States 

Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine

Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development

       

Crypt is explicitly a sequel to Vault of Horror, with the king hauling the retired protagonist out of his seaside cottage to free a princess from Demogorgon deep within Shadowthorn Mountain. Again, we have Blakemore's trademark hyperbole: "Although other 3-D dungeon adventures are available commercially, you'll realize that few of them are this much fun."

        

Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Might and Magic were never this much fun.

      

The objects this time are sword, shield, wand, ring, crypt map, princess's brooch, and chalice. There are new enemies and enemy graphics. The only changes to the interface are that you can get an overhead map and your health is now signaled by--you guessed it--a beating heart. There is still no character creation, attributes, or leveling.

 

I guess the robed "revenant" in the original game could also plausibly be "Merlin."

       

Mines of Merlin

United States 

Independently developed; published on disk that came with Ahoy! magazine

Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development

     

Crypt was still type-in code; in the issue, Blakemore brags about how much he tightened it. For Mines of Merlin, the magazine released it only on the accompanying disk. It is given as an "enhanced version of . . . Vault of Terror . . . minus the bug that plagued the original." I didn't experience a bug, so I guess it was fixed in the version I found.

       

Merlin uses the same graphics and interface as Vault.

    

From what I can tell, Mines is the exact same game as Vault except that when you die, there's a bit about your body being recovered and a chance at resurrection. The title makes even less sense than Vault of Terror, but the issue with which Merlin appears doesn't contain the backstory anyway.

      

            

Tomb of Horror

United States 

Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine

Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development

      

They were back to type-in code (although you could apparently also buy it on disk) the next month for Tomb of Horror: "The ultimate 3-D adventure for the C-64." Here, Blakemore has moved even closer to replicating Daggorath, with items specifically held in the left and right hands and options to "Incant" items and "Quaff" potions. The screen even fuzzes as you die. But he also admittedly includes a number of elements not present in that earlier game, including the ability to "Hail" creatures (I didn't play long enough to learn why) and "Search" for traps. The awkward bottom icon menu is gone, replaced by a more standard menu that pops up in the middle of the screen. Graphics are updated and the dungeon looks lighter. Alas, the game still lacks any RPG-style attributes or development.

       

The new menu for Tomb of Horror has some familiar options.

     

Blakemore wrote over 30 more games for Ahoy!, none of which even Gamebase64, which is liberal with the use of the category, classifies as an RPG. Some of them have RPG-sounding names, like Minotaur Maze (1986), Catacombs (1987), Dark Fortress (1987), and Chainmail (1987). In between his work for Ahoy! and his employment with Sir-Tech, he wrote Melee (1989) for Softdisk (published in an issue of Loadstar). I originally intended to BRIEF it here, particularly since it has a horrid joystick-as-mouse control scheme, but I have to concede that it has enough RPG elements that it deserves its own entry.

        

I don't know much about programming, but Blakemore's games do seem relatively sophisticated for titles that the user was meant to type in. It's possible Blakemore was unusually skilled in this area. In the introduction to Vault, he says: "This game is the result of an argument I had with a teacher at the college where I study in Texas." (Aside: I know Blakemore lives in Australia now. I don't know if he's an American expatriate or if he's an Australian who just happened to go to college in Texas.) The teacher didn't believe Blakemore could do what he described in the space he had available. One would be tempted to regard that as more Blakemore self-aggrandizement, but the notes to Crypt indicate that Blakemore's editor required him to cut the time it would take the reader to type in the program. He managed to get it to 356 lines (from Vault's 490) while still adding features to the game. An old UseNet post from a Paul Panks praised Blakemore's coding efficiency while exemplifying the hyperbole that discussions involving Blakemore tend to engender: "Blakemore isn't just a programmer. He's a miracle programmer."