Game 506: The King's Mission Game (1977)

 

"We own the copyright to what, now?" -- The Illinois Board of Trustees.

          

The King's Mission Game

United States

Independently developed

Released 1977 for the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Date Started: 15 March 2024

Date Ended: 16 March 2024

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 17

Ranking at time of posting: 128/508 (25%)

      

The King's Mission Game was on PLATO, all these long years, under my very nose, yet I did not have the wit to see it. Granted, absolutely no source about PLATO RPGs mentions it, and its file name ("2tkm") doesn't exactly pop. El Explorador de RPG, living up to his name, discovered it in 2021 along with several others that I've been slowly working my way through.

   

Mission, written by Kent A. Wendler, is apparently based on the lost Think series (see my coverage here), which also inspired Don Gillies' Swords and Sorcery (1978). It plays similarly to Swords, but there are also a number of differences, and Mission is ultimately harder.

   

The game takes place in the Aeolian Kingdom, where you take missions from the king to kill a certain number of monsters in each of 10 "enchanted realms." The realms are defined by a number from 1 to 10, and the size of the realm is that number squared. Thus, Realm 1 consists of just a single screen, while Realm 3 is 9 screens arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid. Impenetrable trees line the outside edges of each realm. Each screen has 8 x 8 positions.

        

Starting a new mission. This will take place in a world of 2 x 2 screens.

      

Each screen is seeded with four monster types: goblins, zombies, werewolves, and demons. Screens can also contain random arrangements of trees, treasure chests, and "living pyramids" which will sell you arrows, health, and (later, when you have lots of money) weapons. 

You move through these screens in a weird way that goes back to Mike Mayfield's Star Trek. You specify a direction and speed, and you keep moving that direction and speed until you change or hit something. There are rules about how fast you can change speed and how sharply you can turn. If you hit something, you take damage, but not much. The movement made sense when the vehicle of travel was the Starship Enterprise. It makes less sense when it's an adventurer on foot in a forest--and yet it works well in context, creating a fun, tactical game that depends more on positions and angles than traditional RPG mechanics like strength and dexterity.

     

Shooting a monster in the first world (1 x 1). Notice how I "injured" his left side. (I'm the hollow character in the upper left corner.)

     

In fact, Mission really isn't an RPG by my definitions. You have no attributes; the damage you do to enemies is entirely based on your weapon; and the only way you improve is through increases to your health ("hits"). But it only took a few hours to experience the game, and I enjoyed it. 

   

Mission is principally a game of math. You start with 200 hit points, 15 arrows, and 25 gold. Your sword and arrows do 10 damage to enemies, and whatever damage you do adds to your hit points. Enemies, for their part, damage you for however many hit points they have remaining. Goblins start with 10 points, zombies with 40, werewolves with 80, and demons with 800. Thus, goblins die in one hit, but the others take at least several hits, and they do significant--in the case of demons, absolutely fatal--damage to you whenever they hit. Rule #1, therefore, is to stay out of the way of everybody but goblins, killing them with arrows. Demons can't even be hit or damaged with regular swords or arrows, so they only exist to be avoided.

        

Stupidly allowing a demon to get close to me.

      

The second and more significant way the game is about math is in figuring out optimal movement and firing. To specify a movement or shooting direction, you enter a number from 0 to 12, where both 0 and 12 represent due north. East, south, and west are 3, 6, and 9, respectively. But you can also enter fractional numbers, like 4.5 or 8.75. You can shoot enemies from clear across the map if you can figure out the right slope. 

       

Rise over run, Mister Falcon.

      

It's hard to explain without playing it in front of you, but all of these factors come together to create a fun, tactical experience. You arrive on a map and try to plot the optimal route that keeps you out of the reach of the more dangerous enemies while still allowing you to drill goblins with arrows. You avoid demons like the plague, reversing direction as necessary and using trees and chests as barriers. Sometimes it's best to allow yourself to collide with trees, chests, or enemies, taking damage, rather than wasting a round bringing yourself to a stop manually. The first realm is paradoxically quite hard, despite the low number of goblins you have to kill, because there's no escape from the one screen. You could start surrounded by enemies. In other worlds, you can escape off the edge of the map, which causes the positions of surviving monsters and other items to reset. Monsters never chase you off the edge of the map.

        

It took me a while to build any intuitive expertise with the movement and firing systems. In my first couple hours, I won the first scenario a few times but kept dying on the second because I bumbled next to a demon or tried to take on a werewolf in melee combat. Eventually, I figured out how I could shoot and move in directions other than the four cardinal directions, and things became easier. I was able to win the second and third missions. The rewards you get from missions are laughable--less than you get from individual chests during the missions.

        

This is an untenable starting position.

      

The game tracks a "rating," which is heavily influenced by opening treasure chests and completing missions, less so by killing enemies. There's a "King's Roster" of the most successful characters who have not yet died, plus a "King's Honor Roll" of the latest living character to complete his missions in each realm. I managed to get the top ranking on the roster for a while, beating the several characters fielded by El Explorador back in 2021 (we and two or three other people appear to be the only ones who have played the game since Cyber1 resurrected PLATO in 2004). But then I died, and all trace of my existence was wiped from the game, leaving El Explorador's characters to rule the roster again. 

      

Damn right.

     

I imagine the game changes a lot if you can build health and gold into the thousands. For 2,000 gold pieces, you can buy a magical sword +1 that does 100 damage. There are also magical swords +2 and Swords Supreme (I believe the last one does 800 damage) available for thousands more gold pieces. If you were able to get a Sword Supreme, you could go around killing demons, adding 800 hit points to your own total with every swipe. The game would cease to be a challenge long before that, probably. I never got more than 500 or so gold pieces.

        

8 bags of gold! Whatever will I do with such a treasure?

     

A couple of other things are worth noting. By now, you've been impressed by the crisp graphics common to many of the PLATO games, including character and enemy icons that are better than anything we'd see on the microcomputer until the mid-1980s. Mission also does a fun thing where when you hit enemies with arrows, their icon "dissolves" a bit on the side where you hit them, representing your chipping away at their health. Second, as with most PLATO games, the documentation is completely clear and thorough.

          

PLATO games are always very well-documented.

       

Finally, it's worth noting some of the differences between Mission and Sorcery:

    

• Sorcery let you specify the size of the area you explore in rows and columns up to 10 x 10. It did not insist on making square worlds. You could create a world of 8 x 1 screens or 2 x 9.

     

A shot from the similar Swords and Sorcery (1978).

     

• Sorcery had tree-chopping missions that Mission lacks.

• Mission replaces Sorcery's magic circles with "living pyramids," where you can replenish your arrows, trade gold for hit points, and end the mission if you've killed all the enemies. Neither really makes sense, but they're filling in for star bases in the Star Trek game. 

      

If you miscalculate and hit a pyramid, they won't sell anything to you for the rest of the mission.

       

• Sorcery had more equipment that you could buy or find, like swords, shields, armor, and boots. Mission just has arrows and the aforementioned magic swords.

• Sorcery started out quite hard, with the character having 0 hit points. But it got very easy once you passed a couple of missions. Mission starts a little easier--you can't die from walking into a tree, at least--but it never gets truly "easy."

    

I gave Sorcery 18 on the GIMLET and Mission gets 17 for its fewer RPG elements, but I think I might have enjoyed Mission more, particularly since Sorcery got so easy so fast. Mission isn't a good RPG--not an RPG at all--but it's still a fun tactical game that I found difficult to close after the few hours I spent with it.