Game 523: The Wilderness (1985)

       

The Wilderness

United States

Independently developed; published by CDC

Released 1985 for PLATO system

Date Started: 7 July 2024

Date Ended: 7 July 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

     

Over 522 previous titles, we've seen many that were "inspired" by others, a few remakes, a few games with multiple versions under the same title, and a few outright ripoffs. But even the ripoffs usually have something new to offer, if only cosmetic. This is the first time I can recall that literally the same game has been offered under a new name. [Ed. Forgot about Rogue Clone, which in some ways wasn't even a new name.] The Wilderness is a shot-for-shot remake of Don Gillies' Swords and Sorcery (1978), which I covered in 2019. I struggled hard to find any difference between the two and came up with:

   

• They have different titles and title screens.
• The graphics are slightly different.
• Wilderness has the character name at the top of the screen while Sorcery does not.
• Wilderness displays your current arrow totals.
• The Wilderness character stands out with an icon colored differently from the enemies.

         

None of these change the game significantly, and thus I could just gesture to my entry on Sorcery and be done with it.

        

A shot from The Wilderness. My character (lower right) is trying to kill the dragon to the west of me with arrows before the wizard to my north gets too close.

       

Both games were available on the PLATO system, but perhaps not at the same time or place. Regular readers will have heard about PLATO plenty of times by now, but for the uninitiated, it was an educational mainframe system hosted at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign starting in 1960. Some of the earliest computer games were written by students of the university (and other institutions in the region that had access to the network), including the earliest CRPGs. Of particular note are the CRPGs that predate the first commercial CRPGs for the microcomputer; for an introduction to those, see this entry.

    

One of the earliest games for PLATO was called Think2 (its name had nothing to do with the game; it was common practice in those days to hide games under generic-sounding academic program names so they wouldn't be deleted). Written by Jim Mayeda, it was based on Mike Mayfield's Star Trek (1971), but with the action ported to a fantasy wilderness. It was deleted, and no longer survives, but we can sort of reconstruct it through the existence of games written by later authors using printouts of the Think code: Kent Wendler's The King's Mission Game (1977), Don Gillies' Swords and Sorcery (1978), and now The Wilderness. The Wilderness is a lot closer to Sorcery than Mission, making me think that Sorcery was probably its source rather than yet another printout of the Think code. For instance, Gillies tells me that he invented "adrenaline," which is in both Sorcery and Wilderness.

      

Setting the size of the game world.

        

The question is why a game nearly identical to Swords and Sorcery would have been required on the same system as Sorcery, and my best answer is that it probably wasn't on the same system. I suspect, rather, that author Michael Wei wrote it for one of the commercial implementations of PLATO by CDC. Our ability to access PLATO today goes back to its online resurrection by Cyber1, whose code and database, as I understand it, were based on the last commercial release from CDC. The commercial release would not have included the amateur games written by university students; after Cyber1 appeared in 2004, those games had to be re-typed in. You can see this in the notes files for, say, The Game of Dungeons ("dnd," 1975), which go back to 2015, or Swords and Sorcery, which go back to 2009. The notes files for The Wilderness, on the other hand, are all original, from the 1985-1989 period. This suggests The Wilderness would have been available on commercial installations of PLATO where Sorcery was not.

      

I have been unable to reach author Michael Wei to confirm any of this, nor to ask him why he wouldn't have credited Gillies or Mayeda (Gillies himself credited Mayeda) on the title screen or in the help documents. Wei also co-wrote Labyrinth (1980) and is quoted in Brian Dear's history of PLATO, The Friendly Orange Glow (1980), as being at the University of Illinois in the late 1970s. Even accounting for graduate school, 1985 would be pretty late for him to still be there, which jibes with my theory that The Wilderness was a commercial release.

        

Until you get some experience, you can die just walking into things.

      

Don Gillies told me that he had the opportunity to publish Swords and Sorcery with CDC; the process involved a little paperwork, some editing of the program to remove potentially offensive content, and disclaimers on the home page. One of his friends, a contributor to Avatar, went through the process and got a few dollars a month. Rusty Rutherford, author of The Dungeon (the first known CRPG), recently told me that he got either $0.25 or $0.32 for his efforts. Gillies chose not to go through the hassle. If he had, The Wilderness probably wouldn't exist.

      

So much for that. What about the game itself? You play an agent who takes missions from the king of an unnamed land. Each mission takes place on one or more maps of 10 x 10 squares, and you get to specify the number of maps (up to 100) and their arrangement in rows and columns (maximum is 10 x 10 or 100 x 1). The missions are always to collect a certain number of treasures, kill a certain number of monsters, or (for the first mission only, I think) chop down a certain number of trees. The specific numbers are tied to the size of the world that you create.

        

Getting the first mission.

      

Once on the map, you are chased around mercilessly by (depending on your experience) goblins, skeletons, werewolves, wizards, dragons, and demons. Treasure chests dot the maps; trees line the edges and block your passage.  Each screen has a fixed number of enemies, treasure chests, extra trees, and magic circles, but their specific positions are randomized every time you leave the screen and return. Enemies and chests do not respawn until you end a mission and start a new one.

      

What makes this series a bit unique is its movement system, adapted somewhat nonsensically from Star Trek. That game took place on a similar map of 8 x 8 "quadrants," each quadrant part of a 8 x 8 grid of "sectors." Each map was seeded with Klingon ships that you had to destroy. You moved by specifying a direction and speed for the ship, and the ship maintained that direction and speed as you fired phasers and photon torpedoes, changing only when the player used a round to type in a new heading and speed.

   

The same movement system is used here. You specify a direction and speed (the number of squares you move each round) from 0 to 3. If you find or buy adrenaline, you can increase that movement to 4. You keep going at that speed and direction even as you swing your sword or shoot your arrows unless you deliberately stop. If you run into an obstacle, you take damage.

        

I need to get away from these dragons and demons, so I'm going to move west at a speed of 2, which will get me off the screen in two moves.

        

The first mission can be relatively difficult because experience and hit points in this game are the same thing, and at the outset, you have 0. You die from anything, including accidentally walking into a tree. Thus, you want to create a small game world and hope for an easy quest like chopping down 20 trees. You then just have to stay away from enemies (who never have ranged attacks) until you get the requisite number. Once you get rewarded by the king from your first mission, you have enough hit points and money to take on much more complicated missions.

      

In your first mission, you just have a sword, lent to you by the king. Once you have some money, you can buy arrows at any one of several "magic circles" that are seeded into the game world. These magic circles are taking the place of starbases in Star Trek, and it's a little silly that the authors couldn't come up with another way to represent them, like towns, forts, or just shops. You can also buy replacement swords if your sword breaks, which happens often. Treasure chests occasionally have upgrades to magic swords plus other artifacts like magic boots.

         

Visiting a magic circle. My sword recently broke, so buying a new one is a priority.

       

The game seems hard at first until you learn a few strategies. First, if you just straddle the border between two screens, you can avoid harm completely, since your character always goes first in a round. If too many enemies are too close, or treasure chests or magic circles are too far away, you just move to the next screen and hope for a better configuration when you get back. Using this strategy, you can usually pick off enemies one by one.

    

Another strategy is to get enemies to chase you. If they're alongside you, they can hit you on the diagonal after you move. That's no good. You want to avoid losing any experience/health if possible, since your experience is your power. Instead, you lure them into a configuration where they're persistently behind you. That way, you can swing your sword to your rear and then move out of the way before they get a return strike.

      

Attacking a werewolf as it chases me east across the top of the screen.

      

Arrows make things a bit easier, too, although some enemies are immune to them. You can shoot arrows in the four cardinal directions but you can also type in a specific angle, including decimal places, from 0-12. (You can think of the numbers as a clock face or as simply dividing 360 degrees by 30.) With the right calculations, you can nail any enemy from any location on the map, then escape to the adjacent map before they get close enough to retaliate. Really, impatience and error are almost the only ways to lose this one until you get up to very high levels and start contending with invisible demons.

     

All of the missions are simply in the service of jockeying for a higher score on the leaderboard, which makes it too bad that the game doesn't present the data in descending order by your experience or gold. Instead, everyone is just there alphabetically. 

       

A couple of the other players on this screen are impressive.

       

The game doesn't offer much in the way of character development. It's perhaps a bit too stingy with both experience and gold during the missions and a bit too generous with both as mission rewards. For instance, on one character's first mission, I killed several goblins for 10 experience points each, and chests had around 50 gold pieces each. When I finished, I was rewarded with 1,558 experience and 2,598 gold. On my second mission, therefore, the king wanted me to kill 10 dragons. That escalated fast.

       

End-of-mission rewards.

         

I give The Wilderness an 18 on the GIMLET, the same score as Swords and Sorcery got; remember, the GIMLET awards the gameplay experience, not originality. It gets nothing for the game world or for NPCs, 1s-3s for everything else. Nothing really stands out, and it's not really an RPG, but it's reasonably fun as a kind of action-strategy game for a few missions.

          

Back in the hall of fame for "pedit5!" About two people beat the game per month, so I should be there until November.

       

Plus, while I was visiting PLATO, I took the opportunity to get myself back in the Hall of Fame for The Dungeon. So it wasn't a wasted trip.