BRIEFs: Black Crystal (1982), Creepers (1982), Chitei Tanken (1982)

A game of its era.

      

Black Crystal

United Kingdom

Carnell Software (developer and original publisher); Mastervision (later publisher)

Released 1982 for ZX-81 and ZX Spectrum, 1985 for Commodore 64

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

For years, I've laughed at videos that show enraged computer users pounding at the monitors of their computers, as if (a) the monitor holds the CPU, and (b) beating at the CPU's casing would somehow fix whatever problem they're having with Microsoft Excel. Now I get it. If I had purchased Black Crystal back in 1982, not only would my television and ZX Spectrum keyboard have been in pieces by the end of the day, but I would have probably also smashed my Super Simon for good measure.

   

Black Crystal is a teach-you-how-to-play-and-punish-you-for-getting-it-wrong game that occupies a weird space between adventure game and RPG. It progresses through several phases as the player tries to find seven magical rings. Each phase offers a slight change to the interface, but there is no phase in which it isn't infuriating. In over 16 years of blogging, I can't believe that no commenter has ever mentioned it. I only tried to play it for a couple of hours, and I may have nightmares about it for the rest of my life.

     

These don't seem mutually exclusive.

      

The Tolkienesque backstory starts with the origins of the universe and brings us to the near-present, when an evil wizard named Tobias learned a spell that created the titular black crystal. For centuries, it has cast a pall over the Earth. Now a wizard named Gora has learned how to destroy the crystal, but it involves finding the seven rings that were splintered off the One Ring created by the creator god. The player can choose to play as a warrior, an elf, or a wizard. This choice affects the number of physical and spiritual points that he has, and thus how many actions he can perform in each category before becoming exhausted.

    

The game starts in the Kingdom of Beroth, a 30 x 15 map. Somewhere among its 450 squares, two of the magic rings are concealed. The player has to find them both (which involves no more than walking in the right square), then make his way to the Castle of Shadows to begin the next phase.

     

This is where I either need to lunge forward with my own sword or raise my shield above my head.

        

Text is insufficient to describe what happens next, so I highly encourage you to watch YouTuber SpongGames attempt to play the ZX81 version. Basically, as you enter each square—or pause too long in a square that you're already in—there's a chance that you'll be attacked by an enemy. These include balrogs, trolls, centaurs, wraiths, and forest dragons. After identifying your foe, the game tells you what the foe is doing. Examples:

   

• "It jabs its sword forward."
• "It moves forward to attack." 
• "It raises its sword above its head."

    

In response to what the enemy does, the player can:

   

• Thrust his sword upward.
• Thrust his sword forward.
• Thrust his sword downward.
• Hold his shield angled upward.
• Hold his shield angled forward.
• Cast "Lightning."
• Cast "Power Drain."
• Cast "Swerve."

   

There is a generally "right" response to each enemy action. For instance, if a centaur raises his sword above his head, you can kill him with a quick thrust of the sword forward. If the centaur starts to bring his sword down, though, it's time to counter with a "shield up." Generally, when enemies move forward, the correct response is to thrust forward, except for balrogs, flying lizards, forest dragons, and bats, for whom you want to thrust upward. If the enemy attacks forward, you respond with shield forward. Undead are susceptible to "Power Drain." Almost everyone is susceptible to "Lightning."

      

I did not act fast enough.

      

So far, I realize this doesn't sound so hard. Just identify the right counter and use it. The problems are:

  

• You only get one shot. There are no "lives." If you choose the wrong action, the enemy will kill you and you start over at the original square (although you keep any rings you found).

• You sometimes only have a split second to make the decision. The game is maddeningly inconsistent about this.

• The actions are mapped to weird keys. For instance, the three sword keys are Q, R, and U. The three spells are Z, B, and P. Even moving is weird. The cluster looks like this:

   

                   1  7  2

                   5      8

                   3  6  4

       

• If you don't move immediately after killing an enemy, you'll get attacked by another one, which is a problem because you only get so many physical or spiritual attacks before you get exhausted. Moving without incident incrementally restores those points.

   

But this most of all:

   

• The keyboard is horribly nonreactive. You can't just tap the key. You have to hold it down long enough for the computer to read that the key has been pressed, but not so long that you trigger the next enemy action before you're ready. If you're moving across the landscape, it's virtually impossible to move in a systematic manner in which you don't move too far or get attacked because the machine read no input at all and thinks you're just dallying. 

    

The last issue has to do with the ZX Spectrum having no keyboard buffer and the game not making it clear when it's expecting an input. It's not an emulator issue. The manual even warns about it.

   

I lasted long enough to find two rings in the Kingdom of Beroth, which allowed me entry to the Castle of Shadows. There, I had to find the secret door into the upper-left chamber, find a monolith that gave me the "Invisibility" spell, and find a stairway upwards. This is all while undead enemies are attacking; they mostly only respond to spells, but fortunately spiritual power regenerates with every step. There are other events, like chandeliers falling and spears firing out of holes in the wall, which demand the use of a shield or "Swerve." Even using save states to take the edge of incorrect choices (which stopped me from starting over at the beginning every time), after an hour, I was so sick of the keyboard issue that I decided not to go on.

        

What kind of sociopath puts spikes in a chandelier?!

      

From the manual instructions, the next three maps would be the Shaggoth's Lair, the Temple of the Fire Demon, and the Tower of Beroth. Shaggoth's Lair apparently has a text adventure interface where the player types commands like MOVE NORTH and GET LAMP. The other two maps use the interface discussed here. After that are at least eight more maps: Sea of Sand, Underground Swamp, Gold Mine, Bridge over Abyss, Temple Maze, Room of Pits, Lords of Chaos, and The Black Crystal. Each of these has additional instructions; for instance, in the gold mine, you use keys 5-8 to dig. In Temple Maze, you apparently fire lightning bolts with the "Z" key. For the Lords of Chaos level, the manual says: "This is a strategy game. You make your move and the Lords of Chaos make theirs." You have to drop the Fire Ring on the ground and lead the Lords of Chaos onto the ring to banish them, but "if they see the ring, they will throw it across the room."

      

Meeting a skeleton on Level 2 of the Castle of Shadows.

 

 

If you're interested in what these levels look like, I direct you to a series of videos created 16 years ago by YouTube user Allmightybobful. He hate-played every level of the game (the C64 version) with comments like:

      

• "As we prepare to enter the Castle of Shadows . . . we take a moment to wonder why a game like this is allowed to exist." 

• "If you needed proof that a gaming company changed its mission statement to 'we hate gamers,' look no further." 

• "Fear and loathing turn into unbridled rage at Mastertronic as I sink deeper into despair." 

      

I'll spare myself, since despite its listing on GameBase64, it's not an RPG. Its statistics are more of an inventory of physical and magical power and not inherent attributes that improve.  

       

The six programs are completely separate, incidentally. You have to pass your progress from each program to the next by entering a numeric code.

        

Although I don't find this terminology anywhere within the game's documentation, there are plenty of web sites that call it the first of the "third continent" series, the second of which was Volcanic Dungeon (1982) from the same year. I reviewed it a few years ago and played it to the end despite concluding that it wasn't really an RPG, either. It was a lot easier and more enjoyable than Black Crystal, and it had the same deterministic approach to combat, although based on equipment rather than actions. The third game in the series is supposedly The Wrath of Magra (1984), which I recently added to my list after someone added it to Wikipedia. I'll play it eventually. 

    

*****

       

I don't know what options you're setting with the 0-3 keys.

       

Creepers

United States

Silicon Valley Systems (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for Atari 800

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

Creepers is a proto-RPG in which you control a party of eight characters at once: Sir Denish the Knight, Squire Cott, Dell the Scholar, Gala the Huntress, Dike the Thief, Zigg the Wizard, a merchant, and a prince. They travel together through a dungeon corridor in a square, seeking the Golden Chalice. They encounter monsters, traps, and trapped chests. Although the characters travel in a blob, the player selects one of them to be "active" at any given time and can rotate that character's position in the overall party configuration.

   

The shtick is that each character has a set of skills that must be called into play in certain circumstances. For instance, Zigg can launch a fireball in any cardinal direction (out of a limited pool of them) and Gala can do the same with arrows. If enemies get into melee range, Sir Denish and Squire Cott can attack with a sword and martial arts, respectively. Dike is there to disarm traps, and Dell can teleport the party to safety. If any of these characters dies, the player loses access to their skills. It reminds me a bit of Oldorf's Revenge (1980), although the interface is completely different.

      

The wizard shoots a fireball at a centipede.

        

The commands are a bit of a nightmare, and I wasn't able to find a manual that documented them all. For some reason, my party members just started dying for no reason while I was experimenting. (I think they die if you just sit still too long.) Although each character has offensive and defensive attributes, they don't change during the game. MobyGames thus classifies it as an adventure game, but AtariMania thinks it's an RPG. 

   

Silicon Valley Systems was based in Belmont, California. They issued about half a dozen titles for Atari and Apple computers between 1982 and 1983, none of them RPGs. Perhaps the most intriguing is the all-text Final Exam (1982), in which you play a character desperately trying to study for a final exam, but facing obstacles such as, in MobyGames's summary, "a kegger next door . . . a homicidal ex-girlfriend, [and] your roommate's drug score." Why not just create a game in which you show up for class in your underwear while you're at it?

    

****

    

A contender appears.

        

Chitei Tanken

"Underground Exploration" (literal translation); "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (thematic)

Japan

Koei Micom System (developer and publisher) 

Released 1982 for PC-88

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

   

There have been a number of contenders put forward over the years for the first RPG from a Japanese developer. All of them were released in 1982. The only one I've covered that is unquestionably an RPG is The Dragon & Princess, and I think it remains the best candidate, but a few years ago, someone re-discovered Chitei Tanken, released in March of 1982, and it began appearing in databases with "first Japanese RPG attached."

   

As longtime readers know, I don't obligate myself to play games written in languages that I can't type into a translator. I made that rule when typing was how you had to do it. Nowadays, of course, there are several ways to translate directly from a computer screen. I haven't changed my rule because I find a strong correlation between "can't type it with a western keyboard" and "automatic translation software does a miserable job." On the other hand, many of these early Japanese games often have very little text in Japanese in the first place. I feel like I ought to play a landmark game like "first RPG" if I possibly can.

       

A list of potential characters.

          

Fortunately, I watched this excellent video by YouTuber Retro Gaming Japan, which not only fully describes the game but wrestles with the question about what an "RPG" really is. The narrator supplies evidence that author (and Koei co-founder) Yōichi Erikawa has said in interviews that he believes he wrote the first Japanese RPG. The narrator himself is torn on the issue and finally decides that it is an RPG, but only slightly. His ruling is based in part on my own definitions (he quotes my blog)—but as they were four or five years ago, before I decided that character development was so important that it always had to be present, and not just one of three potential criteria. So while pre-COVID Chet might have agreed with him, current Chet says that while Chitei Tanken has RPG elements, its lack of character progression disqualifies it as a full RPG. 

    

Chitei Tanken has the player take a party of between three and six characters into a multi-level dungeon with the nebulous goal of gathering as much treasure as possible. You can apparently "win" by opening the last chest on the final level. The player creates the primary character and then selects the rest of the party from a list of 10 characters with fixed names but variable attributes: strength, health, daily wage and provisions (how much you have to pay him every day), and a dollar value at which the player can "buy out" the contract and replace the character. The main character also has attributes of intelligence and courage. Strength, health, courage, and intelligence all have maximums of 1,000; if any of them reach 0, the character dies. These attributes cannot be improved, but they can be "healed."

     

The combat screen.

       

I believe the manual for the game has been lost, but thematically it isn't a fantasy game. It seems to draw inspiration from the Jules Verne novel Journey to the Center of the Earth and/or the 1959 film adaptation, which was translated as Chitei Tanken despite the book having been traditionally translated as Chitei Ryokō. Characters are assumed to have rifles; the main character can use a portable computer; terrain includes swamps and deserts; enemies include Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. The player can sell gold (which he must mine) and buy food and medicines at "native" villages on each floor. The interface is almost purely text, and the narrator of the video describes it much more as a logistic/survival simulator in which the player has to carefully manage time (every action takes some number of hours and sometimes health), terrain, equipment, food, and money.

     

I'll conclude with the video narrator's view: "This game might have been influenced by board games or simulation games. Any similarities to proper role-playing games might be a coincidence, and it might be that it was only called a role-playing game retrospectively."

     

He goes on: "Alternatively, one might consider this game to be some kind of proto-RPG; that is to say, an early adaptation or example of this genre that does not yet quite fulfill all requirements of RPGs." I think he nailed it there. Not only that: this description works for pretty much every RPG in this BRIEF.