Game 146: Gateway to Apshai (1983)

As commenters pointed out, the game manages to misspell its own name on the title screen!

Gateway to Apshai

United States

Connelly Group (developer), Epyx (publisher)

Released 1983 for Commodore 64, Atari 8-Bit, 1984 for ColecoVision

Date Started: 23 May 2014
Date Ended: 24 May 2014

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 10
Ranking at Time of Posting: 4/143 (3%)

Ranking at Game #456: 21/456 (5%)

What a disappointment. I had been looking forward to Gateway to Apshai--the last of the long and noble Dunjonquest lineage--for a while. I thought it would improve upon the experiences we saw in Temple of Apshai (1979) and Hellfire Warrior (1980), but instead it's a dumbed-down bastardization, an arcade game with RPG aspirations rather than a true RPG. It only uses the Apshai name.

Temple of Apshai, as you may recall from my review, is the first commercial role-playing game that we can definitively call an RPG. It had a full set of statistics, equipment, and evocative and detailed descriptions for its dungeon's many rooms. It was also the first RPG series, and the first RPG ported to a variety of platforms. There are 13 games in the Dunjonquest series, divided into several sub-series; my post on Hellfire Warrior catalogs them in detail.

A typical Gateway screen. I've explored several rooms in the area, and some arrows, an amulet, and a chest wait for me to pick them up. I have the joystick button set to "fight," and I'm currently trying to deal with a rabid rat. I've amassed a score of 6,560 in treasure, I'm on Level 5, and I have about 6 minutes left on the level.

The framing story has Gateway serve as a prequel to the Temple of Apshai by recounting a warrior's discovery of the path, through a series of dangerous caves, to the titular Temple. Reading the manual, I was struck by how weak the production values were compared to Epyx's previous games; there were only a couple of amateur illustrations and a page-and-a-half backstory in a five-page manual--this from a company famous for detailed illustrations, exhaustive documentation, well-written narratives, and treatises on role-playing. In any event, the framing story is just that. Nothing during the game suggests anything about the story, nor even any sense that you're in a world called "Apshai."

This might be forgivable if the gameplay was any good, but it's not. The C64 had a full keyboard, of course, as did the Atari 8-bit series, but many developers of the era seemed to feel that it was a console, good primarily for its joystick. The game uses only the joystick and three function keys, one to cycle through the available inventory, one to cycle through available commands (instead of doing something sensible like mapping each command to a key), and one to enter combat mode and cycle through modes of combat. Any of the cycling related to equipment, commands, or combat is executed with the "fire" key on the joystick. I'm using an emulated joystick (the number pad on my keyboard), but I'm having trouble envisioning how this worked. The player would have had to use the joystick one-handed while the other hand hit the F-keys (which were, admittedly, conveniently grouped on the right-hand side of the keyboard). If you're going to make the player use the keyboard at all, why not give him a fully-mapped set of keys?

Stuck between a goblin and a ghoul.

 

Every player starts with the same nameless character with 3 points in agility, luck, and strength; 9 points in health; and 5 lives. You begin on Level 1 of the dungeon, with all but the starting area concealed in the fog of war. Room by room, you reveal the corridors and chambers, fighting monsters, picking up treasure and new equipment, and avoiding traps. The moment a level begins, you have a counter that starts at 99 and works its way down to 0. When it hits 0, you're automatically transported to the next level. The counter goes at a rate of about 1 for every 4 seconds, so practically speaking you have about 6-7 minutes on each level. There is no save mechanism.

The nominal goal of the game is to reach Level 8, but this isn't really any kind of achievement, given that you can manually transition levels any time you want, without waiting for the counter to hit 0. When you reach Level 8, there's no kind of congratulatory message. The game doesn't end; rather, if you successfully time out the level, you just return to Level 8 again, repeatedly, until your 5 lives finally run out. The real goal, therefore, is to amass as many points as possible and impress your friends. 1980s game players, judging by many game manuals of the era, had easily-impressible friends.

No true RPG ever says "game over" at the end of the game.

At the beginning of the game, and when you transition between levels, the game asks you to pick what dungeon you want from a selection of 1-16. The game manual boasts that each dungeon level has about 60 rooms, for a total of "over 7,500 different rooms for you to explore." "Explore" in this case means walk in to a featureless rectangle, pick up any treasure, kill any monsters. There are no room descriptions, textures, names or anything to differentiate them--nothing, in short, that made the previous Dunjonquest titles so memorable.

The combat is entirely action-based. Until you find a bow and arrows or magic arrows, you just have a melee weapon, and fighting consists of hitting the trigger repeatedly to wave it in the vague direction of your foe. Different enemies move at different speeds, so it's possible to do a kind of fighting retreat with some of them, hitting them but turning and running before they can touch you. Beyond that, the only "tactic" is to exploit the poor pathfinding to get an enemy hung up on a wall or corner, allowing you free hits while he struggles to get loose.

What passes for "combat tactics" in Gateway to Apshai.

I toyed with dismissing the game as an RPG entirely, but it technically meets my three categories. Although the combat is solely action-based, damage does draw from the underlying strength, agility, and luck statistics. These statistics are improvable throughout the game; if you time out a level (rather than manually moving to the next one), the game will give you an attribute bump if you amassed enough points while you were there. You can also find special equipment like "strength stones" and "agility amulets" to give an attribute boost.

A reward between levels.

My third core RPG category is equipment, and Gateway does a reasonable job here for a game of such limited aspirations. You start with a dagger and leather armor, but you can find weapon and armor upgrades, shields, helms, amulets, gauntlets, spells, potions, salves, magic maps, and other items throughout your explorations, using them whenever you think it's best. Many of the items are trapped, doing damage, freezing you, or teleporting you to another part of the level when you pick them up.

My weapons and armor late in the game. This character never did find an upgrade to his starting leather armor.

There are a few game mechanics that draw inspiration from RPGs but are rendered in their most primitive form here. The commands that you cycle through with the F5 key include unlocking a door, searching for a trap, searching for secret doors, checking supplies, checking status, and going to the next level. But unlocking doors, searching for traps, and finding secret doors works 100% of the time, so it simply slows down gameplay to bother with the options in the first place. Why not just have doors open the moment you walk up to them, instead of forcing the player to hit F5 until "Keys" pops up, then hit the joystick button?

Woo-hoo! I've made it to Level 8! I wonder if there's a secret door around here somewhere.

At best, the game is an action RPG, but one that isn't very fun. It seems primitive even for 1983, and the Apshai label seems like a cynical attempt to cash in on a famous name. Aside from the brief framing story in the manual--which could have been written to fit the game into any franchise--there is no thematic connection to the rest of the series.

In a GIMLET, I give it:

• 1 point for the framing story, which has no impact on the game itself

• 1 point for the limited character development process; there is otherwise no customization. You can't even pick a name.

A mid-game character, after finding some attribute boosts.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

• 1 point for encounters with a typical variety of monsters (ghouls, thieves, wizards, giants, etc.). They do have different speeds and power levels, but otherwise no variance in how you fight them.

• 1 point for the all action-based magic and combat.

Headshot!

• 2 points for equipment, perhaps the best part of the game. Some of the items you pick up have very subtle effects; for instance, a cross causes your sword to do double damage to undead creatures.

• 1 point for economy. The only thing you can do with gold is amass it, but it's there.

• 0 points for quests. Despite the manual's insistence, in gameplay terms, there is no main quest.

• 1 point for graphics, sound, and inputs. Graphics and sound are not horrible for the era, but they make no real aspirations. The joystick movement works all right, but the whole approach using the function keys was silly. Either you allow the player to sit back from the keyboard, relax, and just use the controller, or you give him a full array of keys to use. If the player must use the keyboard, it's silly to limit the controls to three keys.

• 2 points for gameplay. You could argue that the difficultly is about right, the pace is brisk enough, and it's technically "replayable."

This gives a final score of 10, one of the lowest I've ever given.

The cover art has nothing to do with the game. I didn't even encounter any insect-based enemy.

I've only found one contemporary review, from A.N.A.L.O.G. in 1984. The reviewer is unabashedly positive about the game, concluding that "if you're interested in D&D games or enjoyed the original Temple, then I heartily recommend Gateway to Apshai," both clauses of which should have gotten the reviewer banned from ever reviewing another game. In more modern times, Vesuvius ("The RPG & Strategy Gamer") played it briefly before concluding that it wasn't an RPG and recommending "don't bother." Perhaps most telling, unlike just about every other barely-adequate RPG experience from the early 1980s, no one is currently trying to remake this one.

Gateway to Apshai  was developed by The Connelly Group, owned by Epyx co-founder Jim Connelly, who left the company about the time this game would have been in development. From what I've read, Epyx's other co-founder, Jon Freeman (who had also left by this point), was the mind behind the Dunjonquest series. His lack of involvement in this one definitely shows. This appears to be The Connelly Group's only attempt at an RPG, and it's one of the last RPGs that Epyx ever published, the only exceptions being the compiled Temple of Apshai Trilogy in 1985 and The Legend of Blacksilver in 1988.

Well, at least it didn't take very long. On to Dragonflight!

Game 127: Hellfire Warrior (1980)

 

Hellfire Warrior

United States

Automated Simulations (soon to change to Epyx) (developer and publisher)

Released 1980 for Apple II, 1982 for Atari 8-bit, unknown year for TRS-80

Date Started: 26 December 2013
Date Ended: 28 December 2013

Total Hours: 8
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 20
Ranking at Time of Posting: 26/123 (21%)

Ranking at Game #455: 146/455 (32%)

Let's start by recapping how cool the Dunjonquest series was for its time, and how poorly modern remembrance does it justice. In 1979, starting with Dunjonquest: The Temple of Apshai, Epyx delivered:
 

• The first commercial computer RPG that can be indisputably called an RPG. Its only predecessors--Beneath Apple Manor, Dungeon Campaign, and Space--are best described as "proto-RPGs."
• The first RPG series in which multiple titles used the same engine. The Datestones of Ryn and Morloc's Tower came out the same year.
• The first RPG series available on multiple platforms. Apshai eventually had releases for the Apple II, the Commodore PET, the Commodore VIC-20, the C64, the TRS80, and DOS.
• A well-written framing story in the "Adventures of Brian Hammerhand."
• An excellent game manual full of professional illustrations.
• An honest attempt to replicate the experience of a tabletop RPG, with complex statistics and detailed room descriptions (kept in a separate manual).

The Hellfire Warrior manual art exceeded what was offered by most other games of the period. There are half a dozen other equally-good illustrations in the manual. Such production values were characteristic of Epyx.

The latter point is crucial to the series. I'm not sure how much experience the creators of other RPGs and proto-RPGs of the time had with tabletop RPGs. The creators of Dunjonquest clearly had a lot of experience. The manual for the first game contains a long treatise on the joys and mechanics of tabletop role-playing and a description of how the computer version is both better (faster calculations, no need to coordinate schedules) and worse (solo player, limited mechanics, closed system). The manual explicitly encourages players to port their favorite pen-and-paper characters into Dunjonquest, adventure for a while, and then extract the character back out into the tabletop world. With 35 years of RPG history behind us after this point, it's fascinating to review the creators' original thoughts at the dawn of the genre.

The series makes up 13 games:

1. The Temple of Apshai (1979). I covered it about a year ago. This was the original game and engine with most of the features we continue to see throughout the series. It's open-ended, with no main quest, featuring four explorable dungeon levels.
2. Morloc's Tower (1979). Covered in the same post above. Designated by the developer as a "MicroQuest," it featured the same engine as Apshai but with a pre-determined character, a much smaller dungeon, and a specific quest.
3. The Datestones of Ryn (1979). Another "MicroQuest," time-limited to 20 minutes.
4. Hellfire Warrior (1980). Revised and updated the Dunjonquest engine with a new series of levels.
5. StarQuest: Rescue at Rigel (1980). A sci-fi adaptation of the engine. I covered it briefly, but it removed so many of the elements of Apshai that it basically wasn't an RPG any more. [Ed. Later covered in more detail.]
   
6. Star Warrior (1980). A sequel to Starquest: Rescue at Rigel.
7. Sorcerer of Siva (1981). A stand-alone game with a quest to kill a wizard. [Ed. Later covered.]
   
8. Upper Reaches of Apshai (1981). An expansion to Temple of Apshai, using the original engine, adding four more levels.
9. The Keys of Acheron (1981). An expansion to the Hellfire Warrior version of the engine. [Ed. Later covered.]
10. Curse of Ra (1982). Another four-level expansion to Temple of Apshai. 
11. Danger in Drindisti (1982). Another expansion to Hellfire Warrior. [Ed. Later covered]..
    
12. Gateway to Apshai (1983). A "prequel" to Temple of Apshai with an updated engine. [Ed. Later covered].
    
13. The Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985). A re-release of Temple of Apshai and its expansions with improved graphics, sound, and controls, and all three previous games fully integrated. It was this game that I played in one of my earliest blog entries, thinking I was getting the experience of the original.

It could be argued that some of these technically aren't part of the Dunjonquest series because they don't feature that label, but they all use the same engine or are explicitly in the same family. Sword of Fargoal (1982), which I didn't list above, is also very much in the same spirit.

Though occupying its own sub-series, Hellfire Warrior is given as a sequel to The Temple of Apshai, and its first dungeon level, numbered 5, is named "The Lower Reaches of Apshai." Both this game and its expansions differ from the Apshai trilogy in offering explicit quests. In Hellfire Warrior, this quest is to rescue a warrior maid named Brynhild who's lying in an enchanted sleep on the "Plains of Hell" level of the dungeon. Technically, a player could go right to Level 8 and try to rescue her, but the experiences of the previous levels are needed to build up the requisite experience, attributes, and equipment.

Like its predecessor, the game begins by asking you to either create your own character (type in the attributes, money, and equipment) or have the game roll a character randomly. The creators honestly seemed to intend the first option as a way for a tabletop RPG player to enter the dungeon and not as a blatant mechanism for cheating, but of course it makes cheating--including the creation of a character able to win the game immediately--a possibility. Lacking any previous character, I chose the second option, which can be brutal. The game rolls every attribute from 3 to 18 with no option to re-roll or adjust values. You assign a name and can then spend your randomly-allocated pool of "gold royals" on equipment.

There's no way to visit shops individually. Instead, after creating each character--or after emerging from the dungeon--the game cycles through the available shops and asks one-by-one if you want to visit. The shops and their items are:

Weaponsmith. You select your sword from among five types (including the rarely-encountered "hand-and-a-half" sword). The more damage they do, the more fatigue they require to swing. Armor choices are leather, ring mail, chain mail, partial plate, and full plate. Similarly, the more protection they offer, the more fatigue they consume in movement and combat action. Finally, you can buy a bow (only one type offered) with an associated number of arrows up to 60.

 
Apothecary. This is a new feature in the game series. In addition to elixirs and salves (restore health) and nectar (restores fatigue), the apothecary offers a selection of exotic-sounding potions, such as "cobra milk," "troll blood," "white lotus," and "mandragora." The manual is mostly silent about what these elixirs do, except to say that when you buy them, you drink them right away, and some increase attributes or protection for the duration of the next dungeon trip.

Let's just mix it all together in a blender.

Malacylpse the Mage. He offers to enchant the player's weapon and armor for an escalating amount of cash per "plus." He also sells magic arrows and magic items, including an "Orichalcum amulet" of uncertain purpose. This is the first time I've seen "Orichalcum" outside of Skyrim, so I looked up the term and discovered that it's "a metal mentioned in several ancient writings, including the story of Atlantis." I thought Skyrim had invented it because it had to do with orcs.

Priest. Here, you can donate remaining cash for an uncertain purpose. I'm thinking it might affect the likelihood that an adventurer will find your body if you die in the dungeon.

After that, it's off to the dungeon level of the player's choice.

Gideon after a few successful adventures. His attributes aren't really that high; he's buffed by some potions right now.

Dungeon exploration is essentially identical to Apshai. The movement mechanic is awkward and sometimes frustrating: you use the (R)ight, (L)eft, and (V)olte-face keys to face a particular direction, then enter a number from 1-9 indicating the number of steps you want to take in that direction. The steps have an associated fatigue cost, though it's negligible when you're unencumbered and healthy.

As with most games of the era, navigating the bland corridors of the dungeon is assisted by a certain amount of imagination, but the Dunjonquest series significantly aids one's imagination with well-written room, monster, and treasure descriptions in the game's manual. Much like the later "adventurers journals" in the Gold Box series, the Dunjonquest manuals are a constant companion to the action on the screen. On Levels 5 and 7 of the Hellfire Warrior dungeon, each room (including corridors) has a number corresponding with an entry in the book. Upon entry in Room #1, we're told:

Long corridors roughly hewn from the native stone, eight feet wide and fifteen feet high. An occasional wooden door appears rusted into near immobility. In some places, the walls have crumbled and been dug away.

Some of the rooms have treasures, noted by little colored vertical bars, and the room description usually has something to say about the nature of the treasure:

This large room is also faced with tile in similar condition. Cots and foot-lockers betoken common sleeping quarters. The room is littered with broken weapons, ragged armor, and other junk. A fallen warrior still clutches a sword.

When you pick up the treasure in the room, the screen says that you've picked up treasure #8, which the manual describes as so:

You pick up a sword for closer inspection. The blade is of finely honed steel, and the weapon feels well-balanced, almost alive in your hand. Hidden in the hilt are two small diamonds.

Monsters appear randomly as you explore, and you have the option to (F)ire an arrow or a (M)agic arrow at them--if you can line yourself up properly, which can be hard. Once they get close, you hit (A)ttack for melee combat and begin trading blows until one of you is dead. It's not terribly difficult to avoid combat or flee from it, as monsters won't chase you out of the room they spawn in. But since they can spawn randomly, there's really no "safe" area of the dungeon.

Firing an arrow down a corridor at a giant bee.

Killing monsters adds to your experience pool (you start with 20,000). More experienced characters do better in combat, but in a nebulous way not really explained by the manual. The manual also suggests that attributes will slowly increase with experience, but I never noticed that happening. The game keeps a counter of monsters killed in that dungeon session.

As you explore, you have to be on the lookout for traps, revealed with the (S)earch command, as well as secret doors, revealed by facing a wall and (E)xamining it. Each command might require four or five attempts to find what you're looking for. Secret doors abound in the dungeons and it's easy to miss out on entire dungeon sections if you don't carefully search every wall.

You have to be concerned with both health and fatigue. Health restores only through salves and elixirs and the very rare magic pool or fountain in the dungeon. Fatigue restores by standing still. Both combat actions and movement deplete fatigue, and it's possible to get into a never-ending cycle where you're trying to restore fatigue and a monster shows up, requiring you to expend your remaining fatigue attacking him. As he dies and you stand there trying to replenish, another monster shows up, and so forth.

If you die in the dungeon--quite easy if you overextend yourself--one of four things can happen. The first is that you get eaten by a monster. The second is that Olias the Dwarf will find you and return you to the town, but after taking all of your treasure and magic items. If Lowenthal the Wizard recovers you, he'll leave your cash but take your magic items. Benedic the Cleric will resurrect you and return you to town without taking anything, though he asks for a donation.

I got lucky this time.

The key to success in the game is to engage in a series of small expeditions, gathering treasures and returning to town when your health elixirs get low. The game is very generous with its treasure, and with only a few sorties, you can get several magic items and your sword and weapon up to +4 or +5. In between adventures, you can save both the state of the dungeon level (a feature not present in Apshai) and your character. Leaving the dungeon automatically converts your found treasure to gold. Certain special treasures--wearable magic items--never show up in your inventory but do exert permanent changes on your attributes.

Level 5, "The Lower Reaches of Apshai," is a standard dilapidated dungeon, occupied primarily with monstrous bugs, like giant mosquitoes, ants, and snails. It's a good introductory level.

Level 6, "The Labryinth," is a maze whose door closes behind you when you enter. You have to find the exit while battling creatures like "unitaurs" (minotaurs with one horn) and various types of dinosaurs. The game provides a hint as to the exit's location in case it becomes too difficult. There are no room descriptions on this level, but there are still detailed treasure descriptions.

Firing an arrow at a unitaur in the midst of the labyrinth.

Level 7, "The Vault of the Dead," is a large, spacious crypt with undead-themed creatures like ghosts, ghouls, gargoyles, and spectres. The latter are capable of draining constitution, which causes your fatigue loss to increase exponentially, and you can wind up in a situation where you simply can't move. There's one fantastic treasure on the level: The Seven-League Boots, which increase movement speed.

Fighting a gargoyle in the Vault of the Dead.

Level 8 is the "Plains of Hell," and this is where the main quest is located. It took me a long time on the other levels to build up a character able to survive here for more than a few minutes. The level consists of a very large room--the titular "plain"--with various treasures and wandering fiends, imps, firedrakes, behemoths, and pyrohounds. Off to the west side is a bridge that takes the player to the sleeping warrior maiden, after he passes through corridors of hellfire (an unavoidable trap) and several tough enemies, including a "pyrohydra" (described in the manual as "the most fearsome monster ever created") and a demon.

Fighting the pyrohydra to enter the final area.

The sleeping maiden appears as just another treasure, though well-described:

This, of course, is the warrior maid Brynhild. Although her face is fair, her form comely, and her hair like spun gold, there is nothing elfin about her; her limbs are supple but strong, and her armored body is heavy. Yet, to release her from the enchantment that holds her in the grip of sleep, you must bear her out of these flaming caverns, through the great doors by which you entered, and all the way back to sun and air. The end of your quest lies before you--if you can  make it.

About to pick up Brynhild in her chamber.

 
Brynhild weighs 150 pounds (I couldn't have taken off her armor before picking her up?), greatly increasing the player's encumbrance, so getting out with her is a process of mincing your way back to the beginning. On the way, you face Death himself, apparently unkillable, but easily escaped by fleeing out of his room.

Escaping Death.

The harder part is dealing with all of the random combats while struggling with the constant fatigue loss.

Only steps from the exit, nearly out of fatigue, pursued by a spectre.

There's no victory screen when you reach the exit with Brynhild. You just get the normal "treasure" screen, and only the presence of "Treasure #10" (worth nothing) proves that you made it out with the warrior maiden.

Fifth line, second column. That's my "victory screen."

The enterprise took me about eight hours. I'm giving the game a 20 on my GIMLET scale. Its best scores are 3s in "encounters" (the monster and room descriptions add a lot of atmosphere), "equipment," "character development," and "gameplay" (I like the choice of levels and the overall nonlinearity). It does poorly in "NPCs" (there are none) and "quests" (I don't like that the game doesn't really acknowledge the quest in-game) and "graphics, sound, and interface." Combat remains disappointing in the series, which continues to exclude any magic.

The game's two expansions, The Keys of Acheron and Danger in Drindisti are both on my list, but listed as "NP" (not playable), as I can't find working versions anywhere. That I'm able to play Hellfire Warrior is thanks to reader Josh Lawrence, who pointed out that it was cataloged as an "adventure" game on Asimov, but the other two aren't in the same (or any) directory. I'm also having trouble finding Sorcerer of Siva. I can't say that I'm pulling out all the stops trying to track these games down, though, since once you've experienced one Dunjonquest title, you've pretty much experienced them all.

I'm moving on now to Lords of Chaos (1990), a strategy/RPG hybrid. My next "old" game will be Time Traveler (1980), which is given as a text/adventure hybrid. [Later edit: I've rejected Time Traveler as an RPG. It's an amateur effort in which all of the actions are dependent on random probability.]

*****

Further Reading:

• My original take on the Temple of Apshai Trilogy
• My later take on The Temple of Apshai and Morloc's Tower
• A series of four postings on Dunjonquest on Hardcore Gaming 101; Page 2 covers Hellfire Warrior
• The Digital Antiquarian's coverage of the Dunjonquest series
• The Hellfire Warrior manual at the Museum of Computer Adventure Gaming History

Game 88: Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, Datestones of Ryn, and Morloc's Tower (1979)

Exactly three years ago, a naive young CRPG player decided to start a blog. He had been encouraged by the subscribers of /r/gaming on Reddit, after he submitted a winning screenshot of Rogue, the second game he played in his epic quest to play every computer role-playing game ever released. Because he was already familiar with both DOS and the DOSBox emulator, he decided to restrict his adventures to that platform. Armed with Wikipedia's list, he boldly strode into the first dungeon that he was playing specifically for his blog, and he wrote a posting on a 1985 DOS compilation called The Temple of Apshai Trilogy, incorrectly tagging it as 1981.

He played the game for a single day, made a single posting, and moved on, an eager fire in his eyes. He figured by 2013 he'd be playing Baldur's Gate II, maybe Morrowind.

Oh, how I wish I could go back in time three years, bounce that tender youth on my knee, and explain a few things to him. I'd tell him:

• Wikipedia's list has like a tenth of all computer role-playing games released over the last 35 years. You really need to go to MobyGames, but even their list isn't really complete. Settle in for a long trip on this one, buckaroo.

• You're eventually going to come to regret your "DOS/PC-only" rule. You'll end up missing a ton of cool games, and you'll miss the best versions of the games that you do play. Your readers will tell you this from practically day one, but you won't listen because you never listen to anything. Also, you have this prejudice against the Apple II ever since you couldn't beat Agent USA in middle school. You need to get over that.

• But you'll mostly regret it because you'll come to see yourself as a CRPG historian as much as a CRPG Addict, and you'll realize there are a bunch of holes in your experience.

• The other emulators really aren't that hard. Look, I'll show you. This is called the Commodore PET. You can...hey, come back here!

After a few investment tips and a warning to go to New Orleans for only five days, not seven, in January 2013, I'd head back to the future, and this blog would be a very different place right now.

The Dunjonquest franchise was one that I screwed in my haste and ignorance. I just re-read the posting from February 15, 2010 (incidentally, I had five postings on my opening day; what the hell?), and it's embarrassingly awful. I barely covered the game at all. I had about six paragraphs and three screen shots, and I couldn't have invested more than two hours in it. But more important, in my ignorance I thought that The Temple of Apshai Trilogy was a compilation of all the Dunjonquest games to that date, which was wrong.

A screenshot from the DOS version I played in 2010.

 
Dunjonquest began with a bang in 1979, in a way that we hadn't seen yet with CRPGs. Remember that we're just at the beginning of commercial CRPGs. College kids had been playing them on PLATO and DEC mainframes for a few years, sure, and the Apple II and Commodore PET had supported a few primitive efforts. But now Automated Simulations (later Epyx) comes along and:

• Releases three games in one year using the same engine: Temple of Apshai, Morloc's Tower, and The Datestones of Ryn.

• Ports the games to multiple platforms. 1979 saw Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 releases. In the coming years, Atari 8-bit, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, and DOS releases would follow for certain titles.

• Introduces conventions not seen in CRPGs to date, including detailed room descriptions (kept in a separate manual), shops to buy equipment, an inn, and a detailed, well-written, framing story.

A bit of the introductory story from Apshai.

From what I can tell, it appears that Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai was the first 1979 release, followed by Datestones of Ryn and then Morloc's Tower. The next four years would bring seven other games in the Dunjonquest series, including two more Apshai games to round out the "trilogy" (Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra); the Hellfire Warrior sub-series (Hellfire Warrior, Danger in Drindisti, and The Keys of Acheron), Sorcerer of Siva, and Gateway to Apshai. Moreover, the StarQuest duo (Star Warrior and Rescue at Rigel) use essentially the same engine, something I didn't realize when I panned Rescue at Rigel in 2010.

This was, in short, a series that deserved more than a few paragraphs written after playing the worst version, so I'm giving proper attention to the Apple II original.

Nonetheless, I'm not going to cover Temple of Apshai again here in detail. This is mostly because I haven't been able to get hold of a working version  (I can roll a character and enter the dungeon, but not save my progress or return to the inn). Suffice to say that you begin the game by creating your character--either randomly rolled or typed in by you (which of course invites some start-scumming). You go through a brief equipment purchase before being thrust into the first room of a three-level labyrinth with between 56 and 60 rooms each.

Character creation and equipment purchases in Temple of Apshai.

The gameplay isn't stellar. You move through an awkward system of rotating your character with the "L" and "R" keys and then typing a number representing the number of steps you want to travel. Occasionally, a monster appears and you can (A)ttack, (P)arry, or (T)hrust. Movement and attacking depletes your "fatigue," but waiting around restores it. Instead of hit points, you have a "wounds" score from 0% to 100%. Magic items are limited to healing salves and elixirs. There are secret doors to find along the walls and various (fixed) treasures to pick up in the dungeon's rooms.

My character in a Level 1 Apshai room. I have just discovered a secret door to my west. There is a treasure to my south. And I'm being attacked by a giant mosquito.

What makes the game unique and fun are the detailed room and item descriptions that appear in the accompanying manual. Long before the Gold Box series offered verbose journal entries for special encounters, Dunjonquest was doing it for every room. If you look at the screen shot above, you'll see that I'm in "Room No. 21" (even hallways are numbered as rooms). The book describes the area as:

The west wall of the cavern shows the marks of carving tools, but the rest is natural rock. The floor of the room is overgrown with mushrooms of two varieties. One has broad, flat caps and is white with brown splotches, while the second variety has black, tightly rounded caps.

The mushroom patch is the treasure that you see on the screen, and it has its own number and description in the manual. But most important, note that the room description above gives the key clue as to the existence of the secret door that I just found. This, in short, is a game meant to be played with the book in hand, and it is intended to mimic--as closely as possible given the technology of the time--the experience of exploring a tabletop RPG module. The authors say as much in a long introduction in the Temple of Apshai manual, noting that--and this remains true 34 years later--"while there are greater practical limitations to your actions than is usually the case in a non-computer RPG, there are still a large number of options to choose from."

In Temple of Apshai, you return frequently to the inn to rest, buy new items, and plan your next expedition. There is no "main quest" to the game, and I suppose the player simply chooses to end it when he's explored every corner of the dungeon or feels that his character has developed enough.

Morloc's Tower and The Datestones of Ryn are somewhat different. Epyx refers to them as "MicroQuests." They have the same engine, but no accompanying room descriptions (though it does have treasure descriptions).  You also can't set your own character: you play as Brian Hammerhand, a fighter with fixed attributes and equipment. You can't save the game or leave the dungeon as in Apshai; instead, the idea is to complete the entire dungeon in one expedition, which typically takes less than an hour--and, unlike Apshai, has an actual quest to complete: killing Rex the Reaver the Robber Baron and retrieving the "datestones" he stole from the Duchy of Ryn, and destroying the evil sorcerer Morloc. The game manual encourages you to replay the game multiple times, trying for a higher score or faster time.

Your uneditable PC for two Dungeonquest games. I love that a guy named "Hammerhand" carries a sword.

In both games, there is some randomness to the placement of treasures and monsters every time you start. Morloc has the player set a difficulty level from 1 to 3, making it one of the earliest CRPGs to offer this feature.

Both "MicroQuests" feature an involved story in the game manual that sets up the quest and gives some clues about what you might find, and how you might solve it. For instance, the manual for Morloc's Tower describes how Morloc consorts with "unnatural beasts and creatures inhuman," including a salamander that shoots fireballs. This is an enemy you encounter on the third level of the tower.

The salamander blows fireballs at me while I shoot arrows at him.

In a similar vein, the manual has one of the terrified villagers telling Brian Hammerhand that they once possessed a magic sword that told them when Morloc was near, "but it was taken from us to the tower...you may find it there." And indeed, on the fourth level of the tower is a magic sword that replaces your initial weapon and glows when you're close to Morloc and "flares" when you're in the same room as him.

But the lack of the detailed room descriptions and the inability to create your own character removes much of what was fun and RPG-like about Temple of Apshai, leaving only the interface, which is unforgivably annoying. The movement system might be the worst one I've ever experienced in a CRPG, forcing you to mince along in baby steps if you don't want to deplete your fatigue. Monsters appear randomly, sometimes in packs, even in rooms you've already cleared. Fighting them involves essentially no tactics, and you don't get any experience or rewards for doing it, so it soon becomes annoying.

Standing and exchanging blows with an ogre.

The "levels" of the "dunjons" fit entirely on a screen, so unlike as in Apshai, it's extremely easy to tell where there's a secret door. Despite this, the game makes you hit "(E)xamine" multiple times to find it. There's no visual indication of the stairs; you have to read the manual to know that they're always in the bottom-left corner. There's no way to pause the game at all, and since enemies can generate randomly right next to you and attack in real-time, you can't even take a bathroom break (let alone a blogging break) while playing.

Countering this is a fairly brisk pace; I was able to win Morloc's Tower in about 45 minutes (Datestones of Ryn had some emulator problems I couldn't solve). The major steps are:

1. Explore the dungeon and find the right treasures. There are several items in the tower that help defeat Morloc, including the magic sword, a glowing blue pyramid that stops him from teleporting out of the room, and a magic egg that incinerates everyone in the room for terrific damage. However, if you find an object called a "crystal tiara," it negates the power of the pyramid, meaning you have to chase Morloc around from room to room before you can kill him. The game doesn't tell you this anywhere; you have to learn it from experimentation or by reading the spoilers at the end of the manual. There are other rings and such that provide protection against fire and magic.

2. "(U)se" one of the treasures to tell you were Morloc currently is, and hie your way to that level and room.

A magic device tells me that Morloc is in Room 22.

3. Search the room until Morloc appears and then beat at him until he's dead. At this point, the game gives you a brief "win" screen, your score, and dumps you to a prompt. The score is based on the number of creatures you killed, how quickly you defeated Morloc, and the difficulty level you chose at the beginning.

Datestones of Ryn has even quicker gameplay--you're limited to 20 minutes on the timer--and the final score is based on how many stones you retrieved and how many enemies you killed.

A Datestones of Ryn screenshot for the Commodore 64.

As torturous as these games are to play today, they deserve credit for being the first commercial CRPGs to offer the kind of RPG experience that we've come to expect, and for trying hard, with the limited technologies of the time, to replicate the tabletop RPG dynamic. I don't know if Richard Garriott was ever exposed to these games, but you can see some Ultima-esque attention to back story and monster descriptions in the manuals, and of course the AD&D Gold Box series, starting with Pool of Radiance, would famously adopt the game/manual hybrid approach, though not with every room.
 

The game is credited to Jonathan Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson. Freeman was a co-founder of Automated Simulations, which became Epyx, but he left the company in 1981 and formed another company called "Free Fall Associates" with his wife, Anne Westfall. His departure essentially marked the end of Epyx's involvment in CRPGs; they would become more famous for sports games (Summer Games, Winter Games, California Games). Free Fall developed the Archon action game series and is technically still around, although with a web site so confusing that I couldn't find a valid e-mail address to try to contact Mr. Freeman.

Jeff Johnson, meanwhile, moved over to SSI sometime between 1982 and 1985 and worked on a host of CRPGs, including Wizard's Crown, Realms of Darkness, Rings of Zilfin, The Eternal Dagger, and Phantasie III. He moved to other companies and other genres, but today seems to be back in the RPG world at Atari, with credits on Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I may check out a couple of the other Dunjonquest games from 1980-1982 on different platforms, just to see how the series evolved.