Game 96: Fracas (1980)

     

Fracas

United States

Computersmiths (developer and publisher)

Released 1980 for Apple II

Date Started: 8 April 2013

Date Ended: 8 April 2013

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 16

Ranking at Time of Posting: 9/96 (9%)

Ranking at Game #455 : 94/455 (21%)

  

Developer Stuart Smith was unique in his era for his focus on classical mythology. While everyone else was creating clones of Middle Earth and Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings, Smith was developing games based on Arabian mythology in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981), Greek mythology in The Return of Heracles (1983), and Mesopotamian mythology in the Rivers of Light module to his Adventure Construction Set (1985).

His first game, Fracas, written for the Apple II, alas features no such setting, but it does offer an original gameplay mechanism that returns, I understand, in Ali Baba: a turn-based, multi-player mechanic that allows both competitive and cooperative modes. Up to eight characters in up to six "alliances," or factions, can explore the city of Faroph and its environs at the same time. There is no quest or ultimate goal, but the manual encourages you to set goals when you start the game: collect a certain amount of treasure, defeat a certain monster, get an attribute to a certain level, or just find each other and assemble at the town square (you have the option to start the game in a random place).

Faroph and some of its areas, including a mountainous area to the southwest, a forest to the southeast, and a crypt to the northeast. You have to use your imagination.

The game is low-res, with color-coded squares used to represent each PC or NPC's alliance (no NPC or monster ever has the same alliance as a PC) and piles of gold. Gameplay consists of moving about the map, finding treasure, navigating traps and teleporters, and fighting monsters--either individually or collectively with friends.
 

The game uses six attributes: strength, life force (or hit points), skill (basically dexterity), weapon skill, armor level, and movement speed. Each statistic except armor is on a scale of 1 to 100. Armor runs on a scale of 1 to 20 indicating how many hit points of damage it "absorbs," but it subtracts an equal number of points from both skill and movement speed, so you can't overload. The player has the option to let the computer roll the character or type in his own values. In the latter case, nothing stops you from creating a character with max everything, but since the game is essentially a multi-player game, it's expected that the various players will enforce rules about what they can and can't do in character creation.

As you enter each "room," the game tells you the name of the room, the number of "ducats" (gold pieces) in the room, and the visible monsters. Movement takes place in "turns" in which you have a varied number of actions based on your movement score. You can run, attack, retreat, or rest to regain hit points.

Entering a new area.

When combat arrives, your skill determines your chances to hit and dodge, your strength and weapon skill determine your damage, and your armor determines how much of your enemy's attack is absorbed.

Combat is fast and frantic in Fracas.

Both combat victory and finding treasure increases experience, and every once in a while you gain enough experience to improve your skill or strength by 1 point.

The neat thing is that all the options and features available to the PC are available to NPC monsters, too. They're not so much "monsters" as computer-controlled PCs. No two of them have the same name: when you encounter three rats in a granary, they're labeled "biggest rat," "fat rat," and "Speedy Gonzalez." They have the same attributes as the PCs. They'll attack other creatures of different factions. They can run away, rest, and regain health. They can pick up treasure. If they hit you enough times, or kill other creatures, or get enough treasure, they can gain experience and improve their statistics. I've encountered plenty of games in which monsters scale to the player's level, but I've never encountered any in which monsters are capable of gaining levels by defeating the player. This would be an awesome addition to modern games.

A wolf picks up some treasure, a vampire chooses to take a time out and gain his health back, and a guard improves his skill at my expense.

The game is deceptively large. When I first played, I thought it would be a quick matter to explore the map of Faroph (which is fixed, not randomly generated). But the crypt area ended up taking me to a large and confusing area of teleporters, hidden doors, and seemingly random rooms from which I had a tough time finding my way back to the city.

Chester gets swarmed with creatures in a confusing area.

There are also some fun variations in terrain. This area, predictably, is called "The Skull."

On the negative side, you don't actually have any equipment in the game. Your weapon is "assumed" from your weapon skill; so a character with a 13 skill is using a broadsword, and a character with a 19 is using a battleaxe. Movement uses a nonsensical arrangement of the number keys not found on any keyboard, though the game helpfully provides a little diagram while you're moving.

A regular number pad was not a staple of the Apple II.

There's no magic; the shrill, bloopish sounds are painful to the ears; and there's really no variation in gameplay once you have the hang of the limited interface. The only tactics I see are the order in which you tackle the areas, taking care to increase your skills against less difficult monsters before heading off to fight more deadly ones. That is, at least, in single-player mode; multiplayer mode, both cooperative and competitive, offers a neat addition to combat tactics. By playing each of multiple characters yourself and assigning them to the same alliance, you could create a "party" and plot battles that way.

A party of three joins Chester towards the end of his game.

In about six hours of gameplay, I managed to meet a goal of collecting 20,000 gold pieces and make it back to the Faroph town square, so I'm going to call that a "win." I don't think there's enough variety in gameplay for Fracas to be authentically "fun" today, but it would have been a joy when I was 9, playing with friends, letting our imaginations embellish what the screen was telling us. The manual even opens with a transcript of such a gaming session, involving two characters named Eldric and Mordella, "born of the computer's innards on a wintry Friday morning." The little story follows their adventures in their low-res world and speaks to the power of imagination--a power that was essential for true role-playing immersion in this early era.

No one seems to know what happened to Stuart Smith. His brief Wikipedia profile says that he took a job outside the gaming industry in the late 1980s "to provide more stability for his family." His name is so common that it's impossible to find him online. His company was originally Computersmiths in Meadow Vista, California, near Sacramento, but it changed to Quality Software for the publication of Ali Baba and was listed in Reseda, near Los Angeles. By the time Heracles came out, the company address was in Chatsworth. There, the trail ends. The guy couldn't be any more elusive if he was in the Witness Protection Program. [Later edit: He came out of hiding in this comment! It turns out I was wrong about Quality Software being Stuart's company.]

My understanding is that Ali Baba from 1982 expands upon the basic system of Fracas with better graphics, an economy and equipment, an actual quest, and other additions. I have it on my short list to check out. It's refreshing to see, in this early era of CRPGs, games that weren't just adaptations of Dungeons and Dragons.