Game 516: Mines of Mordor (1979)

I like to imagine the author chuckling to himself as he came up with the title, wondering if anyone would get the reference.

              

Mines of Mordor

United States

Independently developed; published by Electronic Imaginations Unlimited

Released 1979 for TRS-80 in at least two versions (6.1 and 6.3)

Released either before or after as Dungeons and Dragons

Date Started: 30 May 2024

Date Ended: 1 June 2024

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

      

Mines of Mordor is yet another dark ages game recently brought to light by El Explorador de RPG. It's about as dark as it gets. If it weren't for its existence in various TRS-80 archive sites, I don't think we'd know about it. I can't find a single advertisement or listing for it in magazines of the period. My commenters are often better at that than I am, but El Explorador is one of those commenters, and he didn't turn up anything for his own entry, either. Even the publisher, Phoenix-based Electronic Imaginations Unlimited, is attested only by this game and one announcement in the May 1983 Color Computer News about some forthcoming educational titles. Of the author, Scott Cunningham, there are several potential candidates.

      

I tried three versions of the game: 6.1, 6.3, and an unnumbered version titled Dungeons and Dragons. Most of this account will cover 6.3, the one that I played the longest and won, but I'll discuss the differences in a bit.

      

Character creation consists only of specifying the number of players (1 or 2) and giving yourselves names, within a limit of 8 characters. The game randomly creates a 6-level dungeon of 25 squares each (5 x 5) and starts you in a room on the first level with stairs going up to the exit. Your goal (not stated explicitly, unless it was in the documentation) is to escape the dungeon with every last bit of treasure collected. 

      

Characters begin with a sword, a knife, a rope, 4 units of food, and 6 hit points. The dungeon layout, and your specific position, is not shown until you go to M)ove, at which point the game draws you an ASCII map, with a double-asterisk (**) representing the player, letters I representing doors (or, if strung together, walls), and pluses (+) representing rooms with treasure in them.

        

Moving around Level 2. There are two rooms with treasure remaining.

      

All rooms that have treasure also have monsters that you have to defeat before you can collect the treasure. Level 1's enemies start off as goblins, orcs, mad men, and at least one troll. Amusingly, the game insists on giving every foe a randomly-generated personal name, like Zeeanm, Reurm, Hesto, Damard, Accama, and Heista.

        

If you surprise them, you get a round in which you can sneak away or make a surprise attack. Otherwise, you enter combat immediately. Round after round, you specify what weapon you want to use. The game rolls some dice and determines who won the round and how much damage they did, along with the qualitative descriptions "hit," "struck," and "clobbered." You occasionally lose your weapon during an attack and have to switch to a different one or, as a matter of last desperation, H)ands. Sometimes you get knocked down in combat, which I guess reduces your effectiveness in the next round.

    

Exchanging blows with an enemy.

    

If you defeat the enemy, you can L)ook for the treasure (which also returns lost weapons). Finding all of it sometimes takes several rounds, and if you leave the room before finding all of it, a new enemy will be generated to guard the remainder.

 

I believe hit points represent strength as well as health, so as you lose them, you also become less effective in combat. Although you start with 6, you can achieve up to 9 regularly and 10 with a potion. Eating food rations restores health. When you choose the E)at command, you can specify how many of your rations you eat as a fraction, from 0.1 to the maximum you hold. Your chance of gaining hit points increases with the total amount you consume.

   

Some rooms have stairways or holes going to the next and previous levels. You can use the holes as long as you have a rope. Sometimes, you fall through the holes, which causes you to take damage and lose one of your items in the room you fell from.

   

As long as you have at least 50 silver pieces, which the game takes as a lodging fee, you can exit the dungeon at any time by moving up from the room you came from. You want to do this occasionally because as you gather treasure, you reach a threshold at which you're carrying so much weight that you start to take damage.

       

The shop at the top of the dungeon lets you buy things and tells you how much treasure you still have to claim.

    

Moving upward takes you to a store where you can buy a variety of items. Most of them don't show up in your inventory when you re-enter the dungeon, so you have to take it on faith that they actually do something. I think that most of them "stack," meaning you can gain benefits from buying them multiple times. But you never see the statistics, so I'm basing that just on a general feeling of effectiveness against various monsters between visits to the shop. It's worth a quick rundown of what everything does:

    

• Gauntlets of Strength, Potion of Strength, Scroll of Experience. Not sure. They make you more effective in combat in some ways, and I think the effectiveness might stack with multiple purchases.

• Sword. A regular weapon. You can hold multiple copies, which helps when you lose one in combat.

• Transport Ring. After you buy it, it appears as a command. If you use it outside of combat, you can specify what level to teleport to, making it a quick way to get from the bottom of the dungeon to the top and back again (but since enemies don't respawn, all it saves is time). In combat, it lets you escape if things aren't going your way. There's a chance that you'll teleport into solid rock and die instantly, making the item mostly not worth it.

    

With permadeath, this isn't worth the risk.

     

• Fire Ball. An additional weapon option that does significant damage. Each purchase can be cast about four or five times before it disappears. Absolutely essential for the last couple of levels.

• Armor. I think it makes it less likely you'll take damage if hit, and I think it stacks.

• Boots of Agility, Cloak of Quietness, Potion of Alertness. Some combination of these three things make it more likely that you'll surprise enemies and less likely that you'll fall down holes. Again, they may stack.

• Bag of Holding. Stops you from taking damage from the amount that you carry. There's no point in buying more than one.

• Knife. A regular weapon. Again, it's useful to have a couple as backups.

• Bow. A regular weapon. Using it increases your odds of hitting an enemy, but it consumes arrows.

• Rope. Allows you to climb up and down holes. You can also throw it in combat to tie up your foe and increase the likelihood that you can escape on your next move.

• Arrows. Fuel for the bow.

• Potion of Health. Restores you to 10 hit points when you buy it. You consume it right away; you can't carry it around the dungeon.

• Food Supplies. Restores health when you eat it, up to 9 hit points.

         

No matter how much you buy, only a few items show up in your inventory.

      

Level 1 delivers so little gold that you can barely afford anything, but by the time you reach Level 3, you're hauling dozens of gold pieces back to the surface and you can buy multiple things at once, which is one of the reasons that I had trouble analyzing what items did. When you purchase five or six things per trip, it's hard to tell what had an effect when you return to battle. You do want to spend all of your loot, too, as the game takes whatever remains when you descend back into the dungeon.

      

You find a lot of gold on the lower levels.

     

Level 2 adds ogres, ghouls, and gnolls to the enemy list. Level 3 adds wights and wraiths. Chimeras and gorgons start to appear on Level 4, rocs and centaurs join the fray on Level 5, and Level 6 concludes with griffons and a single balrog. I found that I needed at least one casting of "Fire Ball" to defeat anything above a roc.

     

My final opponent is a balrog named Naeahe.

     

I don't have a TRS-80 emulator with save states, so I had to win this legitimately, which took a reasonable amount of time under the rules of permadeath. I found the best strategy, even though it took a while, was to return to the surface every time I had enough money to buy any sort of upgrade and to spend it all on each trip. I ran away from rocs, griffons, and the balrog until I'd defeated every other enemy and recovered all their treasure. The last two levels, I fought almost exclusively with "Fire Ball," turning to my sword only if an enemy was down to one or two hit points.

    

Unfortunately, you don't get any victory screen when you finally collect all the treasure. The shop screen keeps track of how much treasure remains, and you have to just take satisfaction in seeing it roll down to 0. If you try to re-enter the dungeon at that point, the game asks if you want to generate a new one. You get to keep all your stuff, but it's possible that you lose the behind-the-scenes bonuses that your various purchases conveyed. Whatever the case, the enemies seemed harder in the new dungeon even though they were named the same things and appeared on the same levels. I didn't play the second dungeon for long.

      

"0 kilos remaining" is how you know you've won.

     

Overall, for a 1979 game, Mines of Mordor is reasonably complex in its variables and strategy. It's not going to take "Game of the Year" away from Dunjonquest, which had a much greater sense of story and atmosphere, but it's got some charm and it gets a 16 on the GIMLET. 

      

Your "reward."

     

As I mentioned, you can play with two characters, although I think it would be torturous to do so. You and the other player trade turns, so you'd constantly have to be swapping the keyboard; a more sensible approach would have been to have each character move for 5 or 10 turns before switching. I can only imagine it must be harder, since neither the amount of treasure in the dungeon nor the number of monsters is doubled, nor are the costs of goods halved. Two-character play is entirely competitive. You can't swap items, but you can fight the other player if you occupy the same square. If one character dies, the game proceeds as a single-player game.

      

The title screen for the earlier version.

       

As far as I can tell, Version 6.1 (the earlier one) is identical except:

 

• The title screen credits the author (which is the only way we know the author's name) instead of Electronic Imaginations Unlimited.

• The dungeon levels are a little more complicated. Areas of isolation can be created, requiring you to go up and then down to access them.

• Enemies' random names all begin with a lowercase letter. I feel like this is an emulation issue that came up in our discussion of another game, but I couldn't find it.

• If you want to move up or down through a hole, you choose the R)ope instead of M)ove and then U)p or D)own.

         

The version labeled Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, is different enough that you might even consider it a different game. El Explorador thought it must have come after Mordor because it has some elements of greater complexity. I see his point, but there are also signs of a more rudimentary game. In favor of it being an earlier version of the game:

    

• The title screen just lists the game name with no attribution or version number.

• Dungeons and Dragons would be an awfully generic name to revert to after at least two releases of Mines of Mordor.

• Commands are more limited and are made by entering numbers instead of more organically by specifying the first letter of what you want to do. For instance, (2) searches a room and (4) moves to another room.

        

The Dungeons and Dragons interface.

     

• The map is a simple grid of rooms, 3 x 5, rather than a more realistic configuration drawn with ASCII characters. When you move, you specify which adjacent cell you want to move to rather than a direction. Rooms with treasure are not annotated.

• The game supports only one player.

• There's no bow.

• There are fewer items to buy in the shop.

    

Items for sale in Dungeons and Dragons.

    

• Enemies are not given personal names.

• Dungeons and Dragons is 173 lines of code with 10,415 characters, while Mordor 6.1 is 252 lines and 13,639 characters and 6.3 is 379 lines and 15,174 characters. I realize that fewer lines and characters can mean a more advanced game since it might be an indication of a more efficient programmer, but clearly the game gained program length between 6.1 and 6.3, so on a linear trendline, Dungeons would be earlier.

     

On the side for it being a later game are a few elements of greater complexity:

     

• There's a small "story" at the beginning of the game about an evil wizard who died, leaving a vast amount of treasure in his fortress. The game also tells you explicitly that you're meant to collect it all.

• There are in-game instructions.

        

Dungeons and Dragons lets you select from four classes and has a little story.

     

• During character creation, the player can specify a number of levels from 5 to 15 and can choose from hobbit, wizard, elf, and dwarf characters. I'm not sure what difference this choice makes, if any. 

• Combat occurs in real-time, with enemies continually attacking regardless of whether you type in anything or not. In addition to weapon options, you have a shield.

 

Combat in the Dungeons and Dragons version.

 

• There are traps in some of the rooms.

    

And a few things that are just different:

   

• Your hit points are represented as a decimal number with 6 decimal places. (I think this is true of the other versions, too, but you only see the integer.)

• Treasure and enemies are separated. You can have rooms with treasure but no foe.

• Items in the shop aren't just fewer but are entirely different. I'm not sure what some of them do.

• The currency is in "drachmas" and "doubloons" instead of gold and silver.

     

Barring some discovery of advertisements in magazines or newsletters or word from the author himself, I'm not sure if we can solve this one. I did reach out to some potential candidates or family members of potential candidates who had passed away, so we'll see if that bears fruit. I'm equally interested in knowing if the author had any CRPG influences. I could see him being exposed to either C. William Engel's The Devil's Dungeon (1978) or Daniel Lawrence's Dungeons and Dragons (c. 1976-1977), but his game is different enough that it's more than possible he wasn't exposed to either.

   

Again, my thanks to El Explorador for his diligence in finding these uncatalogued titles that I overlooked.