Game 550: Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n (1991)

 

From the company that made Seven Horror's comes another random unnecessary apostrophe.

       

Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n

"Sandor II: Kotalan and the Three Sisters"

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for Atari ST

Date Started: 27 May 2025 

           

This is my fifth Motelsoft game, and I found myself looking forward to it as it came up on the list. Since my first go at Seven Horror's (1988), I've found that the company has offered a consistent middle-range experience. None of their games so far has been amazing, and some have been downright confusing, but in general, they've done a solid job analyzing and replicating the factors that make for successful commercial RPGs. That said, I don't think I've managed to get through any of their games without getting significantly stuck at one point or another, a scenario that's doubly likely here, where the game exists only in German.

   

Sandor (1989) is the only one of their titles so far that I didn't finish. The version Motelsoft offers is freeware, and the company doesn't offer the ability to obtain a registered version. LanHawk was later able to win it and offered instructions for getting around the registration problem, but I never found time to go back to it. I found the plot impenetrable (Motelsoft's site only says, unhelpfully and incorrectly, that it's "self-explanatory"); LanHawk was able to offer a bit more, but even his account leaves a lot of mysteries.

         

The game begins.

     

At least for the sequel, we have a proper description in the instructions: A malevolent wizard named Kotalan has extorted King Salinos of Sandor by threatening to turn all his subjects to stone; he has already petrified everyone in Salinos's court except the king himself. It's unclear what he has extorted the king for; it may be an object or a person. The king has put out a plea for assistance, and heroes have arrived at his castle from various neighboring lands. The player has to assemble a party of at least four characters, visit Salinos, and accept his mission. (German readers, I would appreciate if you could visit this site and let me know if I've missed any nuance.)

     

As the game begins on an iconographic outdoor landscape, there is only one character in the party: a 28-year old woman named Tanja, a "Tranok." (Mysterious races are a staple of Motelsoft's games.) She has skill values between 3 and 5 in various weapon skills (sword, axe, bow), navigational skills (hunting cartography, negotiating), 120 provisions, 350 gold, and various attributes such as charisma, intelligence, strength, and luck. She comes with "arc gloves," "toco plate (iron)," and "talmon boots," none of which she has the strength to equip. She also has one spell: "Healing 1." I'll later find that every time you start a new game, values are rolled randomly for Tanja, and the Tanja I got here is extremely weak. It's very on-brand for Motelsoft to not offer much player choice in character creation.

      

This Tanja's starting inventory.

         

I quickly discern that the game interface is mouse-only, which makes me unhappy. I steer Tanja towards the nearest town, Kolono, which was also the closest town to the start in the first Sandor. The maps are otherwise not identical. The town has an armory, a pawn shop, a healer, a hotel, a training center, a bar, and a place where you can buy and sell trade goods like tobacco and tea. 

   

At the armory, which only sells weapons, shields, and potions (no armor), I buy a sword and wooden shield for Tanja.

    

Visiting a pleasant town.

      

In the bar, I have the option to buy provisions (I've already used 11!), talk to the guests, or recruit other adventurers. Talking to the patrons produces a couple of rumors. Scouting for adventurers results in 1 "wanderer" offering to join the party. He's a 22-year-old man of the "Hunch" race with much higher charisma, weapon skill, and strength than Tanja. I take him on, name him "Waldau," and give him Tanja's starting equipment, but he also can't equip the plate or boots. I return to the weapon shop and buy him an axe and shield.

      

Weapons and armor available in the shop.

     

Let's pause for a moment. A few paragraphs ago, I said that Motelsoft was good at analyzing successful games and incorporating their elements. Doesn't the menu town remind you a bit of Pirates!? I think the authors blended menu town concepts from completely different genres; from Pirates! they took the ability to buy and sell trade goods, the ability to recruit at taverns, and the way time passes while you're on the menu screen. (Amusingly, the game has both a 0-hour and a 24-hour, so I guess there's a 25-hour day.) They grafted it with more common RPG menu-town options like buying weapons. I'll bet some of the towns even offer the equivalent of visiting the governor.

     

On our way out of town, a man appears and says, "I am being followed! Will you help me?" We say yes and find ourselves in combat with six grünmagen, which translates as "green mages" but looks to be some kind of gnome (which makes sense). 

         

Getting slaughtered by garden gnomes.

       

Combat takes place on a 13 x 9 grid. You begin by placing your characters. As each round starts, each character has a certain number of action points, which they may use to move, attack, cast a spell, or use an item. This system was popularized by a number of SSI games, including Shard of Spring (1986) and Demon's Winter (1988), and I suspect these games are the source of many of the primary mechanics of both Sandor games. (I should note here that Motelsoft's Heinz Munter, in a 2019 email to me, said that the authors had not played these games, but I think there are just too many similarities. I think it's more likely that after 30 years, Munter forgot, or that he isn't aware that primary Sandor author Harald Breitmaier had played them.) 

   

The enemies completely slaughter us. I can't even kill one of them despite hitting him repeatedly each round. So as unheroic as it seems to say "no" to people in need, it might be necessary this early in the game.

     

The Great Wall of Sandor.

     

I spend the next few hours not so much trying to "advance" as to get a scope of the environment. The game seems to start at the top of the continent, so I move south in east-west strips. Among my findings:

   

• A school that teaches the "Cartography" skill for around 60 gold pieces per point (the price varies between the two characters, so I suspect it depends on charisma).

• There's a wall down the eastern edge of the world, with some obvious content beyond it. The only gatehouse has a freaky guard who demands a password.

      

For a moment, I thought he wanted a longsword.

     

• Other cities called Malonga, Paradiso, and Kassada. They seem to have the same options as Kolono. The shops have different stuff. (I'll figure out equipment later.) I don't find any new companions in the bars: "None of those present are interested in dealing with you."

• King Salinos's castle. The gate guard won't let me pass because I don't have 4 people.

• A couple of dungeons in which the interface turns into a very stylized first-person view. It is quite unlike Motelsoft's other first-person games. Anyway, I don't explore long. I'll have more on dungeons later.

• Some place where I have to press 4 buttons. Obviously, I have no clue here.

        

I definitely don't want to press that first one.

      

• Ringed by mountains, a different dungeon that is explored top-down. I guess the game has both. 

         

 

The second type of dungeon.

        

• A second "Cartography" school and a "Lockpicking" school.

• A place where the game seems to want me to arrange tiles into a mosaic. I think I could probably solve it, but I leave it for later. 

       

I must be missing something because this looks too easy.

       

• A ferryman's hut, where we're offered passage across a river for 40 gold pieces. This is the only way to get to the southern part of the world and several cities there.

      

There are actually two huts, on either side of the crossing.

       

• A place where they'll teach me spells. They say Tanja can learn one new spell, and I can choose between "Firebolt 1" and "Speed 1." Waldau can't learn anything. 

      

We explore so long without any random battles that I begin to wonder if the game has any. Eventually, we're attacked by a thug and a "firenip." This one goes a lot easier, and we're able to kill them with minimal damage. We earn different amounts of experience, so experience seems to be based on what you accomplish during the battle. 

      

The combat window.

     

Shortly thereafter, we get a random noncombat encounter: a group of travelers want to show us their wares. They have some potentially useful items for sale, but I need to get a handle on equipment and the economy before I spend any money. 

   

The wall down the eastern edge eventually turns west and cuts off southern territories, too, so it's clear that what I've discovered is all I have to explore. There's oddly a lot less stuff in the game world than there was in the first Sandor, and other than Kolono, none of the towns are (so far) repeated. There are none of the first game's churches, which confused me. I don't even think LanHawk figured those out.

     

Having burned a ton of provisions just getting the lay of the land, I start over. I note this time that Tanja has different statistics. Her luck and weapon skills are better; she has three spells instead of just one; and her strength is much higher. She's ugly as sin, though, which I think might affect the likelihood that others will join. I try a few more times, and the three general options seem to be a fighter character (at least one good weapon stat, good strength), a mage-oriented character, or a character that sucks at everything. I don't have any luck trying to get a balanced character.

       

My new party leader.

       

While in the process of rolling my twelfth Tanja, I get a new name: Sirus. He's much better than any of the Tanjas, with skills of 10 for sword and axe, a charisma of 9, and decent magic skill (though no spells). I visit several towns and buy him a decent kit. A guy with decent magic skill joins him; I name him Conleth. He's followed by McCann and Maisie, both of whom are more fighter characters. Equipping them is a huge pain in the neck, as there's no indication when you're buying items what strength they require. I keep wasting money on things that the character isn't strong enough to wield.

     

With four characters, we can now enter the castle, which turns out to be a first-person dungeon. "Only the most daring adventurers may come before his eyes!" a message warns as we enter. Dungeon exploration seems to follow the standard Dungeon Master style (again, mouse-only) with a compass and a stylized GTFO cluster. Special encounters appear in the environment as question marks, as they would in the later Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992). I assume enemies will not appear in the environment and combat will take place on the same tactical grid as the outdoor battles, but I don't meet any enemies here.

     

Exploring the castle.

       

My reading of the interface is that if you have someone trained in cartography, it makes an automap for you, but so far, none of my characters are trained. In any case, this "dungeon" is a very small level of only 46 squares, and the wall pattern leads me directly to King Salinos. He told us a story that recaps the backstory, but with a crucial addition:

 

Kotalan came to me in my castle. He showed me how great his power was by turning all my warriors to stone! Then, as a price for sparing the land and its people, he demanded my three daughters: Sarah, Melissa, and Laura. My pleas and begging fell on deaf ears, so after much back and forth, I gave in.

I called my daughters to me and told them of our misfortune. When Kotalan saw them, he muttered a magic spell, and in the next second, my daughters disappeared. Kotalan held up a leather pouch, laughed his terrible laugh, and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. 

        

Were they triplets?

           

"Do you want to try to free my three daughters?" the king asks at the end of his story. I honestly don't know whether I should say yes now or whether I'm supposed to build up my characters to "the most daring" first. I say yes and the face of Kotalan appears to laugh at me. I guess I deserve that.

   

I love that in a game series that forces you to play characters with names like "Monky" and "Gnorr," the king's three daughters are named Sarah, Melissa, and Laura. 

     

The town menu gives the ability to dismiss characters, even the original one, so I don't know if this will be my permanent party. But I'll see if I can build them up as I figure out more about the game.

       

Time so far: 3 hours 

 

CRPG Addict Appearance on the DOS Game Club Podcast

Hi, everyone. I thought I'd let you know that back in February, I joined four other commentators for an analysis of Ultima Underworld on the "DOS Game Club" podcast. The episode has just been released. One of my co-commentators is Richard of Pix's Origin Adventures.

 

Listen to the episode here.

 

I'm due to join them again at the end of the year for a Betrayal at Krondor discussion. 

 

Pathways into Darkness: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

The "best" ending.

      

Pathways into Darkness

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 25 April 2025 

Date Ended: 24 May 2025

Total Hours: 31

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

Summary:

     

A well-designed first-person shooter, Pathways into Darkness has a couple of light RPG elements but wasn't really suited to this blog. You play the last survivor of a commando squadron sent into an ancient pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula, where a malevolent alien being is awakening after millennia of slumber. You must fight through hordes of enemies to plant a nuclear device at the bottom level of the dungeon. Along the way, you meet the ghosts of previous expeditions (as well as your own squad-mates), loot their stuff, and get more capable with a variety of weapons and alien crystals. A number of tricky navigation puzzles and limited saving round out the difficulty in this challenging, innovative, atmospheric game.

    

*****

        

It's amazing how a couple of days' break turns "I'm done with this game" into eight more hours of play. I checked my backup drive, and I had made a copy of the Macintosh hard drive I use in Basilisk about a week before the last entry posted. My character was on "I'd Rather Be Surfing," so pretty much where I was at the beginning of the last session, although less far along than that because the first thing I had to do was travel upwards.

      

Finding the crucial violet crystal.

            

I went up two levels to "The Labyrinth" and explored until I found the violet crystal, then made my way back down. This time, instead of rushing through the next few levels, I made sure to explore every corner and find every potion so I'd have a good stock for the final series of battles. I got so paranoid about needing every possible potion that I reloaded every time I got poisoned by a venomous skitter. This was a lot. I spent most of the 8 hours reloading on those levels and trying again. There was one corridor on "But Wait, That's Not All!" where I'm convinced it's impossible to make it without getting hit at least once, but I tried about 15 times anyway. When I finally admitted failure, curing the resulting poison was the only potion I used in the entire sequence of levels. I made it to the endgame with about 15 blue potions (heal), four bubbling red potions (speed up the character), and three pale violet potions (avoid damage for a time).

      

My least favorite part of the replay.

       

Eventually, I was back to where I ended the last session, trying to take on a sequence of rooms in which a dozen or more of each enemy type appears in the same order the player encounters them in the dungeon. As you wipe out each wave, a teleporter becomes available to the next area. There are 12 areas total, with no saving or resting along the way.

   

It took me maybe five tries to get through, and it only took me that many because I was stingy with my potions even though I didn't need to be. (Keep in mind, though, that I didn't know what the rest of the game would look like after this sequence of rooms.) With as many potions as I had, I could have healed twice in most of the harder rooms, which would have been enough on its own. I had enough red and violet potions to use one of them in all of the difficult rooms and still have a couple of spares. The effects of potions, by the way, are canceled when you go through each teleporter, so you have to use them when you arrive in the room, and there's no way to time things so they're active for two rooms.

     

Wiping out the first room in 10 seconds.

    

This was my experience with the various rooms:

   

• Headless. Trivial. One use of the green crystal (earthquake) wipes out most of them, and it's easy to dodge the rest and pick them off with the AK-47. No one who has made it this far is going to suffer a lot of damage here, except perhaps for the first time, when you might arrive utterly unprepared.

• Zombies. Also trivial. Another blast of the green crystal and a few AK shots.

• Phantasms. I've accidentally been calling these things "phantoms" for the entire game. Without the violet crystal, as I discovered last time, they're damned near impossible, since no weapon hits them and the only other crystals that damage them—blue, red, and black—only damage one at a time. With both red and violet potions, plus plenty of healing, you can just make it, but it's a good thing I went back for the violet crystal. It damages multiple enemies at once, in a sort of "cone" in front of the character. With it, they're all dead in a couple of blasts.

      

I can still barely see these bastards.

       

• Ghouls. Back to easy. Another blast of the green crystal and a few shots. Of the first four rooms, the player shouldn't have to use any potions unless he fumbles the phantasm room.

• Nightmares. These are those flying fish that shoot electricity balls. They respond nicely to the violet crystal, but still, they do a lot of damage and it's easy to get overwhelmed with them. I found that I needed either a red or violet potion, or at least one healing potion, to get through this room.

• Oozes. For me, this was one of the three deadliest rooms. There are just so many of them, and they sponge so many bullets, that I needed either a red or violet potion, plus at least one blue potion, to get through it. It might have been easier if I had used HE rounds, but for simplicity's sake, I only made batches of SABOT rounds.

• Wraiths: These are the flying ghosts that can only be seen with the infrared glasses. For all that, they do very little damage, so as long as I remembered to put on the glasses (I didn't the first time, as I didn't know they were next), a couple shots with the violet crystal and my AK-47 were fine. 

         

I don't think of them as "hard," but they nearly got the best of me this time.

     

From this point forward, I learned that it was best to just use either the red or violet potion the moment I arrived, lest I make a mistake and have to replay the entire sequence.

   

• Shocking Sphere. Immune to everything but the gun, you just have to spray and pray. I usually could make it without a red or violet potion, but I definitely would have to use a blue one to heal.

• Skitters. Annoying, but they respond to the green crystal. Again, by now I was using a potion just to be safe.

     

The skitters lose their legs for a moment thanks to my green crystal.

       

• Ghasts. These are the worst. They have that "earthquake" attack, which does massive damage, and they are unaffected by the green crystal, so there's no way to disrupt them short of shooting them. When 12 of them launch that attack at once, there's really no way to survive unless you've slowed them down with a red potion or protected yourself with a violet one. Either gives you enough time to fill the room with lead. Even then, I needed a blue potion to heal.

• Venomous Skitters. Not so bad. Being poisoned sucks, but not for the amount of time it takes to clear a room. One blue potion at the end was fine.

• Greater Nightmares. This was the second-most difficult room for me. Their electricity balls can't be dodged, so you need some advantage until you can clear at least half of them.

         

I come awfully close to having to do all of this again.

     

The first time I made it through the end, I ran out of SABOT rounds in the last room, with three greater nightmares left. I had made at least a dozen magazines before I started, but you burn through ammo fast in the endgame. I had to run around the room and kill them slowly with the violet crystal. Then, after all of that, I forgot to set the damned nuclear bomb before accidentally wandering into a one-way portal back to "I'd Rather Be Surfing." Rather than make my way all the way back down, I reloaded and did it again, which took me a few more tries.

      

Note that I never used the black crystal. It instantly kills one enemy (the closest), but it leaves its corpse in place, which can screw up movement. You could even block yourself from getting down a crucial corridor with that. I don't think it's worth it. I also barely used the grenade launcher. It takes too long to load and too long to create ammunition for it. Oh, and while we're on equipment: was the gas mask used for anything?

   

Once the last Greater Nightmare is defeated, the djinn who's been orchestrating everything from the center of each room becomes vulnerable. I'm only half-joking in calling him a "djinn." Some commenters said that he's supposed to be the big alien bad guy who you're there to stop in the first place, but I don't think that's true. I think the alien is still slumbering. This guy is the spirit who came out of the bottle that the Cubans were looking for. The hint book calls him a "flaming smokey dude" and doesn't give any suggestion that he's the alien. I do wish I knew more about his backstory, though.

         

Whatever he was, he's dead now.

      

Once the djinn dies, he leaves an "alien gemstone" on the ground, which I suppose is a tick mark in the column for him being the alien, but if so, what happened to the creature that the Cubans brought in a bottle? In any event, the Cubans insisted that I couldn't escape without the gemstone, so I grabbed it. I immediately started losing big chunks of health, but I had been waiting for an excuse to use the lead-lined box that I found on a previous level, and this was clearly it.

     

This also seemed like a good place to set the nuclear bomb, which the game confirmed by allowing me to do it. I entered the code, including the new first three digits given to me by my dead compatriot. It was Wednesday at 03:29 when I set it, nearly a day and a half before the deadline. I set it to detonate in 30 hours.

 

This was about 28 hours more than I needed.

 

    

I should mention that you can't save during any of this. From the moment you enter the 12-room sequence, you can't save until you leave the level and find the first rune on "I'd Rather Be Surfing." It's a bit nerve-racking.

    

The trip back to the surface was otherwise simple. I just had to make my way from one ladder to the next, killing the rare individual enemy who had spawned since my first pass through the area. I thought the authors might have flooded the dungeon with monsters, but they didn't. I could have set the bomb for 1 hour. Because I had plenty of time and I had to go through that level anyway, I stopped on "Beware of Low-Flying Nightmares" long enough to collect the 11 gold ingots behind the locked door, for which I now had the key. A German soldier was dead in the room; his fellow soldier, Walter, had shot and killed him when he saw the gold in the room.

      

I came to save the world, not get rich, but I'm not going to complain if I get rich along the way.

       

I thought about going back to Captain Muller to see if he had any new dialogue now that I had all the gold, but I couldn't remember where he was, and none of the dead NPCs so far had responded to anything I'd done in the environment. I did verify that Captain Muller's plan wouldn't have worked; gold ingots do not fit inside the Cedar Box.

   

At length, I returned to the Ground Floor. The alien gemstone allowed me to open the door to the exterior. Beyond that was a pointless final battle against half a dozen ghouls. When I walked down the hall, the game took over, indicating that the extraction team picked me up and took me to safety. A few hours later, the bomb detonated and buried the "dreaming god."

       

The game then briefly switched to an exterior shot of the pyramid, which detonated.

      

Wait for it . . .

     

Finally, I got my endgame statistics and score. I'm not sure how much treasure I missed. I had an expert marksmanship badge (on the M-16) in the Army Reserves, so that part of me is always going to be a little irked at an accuracy rating of 68%, but honestly, I'm just glad I got through the game. 

     

How do yours compare?

     

I took a video of the final battles, setting the bomb, and escaping the dungeon (omitting most of the walking back to the ground floor). Watch below if you're interested:

     

        

After I won, I reloaded and played with some of the ways to lose the game. Each results in a simple message:

         

If you don't set the bomb in time.

If you set the bomb but don't make it to the exit before it goes off: a "Pyrrhic victory."

If you set the bomb and make it to the exit in time, but don't leave enough time for extraction.

      

As we've discussed, Pathways doesn't really meet my definitions of an RPG. The only way it comes close is the skill level that it assigns to each weapon. Every time you "level up," you do more damage, and at a greater distance. But with only two "level-ups" per weapon, and with every character essentially guaranteed to reach maximum level in all of them, it fails my fourth criteria: "Players must have some control over the rate or details of development."

   

Nonetheless, I'm glad I played it. I enjoyed the challenge. I whine a lot about how I'm not good at action games or first-person shooters, but I don't really have any basis of comparison. I'm probably better than I think I am. I had a moment in Pathways when I was leaving the dungeon. I was heading down a hallway and heard the unmistakable sound of a skitter shooting a missile at me from behind. I instinctively dodged to my left just as I heard the sound of another missile being fired by a second skitter. I waited for the first to fly by on my right, then dodged right and watched the second sail by on my left. I then turned a corner and continued on my way without even turning around. That felt pretty badass. I enjoy those moments of satisfaction when you realize that you've "gotten gud," and I appreciate a game that offers the right sorts of audio cues, visual cues, and controls to help you get there.

   

On a GIMLET, I give it:

   

• 6 points for the game world. It tells a fun, original story, backed up with environmental cues and NPC dialogue. It also leaves a few mysteries open to interpretation. I wouldn't say that the player's actions "measurably affect the game world," but otherwise, I wish most RPGs did as well with their stories. 

• 1 point for character creation and development. It barely deserves that. There's no creation, and the only development is through those weapon skills, which are essentially automatic.

• 5 points for NPC Interaction. This is perhaps the first game I've played in which all NPCs are dead. You don't often see keyword-based dialogue in first-person shooters, nor the delivery of complex lore and clues through NPC dialogue. Pathways is definitely RPG-like in this category.

     

I grew to love this part of the game. NPC lore is both interesting and vital to success.

    

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The game has a satisfying number of monsters with different strengths and weaknesses, just like an RPG. Its non-combat puzzles are less interesting, but I gave an extra point here for what some gamers call "level design," which otherwise doesn't have a place in the GIMLET.

• 3 points for magic and combat. It comes down to shoot and dodge, with some additional tactics offered by the crystals.

• 5 points for equipment. You have an escalating series of weapons, crystals, potions, and a few special use items. I appreciate that the game offers a textual description of each.

   

Some of my late-game stuff. I used the red velvet bag for treasure and the canvas bag for stuff I didn't think I'd be using again.

      

• 1 point for an economy that only contributes to your final score.

• 3 points for a main quest with no role-playing options or side-quests, but at least some alternate (bad) endings.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I thought the graphics were great here. I don't know what else I would ask for. Sure, they're clearly not "modern," but in this case, I don't know that more advanced graphics would really add anything. The keyboard shortcuts were intuitive and responsive, and the sound quality superior. I offer particular praise for the clear, informative automap.

        

I would pay extra for most 2025 games to offer such clear maps.

      

• 6 points for gameplay. It's a little bit nonlinear and a little bit replayable, but most of the points here go for the satisfying challenge and the enjoyable length.

       

That gives us a final score of 41, not bad for a non-RPG being rated on an RPG scale. I don't know what a first-person shooter addict would give it, but I think it's near-perfect for its scope and intentions, and particularly for its era. I struggled whether to subtract any points for allowing the player to enter a "walking dead" situation, as I almost did, but I don't know. My own mistakes turned a game that wouldn't have lasted much more than 20 hours into one that lasted about 30, which still isn't too bad. I don't think it's necessarily poor game design to force a player to learn from his lessons, as long as he doesn't lose too much time in doing so. I don't punish Ultima for making you wander from town to town to find a key NPC, so I'm not sure Pathways deserves any point reduction for making the game unwinnable if you similarly miss an NPC in a corridor, or use too much ammunition, or what have you. It's not like it doesn't give you enough save slots.

       

Looks to me like there's only one valid pathway.

            

Richard Mulligan offered a mostly-positive review in the November 1993 Computer Gaming World, essentially calling it a fusion of a "dungeon crawler" and id's Wolfenstein 3D. He felt that the difficulty was extremely uneven throughout the dungeon but that the interface worked great and that the game offered crisp graphics and atmospheric sound. "Overall, a job worthy of a strong recommendation," he concluded. Inside Mac Games review Jon Blum said in September 1993 that it was "one of the best Macintosh games I've ever played!" Despite that enthusiastic endorsement, he had some qualms about the difficulty; he echoes my own sentiment in saying, "I'm almost tempted to say that Pathways is too hard, but then again I did solve it."

     

Fans of Halo and Bungie's other modern games should be grateful that Pathways did so well; an old G4 article credits the title with keeping Bungie alive. Author Jason Jones took his experience with Pathways and used it in the Marathon series (1994-1996) and then the Halo series starting in 2001. (In between, was the Myth strategy series.) We won't encounter them again as a developer, alas, although they did publish Paranoid Productions' Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis, a 1996 RPG.

    

While I was researching the game and looking for solutions to my problems, I found this 28-video series by YouTube creator Jeoku, and I want to offer it particular praise. This is the way I would want to do videos if I had the time (or if I were a vlogger instead of a blogger). I've never understood the appeal of watching other gamers play games instead of playing them myself, but his "in-depth" approach is one I can get behind. As he goes through the game, he stops frequently to consider aspects of history, technology, and mythology. As he encounters each new enemy, he reviews what Bungie has to say about it in the hint book and analyzes its strengths and weaknesses. He frequently pauses to show maps and explain his strategy and to introduce outside content from articles, reviews, and message boards. It's hard to imagine more comprehensive coverage.

   

With that, we have at least emerged from the darkness. It would be funny if there were an equal number of upcoming games with the word "light" in them that I could put on the list as a contrast, but developers curiously seem to avoid it. We'll just have to metaphorically acknowledge that the light at the end of the 1993 tunnel is starting to faintly appear.

Upcoming Games: BOSS: Beyond Moria (1993), Tower of Druaga (1984), Magus (1993), Ring of Elanor (1987), Ormus Saga II (1993), Breach (1987)

It's time for another open discussion of upcoming games. The list doesn't really include any blockbusters, but maybe that means it will go quickly.

 

As usual, please do not post spoilers. This discussion is to offer:

     

• Opinions about the game's RPG status
• Tips for emulating the game
• Known bugs and pitfalls
• Tips for character creation
• Trivia
• Sources of information about the game from around the web, particularly obscure ones that I might otherwise miss during my pre-game research.

      

Here are the next six games:

    

• BOSS: Beyond Moria (Unknown, 1993, Independent): A rare roguelike exclusively for the Macintosh, this is reportedly a shorter Moria with a science fiction skin.

• Tower of Druaga (Japan, 1984, Namco): I'm aware that this one probably isn't an RPG, but so many other games seem to be based on it, that I thought I should have the experience.

• Magus (Unknown, 1993, Independent): MobyGames has this as Magus: 2nd edition, but I don't regard edition numbers as part of the title. It appears to be an independent, open-world, iconographic RPG with some roguelike DNA.

• Ring of Elanor (USA, 1987, Softdisk). I don't have a lot of high hopes for this diskmag game, but when I did a cursory review, it did seem to meet my RPG criteria.

• The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death (Germany, 1993, CP Verlag): A sequel to a 1991 game that I played 10 years ago and couldn't figure out how to win.

• Breach (USA, 1987, Omnitrend): This is a squad-based tactical game, but it supposedly allows for experience and leveling of the squad leader.

    

We'll have another one of these entries when Breach makes it to the "current" list.

Realms of Darkness: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

"Hark, good people, and let me tell you the epic tale of heroic adventurers who, braving all adversity, brought a message from a guy in jail to his brother. Hey, where are you going?!" -- some bard.

      

Realms of Darkness

United States

Independently developed; published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Released 1987 for Commodore 64 and Apple II, 1989 for MSX, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000

Date Started: 12 April 2025  

Date Ended: 22 May 2025

Total Hours: 41

Difficulty: Medium-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)    

    

Summary:

 

A fun game that combines mechanics from Wizardry, Phantasie, and text adventures, Realms of Darkness offers a consistent challenge and consistent enjoyment throughout its handful of unrelated quests. After assembling a party of up to eight characters from as many classes, the player heads out into a fairly standard fantasy kingdom (with lots of goofy anachronisms) to engage in a variety of low-key quests. Graphical outdoor and town exploration gives way to wireframe dungeon exploration. Most commands are by single keys, but occasionally a more complex puzzle must be solved with a (generally trouble-free) text parser. Combat mechanics and the spell "slot" system are drawn from Wizardry, with timing and initiative based on Phantasie. Character development is rewarding. There are no major problems with the game, but there are a few minor annoyances, such a lack of consistency in the theme and lore, the lack of any coordinates or directions in dungeons, inventory that's hard to analyze, and spells that don't work as advertised. Overall, a forgotten gem that deserves to be better-remembered.

    

******

    

I was determined to win at least one of these Darkness games this week, so when I couldn't make it happen with Journey, I put everything into Realms.

     

This troll looks like he's doing a dance move.

    

The game as a whole comprises five "acts" after character creation, starting in the small area immediately around the city of Grail:

      

1. Find the king's ancient sword, Zabin. This takes place in one of two initially-available dungeons. The sword is in two pieces. The dungeon you have to explore is three levels and about 1,070 squares.

      

2. Deal with a cursed crystal ball. This takes place in the second of the two initial dungeons, which has four levels and about 1,024 squares. You can deal with the ball by dropping a boulder on it or by convincing a pawn shop owner to buy it.

      

After you complete Quest #2, a new southern area opens up off the original outdoor area, via a bridge across a river. There are two more dungeons in this area.

     

A guard points us toward the third quest.

      

3. Kill a tyrant named Gorth. This quest takes place in one of the new dungeons, about 1120 squares. Gorth turns out to be a robot who you shut down by disabling his computer program.

       

4. Travel to the nearby city of Braddel with a message from a condemned prisoner to his brother. This requires you to go under a mountain range via a (technically) two-level but (really) four-area dungeon totaling over 1,100 squares.

     

Braddel is surrounded by a new outer world with five dungeon entrances.

    

Sounds like we'd better leave them alone, then.

      

5. Destroy the Rogue Alliance (as we've learned, the name of the game in Japan). Nobody actually gives you this quest. An NPC just suggests that, you know, maybe it's something you could do. To complete this quest, the player must:

 

a. Assemble the three-part key. Explore four single-level dungeons (about 768 squares) for the three objects and instructions necessary to make a teleporter, which takes the party to a new area.

 

b. Explore the dungeon in the new area to find eight Dragons' Teeth. This takes place across 12 levels (many of them very small) of about 1,200 squares total. 

   

A temple in the new area.

     

c. Infiltrate the Alliance dungeon and win about six fixed battles (about 320 squares). 

      

Overall, the game is about 50% larger than the first Wizardry in dungeon squares alone, which isn't as large as I expected. It feels larger, probably because it takes so long to get back to the town from some of the expeditions. 

   

When I last wrote about the game, I was in the middle of 5a. I had obtained the first of the three objects, the pyramid. I went back to the first dungeon I had explored and fed SQUARE to the misty figure (I verified that CUBE also works) and got the second piece.

     

This was the third dungeon:

        

More of an octagon than a sphere.

     

It looks like it could fit (and probably does, programmatically) into the "brackets" of the dungeon I explored last time. It is obviously not a circle, but it's as close as you can get on a piece of graph paper, so when I met a face in the wall who asked me the shape of his dungeon, I said CIRCLE and got the final object, a sphere. SPHERE also works for the riddle.

  

I want to praise the game for offering logical alternatives to the puzzles. For the most part, I didn't have to struggle with the text parser during the game. I was briefly worried about how I would follow the instructions to combine the three objects to create the teleporter, but when I brought up the prompt, all I had to type was COMBINE, and the game figured it out for me.

      

I don't know why I put a picture of doom birds here. I just felt they needed to be seen.

       

On the negative side, you can't give any of those riddle answers by typing, for instance, SAY "SPHERE" or ANSWER "SPHERE." You just type the answer literally. Later on was a puzzle in which I had to wear an ugly mask, but the game didn't recognize WEAR UGLY MASK, just WEAR MASK. So there are times in which the parser is trouble-free and times in which it isn't.

   

There was a silly puzzle—a harbinger of things to come, frankly, although we've seen the antecedents—in the spherical dungeon. There was one place where I saw a crack in the floor. Examining the crack, I saw a key stuck within it. I couldn't get it out with any commands I could think of, despite my party having hammers and poles and ropes and hooks and spells and any number of other things that you'd think would be able to extract a key from a crack in the floor.

      

I figured magic beans would be the solution to everything.

    

The game clearly wanted me to solve the puzzle with the only resource in the dungeon: a shop called Moe's Magic Shop. It sold an old shoe, a magic hat, a red herring, magic beans, and a magic wand. I wasn't exactly rolling in silver at the time; I had to grind to even afford one or two of the items. I tried the magic beans first: I somehow got the idea that if I planted them in the crack, they'd grow and the resulting plant would widen the crack, or the key would come bursting out on the top of a vine or something. It didn't work. I tried the wand next, thinking maybe it would levitate the key. No luck.

   

I couldn't figure out how any of the other items would help, but I tried the hat. When I examined it, the game told me that a rabbit was hiding inside, waiting to be plucked out. I did that, and it bounced around the room before pulling the key out of the crack. The game did not specify what happened to the rabbit after that. I rather felt responsible for it.

   

I combined the shapes, took them to the location of the star on the ground, and said SPELLBINDER (one of the proposed names of the game). There was a flash, and the party was teleported to a new outdoor area with a 3 x 3 configuration. In addition to its own patch of ground with a star, it had a temple and a dungeon. Getting back to Baddel was a simple matter of repeating the magic word on the star.

    

Moving to a new land.

         

The purpose of the dungeon was to find weapons that would actually harm the enemies in the Rogue Alliance dungeon. These weapons turned out to be eight Dragons' Teeth, usable by all of the characters. I don't know if they're the best weapons in the game, but if not, they were close enough that it wasn't worth swapping other weapons in and out once I had them (not even the machine gun, which performed remarkably poorly and didn't work on magical creatures). To get to them, I first had to make my way down several levels, so we'll start with the encounters on Level 1:

   

• Level 1 had Sherlock's Shield Shop, which sold the best shield in the game: a wooden shield. Yes, the shield hierarchy in this game goes: buckler, round shield, square shield, wooden shield.

     

What are the other shields made of?

      

• Lots of secret doors, one-way doors, teleporters.

• A bronze door had a doormat that said "Welcome." The door was locked. Under it was a silver key, which didn't open the door. When I had mapped everything and couldn't figure out a way forward, I had to find, download, and consult the hint guide. The answer was to KNOCK. You can see how that was both obvious and not obvious.

• On the other side of the bronze door was a metal door. It opened with a lever 11 squares away, but it didn't remain open long enough to reach it after pulling the lever. This was another party-splitting situation.

• A message on a door: "Watch for felines and canines!" Inside the room were "cats" and "dogs" as objects that we could pick up. 

   

Let's scoop a few up and put them in our packs. How could that go wrong?

     

Shortly after we arrived on Level 2, there was a message that said: "Scholars theorize there may be multiple universes." This was a clue to the level's gimmick, which is that three or four locations had teleport squares that swapped us between two different versions of the same level. The two levels are almost identical but have slight differences in wall, door, and trap locations. Most importantly, the ladder going up in the original "universe" becomes a ladder going down in the mirror. Until I realized what was happening, I drove myself mad while "correcting" my map. There's no indication when you switch, so I'm still not sure I mapped both halves accurately or that I explored every square in both. The whole thing was fiendish and frustrating but also quite clever. I think it was a mistake to offer the hint. Without it, I would have struggled longer and been both extra annoyed and extra impressed.

    

Setting the theme for the level to come.

     

Encounters on Level 2:

   

• A sign alerted us we were entering the "home of Gertrude the Witch." Gertrude was running around, trying to avoid a mouse. "Help me!" she screamed. We dropped the cat we picked up on the previous level, and it chased the mouse away. In turn, she took off her ugly mask and gave it to us. We never found a use for the dog and carried it until the end of the game, poor thing.

     

I feel like we should have also been able to address the mouse with one of our many weapons or spells.

     

• We soon encountered a mirror. If I didn't know that all dungeon puzzles are self-contained, and if the game had offered us anything other than the ugly mask, I wouldn't have solved this one. But lacking anything else to do, I typed WEAR MASK. "In the presence of such ugliness, the mirror explodes into a million pieces," the game said. Behind it was a concealed door. When we entered the room, some voice said, "You now possess the covered title of 'the Operator.'" 

• A message on a wall said: "Yarg this, M!"

   

Getting "operator" status allowed Cadoc to operate the elevator found on the third level. A thief had told us about this elevator. The floor it takes you to depends on the number of people in the party. Each resulting floor was a small 8 x 8, and the only thing to do on any of the floors was to find the Dragon's Tooth. But enemy encounters were really amped up on these levels, and I had a few characters die. Fortunately, I had a Sword of Life, which resurrects dead characters, and fortunately, none of them were turned to ash.

      

Is the button just extra blue, or is it attractively blue?

       

It was during these encounters that I started to get seriously annoyed about one aspect of the game: offensive spells hardly ever work. My sorcerer by now had "Fireball," "Frost Byte," "Flames," "Mass Paralysis," "Lightning Bolt," "Snail Spell" (slow), and "Insanity." My priests had "Confuse," "Blind," "Poison," "Earth Attack," and "Shock." This is my estimate from many, many trials as to the results of any of these spells:

 

• 40% of the time, no enemy is affected.
• 30% of the time, one or more enemies is affected but not killed.
• 20% of the time, one or two enemies are killed.
• 10% of the time, the spell is fabulously effective and half the enemy contingent is killed.

     

Always the message you want to see when using one of only two high-level spell slots.

     

With only a few slots per level, it's pretty annoying to waste one on any of the first three outcomes. Because of this—and perhaps this was deliberate—I found myself using defensive and buffing spells a lot more than in the typical game. The sorcerer's "Mass Invisibility," "Party Protection," "Spell Diversion," "Defensive Field," "Valhalla Power," and "Valhalla Spirit" are all fabulously effective, for instance. I found that for most of the game, a combination of "Defensive Field" and "Party Protection" made the party basically immune. (If that seems overpowered, keep in mind that I never had more than 3 castings of those spells in dungeons with dozens of encounters.) Priests had "Tower of Protection," "Chameleon," and of course various healing spells. 

         

Some of the sorcerer's higher-level spells.

     

To explore the eight levels and get the eight Dragons' Teeth, I had to spin characters off into a separate party, then send the original party down the elevator. We could explore Level 11 with all eight characters, then Level 10 with 7, Level 9 with six, and so forth, until Cadoc was eventually exploring Level 4 all by himself. Fortunately, the size of enemy parties reduced with the characters, and even though the levels offered some navigational challenges (one-way doors, pits, teleporters), they didn't take long. Three things occurred to me afterwards:

   

• I didn't actually have to explore the levels with fewer characters. I just had to shuttle them down the elevator a few at a time.

• I could have made it even easier by having every character get designated "The Operator," not just Cadoc.

• Probably not every character needed a Dragon's Tooth in the first place.

   

But I didn't think about any of those things at the time. I slowly assembled the weapons and returned to the surface. At this moment, just before we tackled the final dungeon, was the only time in the game I felt I had plenty of money.

   

I grinded a bit before hitting the Rogue Alliance, but I never got any of my characters above Level 11 and never reached Level 7 spells for any of my spellcasters. My thief never got the "sneak attack" the manual promised, or if he did, it was just calculated into his regular attack statistic and thus was never obvious. [Ed. As a commenter pointed out, a "Sneak Attack" action is clearly visible in one of my screenshots. All I can say is that it was never there when I was specifically looking for it. I don't know what circumstances make it appear.]  The friar is a completely wasted class because his vaunted unarmed attacks don't work on enemies that require magical weapons, and almost every enemy in the second half of the game does. So he ends up being a lesser fighter who gets one "Heal" spell.

    

The final dungeon.

     

The Rogue Alliance was relatively quick. Its dungeon was a single level with five fixed combats, well over half the fixed combats in the entire game. Fixed combats stay cleared, so I was able to return to town for healing after each one or two. 

   

There weren't many puzzles in the dungeon, just a lot of pits, a key teleporter, and a lever that opened a secret door. There was one area in which an ogre refused to allow more than one character to pass at a time, so I had to break up the party and ferry everyone through one-by-one.

      

Couldn't I just kill him? That's what I usually do to ogres.

     

A closet near the end had a sign that read, "The Hero's Closet." Inside were a suit of plate mail, a shield, and a great hammer, but I wasn't about to equip unidentified gear, so if those are legitimate items, I never used them. 

    

Hey! You're a poet, but you're probably not aware of that fact!

     

The final battle was with 11 destroyers, 22 centurions (in two groups of 11), 5 shamans, and 5 warlocks. It's the only battle in the game for which multiple enemy portraits appear on the screen at once. I won the first time, but it took me three tries to get through it with no character deaths. The toughest part was surviving the first round. With 43 enemies, they were bound to get a lot of the initial attacks even if initiative was rolled randomly. Once Sarogoth was able to cast one of his three key defensive spells ("Party Protection," "Mass Invisibility," and "Defensive Aura"), things got a lot easier, and by the end of Round 3, when he had cast all of them, we were practically invincible.

   

Enemies are immune to all weapons but Dragons' Teeth in this dungeon, I think. They are not completely immune to spells, but I found that offensive spells succeeded even less here than in previous dungeons, where they hardly ever succeeded at all. So I used my spellcasters exclusively for healing and buffing. Because of the room configuration, everyone could attack. It took maybe 10-12 rounds to clear them all.

     

The New Avengers.

      

When we were victorious, a screen came up that said: "Congratulations! You've defeated the Rogue Alliance!' Then the screen switched to a study with a book on a pedestal. The view zoomed in on the pedestal and showed the image at the top of this screen.

       

Thanks! I'd feel even better if there had been any information in-game that they were doing anything to bother anyone.

      

Later, I found that if I reloaded the saved game, the party could continue playing. I found a cache of eight blue ribbons in the final room; they don't seem to do anything, but you can pin them on the characters.

     

A few other notes:

   

• The Rogue Alliance battle was sensibly the most rewarding in the game, in terms of both experience and gold. Experience ranged from 1164 (Presstra, who mostly healed) to 1382 (Bilge, who did a lot of killing in "berserk" mode). Everyone got 66 silver coins. 

      

This, in contrast, was the second-most rewarding battle.

      

• I never found uses for a lot of stuff I picked up late in the game, including a brick, a silver key, a couple of gold keys, a green key, and a looking glass. I guess they were mostly spell objects instead of puzzle objects.

• The hint book tells what a lot of the items in the game do (e.g., Knife of Life, Staff of Flame, Atom Wand, Arctic Pole). Most of them cast spells in addition to serving as +1 weapons. However, I found plenty of items that the book doesn't list, including most of the wearable items (copper earrings, gold ring, silver tiara, blueberry beret).

     

That isn't terribly helpful.

    

• I never got a handle on how to tell what weapons are better than others except to judge by the sale cost.

• Experience isn't shared in the game. If 8 characters would have normally received 200 experience each for a battle, but 7 of them die, the last character still just gets 200. For that reason, it wouldn't avail the player to explore with fewer than 8 characters. If I had to do it again, I'd get rid of the friar, let the thief take the fourth combat spot, and have two priests and two sorcerers in the back. 

• I'm glad I didn't need the hint book for more, because it's not very helpful. None of the encounters, teleporters, secret doors, or traps are annotated on the maps. For the final dungeon, it provides a map but says: "No hints are offered." Did the authors forget the title of their book?

• Abacos did a great job with a StrategyWiki entry on Realms, but unfortunately his maps rely on an interpretation of color that doesn't work well for me. Abacos, if you're reading, I don't know if your hint to the KNOCK puzzle would have helped me. "Just act as if the door was a normal home door" only works if you assume it's someone else's home.

• With all of these "darkness" titles, I apparently forgot what game I was playing several times. About a quarter of my screenshots have the prefix "pid" (which I've been using for Pathways) in front of them, and a few of them had "pod" (I guess I was thinking of Pools?). I don't seem to have misspelled rogue despite multiple uses, though.

        

This is already pretty long, but I want to move on, so let's get through the GIMLET. I expect it to come out slightly north of Wizardry and The Bard's Tale for its greater complexity, but not as good as Might and Magic.

   

• 2 points for the game world. This is the biggest lost opportunity. The game has no backstory, and the player is told nothing about the world. There is no unifying quest, and the final quest to defeat the Rogue' Alliance is introduced obliquely. I don't know why the authors weren't more interested in creating a cohesive game world than introducing goofy puzzles and anachronisms. (If I were writing an RPG, I'd spent at least half the time on world-building, and I'd probably find it the most enjoyable part of the process.) I do like that the quests are small and local in nature—there's no world-ending threat here—but I would have liked to at least known the name of the world I'm adventuring in, or the name of the "king" who occasionally gets mentioned.

      

So I guess we're not even trying anymore.

       

• 5 points for character creation and development. I like the number of classes and the way that party composition creates different challenges. It doesn't, on the other hand, affect any role-playing opportunities. Development occurs at sensible intervals and does legitimately make the party feel more powerful, with extra spell slots, attacks, and occasional special abilities for some of the classes.

• 2 points for NPCs. I'll give these points for the occasional people who populate the towns, forests, and dungeons, and who occasionally offer hints in response to TALK, but these are more encounters (next category) than NPCs.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The bestiary is half-original, half derived from Dungeons and Dragons, and enemies have a satisfying number of special attacks and powers. Non-combat encounters are relatively frequent, with puzzles ranging from sensible and satisfying to goofy and annoying (the last act of the game tipping heavily towards the latter). I like the idea of a text parser in this sort of game to make more interesting puzzles, but I think the authors could have used it better. Same with the party-splitting options. It was an interesting choice to have so few fixed encounters and so many random ones.

     

One of the rogue alliance battles.

      

• 5 points for magic and combat. The game does quite well here, offering most of the options and tactics of Wizardry, minus the ability to target specific enemy parties (which lost it a point). Spell conservation takes on the same level of importance, although as above, I felt the spell balance was a bit off in the offensive category. 

• 4 points for equipment. I think there were a lot of missed opportunities here. There was no reason to be so stingy in the variety of weapons and armor offered in the game. I appreciate that there were so many usable items; there were a few times that an extra torch, healing scroll, or rainbow potion made all the difference. But I'm the kind of guy who likes more clarity in weapon statistics.

      

Cadoc's ending inventory.

     

• 6 points for the economy. I certainly can't complain that it was worthless; I was grinding for money for food well into the last quarter of the game. Other than food and healing, there isn't much to spend money on, however, and a score higher than this requires a bit more complexity to the system.

• 3 points for quests. I covered those earlier. Only one of them had any player choice or role-playing opportunities.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets most of this for the graphics, which (as we've discussed) I find goofy but endearing. Some of the outdoor scenes look nice. Sound is rare and piercing and best turned off. I didn't have a lot of problems with the keyboard interface, but it didn't allow a lot of shortcuts, either. I didn't like the configuration of movement keys (though I recognize the Apple II didn't have many better options), and the process of equipping items was a pain.

    

I tried but failed to get a full-screen shot of this guy.

      

• 5 points for gameplay. Though quite linear and not really replayable (except to try different classes), it had the right difficulty and mostly the right length. 

       

That gives us a final score of 40, which, as I suspected, is favorable in comparison to Wizardry (37), The Bard's Tale (37), and Phantasie (39), though it can't touch Might and Magic (60). It is solidly in my "recommended" zone, particularly for its year, and it definitely deserves to be remembered better than it is.

            

The title only makes sense if you regard the "realms" as the dungeons, so it's amusing that the box cover takes place under a bright blue sky.

       

It's too bad that the lack of a backstory, the silly plot elements, and a few mechanical issues keep Realms of Darkness from true greatness. Authors Gary Scott Smith and Alex Duong Nghiem seem to have specialized in this kind of irreverence, however, as their next game was Tangled Tales, which I covered 12 years ago (it got a 38). As Abacos has documented, it's really a sequel to Realms of Darkness, featuring many of the same characters, but it doubles down on absurdity. I realize many people like that sort of thing, but I'm not particularly interested in farce in my RPGs.

     

The authors got Origin to publish Tangled Tales. Nghiem bowed out of game design shortly thereafter, but Smith took contract jobs (generally porting) from Origin and was ultimately offered a full-time job. He stayed all the way through Ultima IX: Ascension. He co-designed the Runes of Virtue series with David ("Dr. Cat") Shapiro and has programming credits on many other Ultima titles. After Origin closed, he bounced around a bit and ended up at Kingsisle Entertainment, where he remains today, working on the company's MMO, Wizard 101 (first released in 2008).

    

This was easily the best game that I've played since my second pass through the 1980s, so thank you to everyone who helped me overcome the emulation problems so I could document it properly. Let's see if we can find some light on the horizon.