BRIEFs: Dungeons and Dragons (1979) and Castle Quest (1982)

 

The title screen and backstory in one.

      

Dungeons and Dragons

United States

Independently developed; distributed in Data Chip Issue 21, the newsletter of the Compucolor Users' Group of Rochester, New York

Released 1979 for Compucolor II

Couldn't play because: Crashes when transitioning levels  

        

After 550 games, it's not often that I find myself learning a new emulator, but here I go with the Intelligent Systems Corp Compucolor II, second and last in a brief line of computers from the Norcross, Georgia-based company. MobyGames has only catalogued one RPG for the platform—the lost Dungeon Quest (1979)—but El Explorador de RPG has turned up two others, plus one quasi-RPG, all created by members of the Compucolor Users' Group of Rochester, New York, and disseminated with the group's regular publication, Data Chip.

   

Dungeons and Dragons is the first of these, created by Steve Fram. The setup is that an "evil insane sorcerer" named Vala has stolen the Orb of Rulership and hidden it in a labyrinth, delighted that adventurers from the land of Andor will kill themselves trying to find it. The player's goal is to find the Orb on the lowest level of the dungeon, which will require him to defeat Tiamat, the "queen of all dragons." If he's successful, he "will become king, and be declared a hero and a god." That's a lot of new titles at once.

    

It took me a while to find an acceptable set of statistics.

    

As the game begins, you roll values from 3-18 for strength, constitution, and dexterity. The formula that generates the numbers rarely comes up with anything outside of a range of 6-16. You can reject as many rolls as you like.

  

After you give yourself a name, the game generates a random number of "points" (rather than gold) to spend on weapons, armor, and shields. There are three or four choices in each category, each assigned a value from 0 to 4.

 

• Weapons: none (0), dagger (1), mace (2), sword (3)
• Armor: none (0), leather (1), scale (2), chain (3), and plate (4)
• Shield: none (0), small (1), medium (2), and large (3)

   

Thus, 10 points or higher lets you get all the "best" equipment at the outset. I got 10 points or higher at least half the time I created a new character. For all that, I didn't notice much of a difference in the ease of combat when I had high-level equipment. I did notice that maximum hit points tended to be higher when I took less expensive items, so perhaps the game puts unused points into maximum HP.

   

After that, you enter the dungeon. The dungeon supposedly has 6 levels, all 20 x 20, the contents randomly generated for each new game. You start in a random location and can move about the dungeon by hitting M)ove and then a direction. Sometimes, walls block you.

    

Each square may bring some combination of monsters, weapons and armor, traps, and spell scrolls. It's usually monsters. These are drawn from the bestiary of the game's namesake: goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls, giant rats, hobgoblins, skeletons, zombies, and so forth. None of them have special attacks or defenses, but their relative difficulty is what you might expect; for instance, bugbears are a lot harder than goblins.

   

During combat, there isn't much to do except C)harge. You can flee with E)vade, but only if you've successfully D)efended for a round first. Fleeing leaves the monster on the board.

  

Combat usually takes multiple rounds. If you win, you get experience and sometimes gold. 2000 experience points gets you to Level 2, and after that the number needed for the next level grows by 1,000 per level up to the 119,000 needed for Level 15. Leveling conveys increases in maximum hit points, and supposedly to fighting ability.

      

Going round after round with a giant rat.

    

Wounds taken during combat heal by 1 point with every step; in addition, every five moves, you can R)est to heal 3 more. The source of the game's difficulty is that you encounter enemies faster than that.

     

If there are any tactics, they are found with the game's scrolls, each of which allows 1-4 castings of a spell. Some of the scrolls help you in combat: "Lightning," "Fireball", "Repulsion," an instant-kill spell that sends enemies to another dimension. "ESP" lets you see the contents of surrounding squares; "Teleport" takes you to a new part of the dungeon; "Trap Immune" lets you avoid traps; and "Healing" does what it suggests.

   

The mechanics are easy to understand, but the overall game is basically impossible. There is essentially no strategy that allows you to restore hit points faster than you lose them, particularly since wandering monsters will appear liberally in squares that you've already "cleared." Trying to restore health by wandering back and forth is marginally safer than pressing forward into unknown areas, but it's still horrifically deadly. I fielded 15 characters before I got one to character Level 2, and he died in the next battle.

   

There's no way around this difficulty, either. The game will only let you save when you go down a level, so if you manage to get a character stabilized, you constantly have to make the choice about whether to spend more time on the current level, risking losing him, or going down to the next level and saving, but knowing you'll find harder enemies there. I can't even cheat it in 2025, as the only emulator I could get working for the Compucolor doesn't have save states.

      

Crashing while trying to descend.

      

Fortunately, the game itself saves us from Dungeons and Dragons sitting in my "current" list for 16 months: Trying to go to the next level, whether you save or not, crashes the game. 

  

I can tell by inspecting the code that the game has 7 different levels of enemies. I encountered some of the Level 2 and 3 enemies on Level 1 of the dungeon, so there must be some probability that a dungeon Level 1 encounter will pick from one of the later lists. The groups are:

 

• Level 1: kobold, goblin, orc, skeleton, giant rat
• Level 2: gnoll, ghoul, zombie, hobgoblin, giant spider
• Level 3: wererat, bugbear, ochre jelly, wight, harpie
• Level 4: wraith, ogre, shadow, doppelganger, gargoyle
• Level 5: mummy, spectre, troll, minotaur, manticore
• Level 6: golem, vampire, hydra, dragon, giant
• Level 7: demon, devil, balrog, rendar, bingar (no idea on those last two)

   

The code also indicates that you can find weapons and armor better than the starting ones (e.g., holy sword, mithiril armor, adamantite shield),

      

My one level-up.

      

Finally, I can tell that when you encounter Tiamat, you can try to bribe her, and if you offer enough money, she'll just let you take the Orb of Rulership. Otherwise, you have to fight. Either way, if you're successful, you automatically leave the dungeon and are "declared a hero." The winning message is titled "congradulations" either way.

  

Having experienced only a small portion of the game, I'll leave it as a BRIEF. However, we can take three things from the experience:

   

• It's amazing how many clever programmers in this era couldn't think of anything other than Dungeons and Dragons or DND as titles for their games.

• Games designed by hobbyists for other hobbyists are far more cruel and merciless than games intended for commercial release.

• We have no way of knowing how many amateur efforts like this existed in the "dark ages" that no one preserved. 

• But enough keep reappearing that I'm apparently going to be reviewing 1970s games until I'm 70 myself.

   

This segues us to:

    

******      

    

     

Castle Quest

United States

Independently developed; distributed in Data Chip Issue 33, the newsletter of the Compucolor Users' Group of Rochester, New York

Released 1982 for Compucolor II

Couldn't fully play because: No way to save the game

         

Castle Quest offers both less and more than Dungeons and Dragons—less because of a character with no attributes other than level, more because of the style of exploration and the nature of the encounters. The dungeon has only one level with 20 rooms, but the player chooses from one of four difficulty levels each time he enters. The goal is to explore the rooms, amass 20,000 experience points, and retire.

  

Character creation has you specify a name, then purchase a shield, armor, weapon, and starting spells from a pool of 450 gold pieces. You then set the difficulty level (1-4); the instructions tell you that it should basically be your current character level. 

    

      

You're then taken to a map of the titular castle, the rooms numbered from 1 to 20. The map looks something like the one used in The Black Sage (1980), but there are otherwise no similarities in gameplay.

   

Your position on the map is represented by an X, but you don't move it around as in a traditional RPG. Instead, you use numeric commands to (1) move to any room on the map, (2) enter it, (3) exit it, and (1) move to the next one. Inside those rooms, you might find monsters that you (5) fight and chests that you (6) open and then (7) get their treasures. Spells add a little tactical variety, but it takes a while to make enough money to acquire them. As everything is done by menu, the map itself is rather superfluous.

    

Doors to rooms can be locked, requiring the "Knock" spell. They can also have traps that lock the door behind you, requiring you to (9) commit suicide if you don't have a "Knock" spell to exit. Doors and chests can both be trapped, enough to kill Level 1 characters instantly. There's one particularly horrible trap that causes you to be crushed by closing walls if you don't exit the room fast enough. This means that modern players can't use a speedy emulator because they'll miss the window every time.

    

With both traps combined, I'm definitely dead.

       

Not that surviving helps much. Over three hours, I created several dozen characters, and most of them didn't survive their first three battles. A lot got blown up when chests did; a lot died to wall traps. Castle Quest isn't any less sadistic than Dungeons and Dragons. I eventually got one character to Level 2, then noticed I was only getting half experience from battles and treasure. I upped the difficulty to 2 and promptly got slaughtered.

     

It costs 50 gold pieces to leave the dungeon and save the game. When you leave, gems and jewelry get converted to gold, and gold gets converted to experience points. When you re-enter, if you made enough money on the previous trip, you can upgrade your equipment.

      

My most successful character trades blows with something.

      

Aspects of this experience—the 20,000 experience point goal, the need to frequently enter and exit, the conversion of gems and jewelry to money and money to experience, and the overall difficulty—remind me a lot of The Dungeon ("pedit5") on PLATO. Author Rick Taubold (who went on to write and edit science fiction and fantasy; see his web site) attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his graduate degrees between 1970 and 1977, so he would have been there when "pedit5" was active. But  El Explorador de RPG contacted Taubold about the similarities, and Taubold said they were just coincidences.

    

I got this message a lot.

        

Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, Castle Quest isn't bugged. The problem is the Compucolor II emulator. The only one I can find will not actually save anything to the game disk. It will "save to the disk" in its own memory, but this effects no actual change to the disk file and thus does not survive if the browser window (the emulator runs in a browser window) is closed. Thus, to get anywhere significant in the game, I would need to accomplish everything in one session, with no deaths. That doesn't seem likely. I was desperate enough to even try MAME again, but I couldn't get anywhere. I got the ROMs installed okay and connected to the disk, but no commands I typed would get the program to run, and I kept getting MAME warnings that there was something wrong with the ROM files. "There is nothing you can do to fix this problem," it said, "except wait for the developers to improve the emulation." Nuts.