My OTHER First CRPG
A while ago, I talked about the first computer role-playing game I ever played - the notorious Telengard. We're probably talking the summer of 1983 here.

But I may have been fibbing. I don't really know for sure. At some point, around this time, I played another CRPG on the C-64. It may have come before Telengard, or afterwards. I can't say for sure. In fact, until last week, I couldn't even tell you the name of the game. I did some scouring of the Internet to find any record whatsoever of this obscure little entry point into the wild and wonderful world of computer RPGs.

Be advised, my memory of the details here are very vague. Though, through the miracle of emulation, I managed to relive the pain experience.

The Dungeons of Magdarr
The game was called The Dungeons of Magdarr. It wasn't available in stores - at least so far as I can recall. No, this little gem was a mail-ordered special from an outfit called "Aardvark Software" or something like that, which advertised text adventures and little arcade-style games in a quarter-page ad in the pages of Compute! magazine. The tiny screenshot vaguely resembled the Wizardry perspective. Since there was, at this point, no word of Wizardry actually getting ported to the C-64, this poor-man's equivalent sounded awesome. And the price was right --- I think the games in the ads only ran something like $15 to $25.

So here was a cheap Wizardry clone! Ka-ching! Color me there. I spent my lawn-mowing money and waited the 3-6 weeks for delivery.

As I can recall, the game arrived in packaging that resembled a Zip-Lock bag. The manual was photocopied page of instructions. This was kinda old-school even for 1983, but I didn't worry about it much. I was ready to dive in! I'd been waiting YEARS for the chance to play D&D on the computer. Well, two years, since I'd discovered D&D in 1981. But this was it!

Kinda.

The interface just to roll up a party was... clumsy at best. Sometimes it expected a full name to be typed in, and other times a first initial was preferred. You went through the usual CRPG conventions of the time - endlessly rolling the dice until you saw a set of statistics that looked good, and then you'd turn them into one of the characters for your party.

And yes, it was a party-based game.

The game would convert your character into a 30-character string, like "bolton@@aabeaba@e@@b@bb@@@@@ci". Yessir, all the details of your characters (including an 8-letter name) stuffed into 30 bytes. That's 1983 for ya! If you had trouble saving the characters to disk, you could just enter the strings manually again in future game sessions, with an added advantage that typos might really cheat up your character!

There were some cute little bits of personality during the character-creation stage that were interesting. Occasionally a god would bless your character with maximum hit-points or something along those lines. Most of the gods were taken from historical pantheons, but re-playing it I found that the god of sex, "Gonaddo," might intervene.

Exploring the Dungeons
The game itself... what can I say? It could all be summed up in one word: Boring. Even when compared to... well... nothing. I could never finish the game.

Not to knock the efforts of the authors, Rodger Olsen and Bill Atkinson, who were probably a couple of high-school seniors or college students at the time. It was a paint-by-numbers D&D game written in BASIC that had dungeons that were scrawls of featureless hallways. Occasionally you'd stumble across a treasure chest (which might be trapped) that would ask who tries to open it. Or you'd encounter monsters, which went through the party one character at a time asking, "Does X fight the Y?" Answering with a "Y" keypress rewarded you with a question to choose which weapon you would use. "S" for sword (if you had one), "B" for bow (if you had one and weren't too close), "M" for mace, etc. Then you'd be invited to hit "any key" to strike to get the results of that character's attacks.

Monsters, stairs, treasures. And that would repeat infinitely until you made it to the end of the dungeon... which was, at least, only on the third level. I know this only because I looked through the source code --- I couldn't bring myself to actually play the game that far. You'd trigger a boss encounter and... something would happen. Who knows? Maybe I missed out on one of the best RPG endings of all time.

But I don't think so.

And bugs! Replaying the game last week, I found that I'd get stuck trying to buy more equipment in an infinitely looping menu. Brilliant stuff! Maybe there was a keyword or something that I'd missed, since the documentation was long-gone, but still - this was pretty horrible even in the early days. Being able to find and play the Dungeons of Magdarr again served to remind me that did not everything that came out in those days was classic material. In fact, just like today, 90% of everything was crap.

This just happened to be something from the forgotten 90%.


(Vaguely) related wanderings:
* Telengard - My First CRPG
* Can CRPGs Age Gracefully?

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink)