Sword of Fargoal

Another early game similar to the mainframe classics is Jeff McCord's Sword of Fargoal, published by Epyx in 1982 for the Commodore VIC-20 (a significantly enhanced version followed in 1983 for the Commodore 64.)

Though McCord denies having played Telengard, his game shares many of its features, such as randomized dungeons, but differs by incorporating the quest motif: descend into the dungeon, fetch the eponymous blade, and escape. Perhaps its most visible innovation is a "fog of war" effect, which obscures parts of the overhead map until the character has explored them; it amounts to an automapping tool.

However, it's really the sound effects that set this game apart. Besides the catchy ditties that play between levels, an ominous chord progression plays whenever the monsters move in the dungeon. Players can hear the monsters without seeing them, a technique that greatly ratchets up the tension. McCord acknowledges Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster Jaws as inspiration.

Sword of Fargoal has a fairly severe time limit (2,000 seconds) and is difficult to win. However, the relative simplicity of the interface makes it one of the more playable and accessible of the early CRPGs, and it was popular among gamers and critics -- indeed, it ranked on Computer Gaming World's "150 Best Games of All Time," published in 1996, and remains a fan favorite among Commodore fans.

It's recently been remade for Windows by Paul Pridham and Elias Pschernig. Jeff McCord is working with Pridham and Pschernig to release an updated version of the game for Apple's iPhone.

McCord wrote Sword of Fargoal on a Commodore PET owned by his high school in Lexington, Kentucky. It's primarily based on Gammaquest II, an unpublished dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons that McCord designed to show to publishers.

McCord's computer science teacher, a Mr. Syler, was fond of admonishing his class that there were to be "no games in the computer room." Nonetheless, the acerbic teacher recognized McCord's gift and loaned him a key to the lab, which he used during off- hours to program and play-test the game.

The finished project weighed in at a compact 14 kilobytes, an impressive feat given the depth of gameplay. McCord, the son of a computer science professor and an avid D&D Dungeon Master, was only 19 years old at the time. Incidentally, the title was originally to be Sword of Fargaol, based on the old spelling of jail. However, Epyx felt that few gamers would appreciate the somewhat obscure reference.

Although the game is well-known among Commodore 64 fans, it did not represent a significant financial windfall for McCord, who admits that he earned no more than $40,000 in royalties during its publication run. Nevertheless, Sword of Fargoal is, in my opinion, the best of the early CRPGs. Unfortunately, McCord's next project, Tesseract Strategy, was never completed, though its intended publisher, Electronic Arts, had expressed enough interest to fly McCord to San Francisco for a photo shoot.

Dungeons of Daggorath

The next two games we'll discuss, Dungeons of Daggorath and Tunnels of Doom, are examples of games that were released only on a single, relatively minor platform (the Tandy CoCo and Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A, respectively). Thus, we have an intriguing question of whether their success owes more to their intrinsic qualities or to the lack of direct competition. In any case, they are highly innovative games that are certainly worth our attention.

Dungeons of Daggorath, developed by DynaMicro and published by Tandy in 1982, offers a 3D, first-person perspective in wireframe of the dungeons quite similar to that seen in Akalabeth and Wizardry. The storyline is the standard "kill the evil wizard buried deep in a monster-infested dungeon." There are only five levels, a dozen creature types, four rings, and of course the usual shields, swords, scrolls, and torches (like many games of the era, players must carry a lit torch to see in the dungeons).

However, what makes Dungeons of Daggorath stand out is its real-time fatigue system. The system is represented by a pulsating heart at the bottom of the screen; it beats faster or slower depending on the level of stress the player is experiencing.

Taking damage or moving too quickly will cause the heart to pulse rapidly. If the heart beats too furiously, the character will faint (and likely become monster meat). This fatigue system does away with the numerical hit point or vitality systems so prevalent in other games. Instead, players must listen to the beating heart, a sound well known for its unsettling effect in horror films.

This sound effect makes for a more visceral, arcade-like experience than most CRPGs, then or now. The game was recently remade for Windows and is freely available for download.