In 1986 I was living in my parent's house, attending classes at the Mansfield branch of OSU, and working full time as a salad bar attendant at a Brown Derby restaurant. It was a golden time of hard work, hard partying, and floppy disks for my beloved Commodore 64.
Finally, I was state of the art. However, I had yet to take on a super complex role playing game because frankly, they were intimidating when I read about them in the magazines of the time. I took on text adventures like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Nine Princes in Amber, but Wizardry was not on the C64 yet, and the only Ultima out for it at that time was III, and I wanted to start the series with I.
My hometown of Galion, within driving distance of Mansfield, had a few good sources of software among them, but to the south in Columbus was, well, everything. Thus a party/software hunt road trip was initiated on March 28, 1986 with my good friend and fellow gaming enthusiast Andy Kiss, primarily to the Toys-R-Us on Morse Road. There, a long wall of software was on display for a variety of computer systems, and the section for the C64 was the largest.
On the shelf was a shiny new package from Electronic Arts called "Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale". It looked as sophisticated as all those other RPGs I had read about, but the animated color monster graphics and the clean screen drew me in. With Andy's encouragement, I dove in and bought it.
After character creation I was free to explore the town, not really knowing what to do or where to go, but I found all the shops and had a few warm up fights in the streets before stumbling onto the first dungeon. It was quite the education from there as I meticulously mapped my way through level after level, and just doing that was enough to grind up my party without the need for too much other grinding.
Sessions continued that spring and into summer, and Andy, as well as our other friend Barry, spent time with me playing it, assisting in the mapping and note-taking. It was a warm moment of reminiscence last week when I opened the old manila folder with my maps and notes an saw Barry's detailed character sheets listing equipment and spells for each character.
That was March, but by August I had stopped campaigning in one Skara Brae and had started with another, as I took the dive and started Ultima IV, no longer concerned with starting the series at I. I made it pretty far until December, when Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight came out, and caught up in the hype, I dove into that, starting a cycle of unfinished RPGs that remains until this day.
Thankfully, inExile entertainment has revived and remastered the Bard's Tale Trilogy on the XBox One, and that is where I am making my second assault on the game. It plays fast, smooth, and slick, allowing for quick in and out sessions where I explore a little more each time, level up my characters, and let the automap do the hard work.
Checking the modern automap against my 1986 graph paper map shows for the first two dungeon levels at least, a meticulous re-rendering of the original layout, from the walls to the doors to the notes and traps. I've only found one minor discrepancy so far, and it could easily be an error I made 35 years ago.
Assuming I don't flake out this time, I expect my campaign to last into late summer. At some point I will be exploring farther than I did before and may copy the automap of those uncharted levels onto graph paper so if I finish the game then that manila folder from 1986 will be complete at last.
No comments:
Post a Comment