Where do you start? I suppose a simple statement like – Bards Tale was quite simply the best RPG game of its time – would do the trick. Coming from a brief background of Dungeons and Dragons, and HeroQuest, any computer game which involved magic, monsters and adventure was a real draw for me. But Bards Tale had something about it which drew you in to the world, kept you playing for hours and hours on end so you could get your party of adventurers to the end of that dungeon and fight the boss guy at the end.
The splendid mix of magic, hack and slash, mapping, puzzles, items, levelling, character classes. They all construed to create a game which you quite simply couldn’t leave alone.
I remember nearly fainting with excitement at the prospect of facing 4 x 99 berserkers at the top of Harkns Tower. The vast array of monsters you could fight ranging from undead to dragons, orcs to demons, dwarves to golems, and the myriad of different items you could find to equip your party with helped keep you sucked in. This was all way before the advent of games which could do auto-mapping for you, and the prospect of not knowing where your next move might take you because you hadn’t mapped it yet on your graph paper made it all
the more intriguing.
Of course there was no animation in this game, merely images of the monsters you’d be fighting, and the scrolling combat text, but the first person graphical representation of the dungeon you were inside made mapping so much fun.
This game must have taken literally years of my life up as a teenager, and the quality of the sequel to it confirmed this games place in the history books. Die hard RPG C64 veterans will remember this game fondly – you played it with a passion, you nurtured your party of adventures up through the levels, gaining new abilities and spells. And when you’d reached the last boss of the whole game, Mangar, there was an unrivalled sense of achievement. Battling your way through approximately 20 levels of dungeons to reach the end of the game took a long time, but was so worth it. Electronic Arts certainly delivered a masterpiece with this game. So much of my later years of enthusiasm for fantasy RPG computer gaming is down to this one classic title. A must for any C64 fan!
