#dunjonquest

[vintagerpg]

Beware the minions of the Insect God! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking back through videogame history at The Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985), the classic remake of the original 1979 game and its two expansions. Apshai is maybe (depending on the criteria) the first dungeoncrawler videogame and one of the earliest videogame interpretations of Dungeons & Dragons. The Trilogy also has a rad instruction manual full of great art that, all these years later, is still worth the price of admission on its own.

[oldschoolfrp]

Temple of Apshai -- one of the first ever computer RPGs originally released in 1979 (ad in Dragon 63, July 1982, when computer games came with 56-page lore books or novellas and what became the “PC” standard was still “IBM computers”)

[retrocgads]

USA 1986

[vintagerpg]

Hellfire Warrior (1980) is the direct sequel to Temple of Apshai and explores the regions below the temple. As you can tell from that amazing cover art, it considerably ups the ante. The four dungeons are the Lower Reaches of Apshai, the Labyrinth, the Vault of the Dead and the Plains of Hell. Scary stuff!

There is some added complexity with new items, shops and an addiction mechanic. Two of the levels — Labyrinth and Hell — don’t have room descriptions, which is a bit of a bummer (though understandable). The essential gameplay is the same though — explore, kill monsters, get stuff. The final level has a princess to rescue (she’s a heavy inventory item, which, jeeze guys) but no formal story or end state for the game.

All the illustration work for the game is by Lela Dowling, who I believe eventually went into comics. Its all absolutely perfect here, I think. That minotaur! That cover! Her signature is real familiar, and I wanna say she’s done work for some tabletop RPGs, but I can’t bring it to mind. Fantasy Trip, maybe? GURPS?

There are two expansions for this one: Keys of Acheron (1981) and Danger in Drindisti (1982). Acheron has some cool features, but that is a story for another time!

[vintagerpg]

I enjoyed doing the vintage videogame posts last year, so I am back with some more this week. First up, Gateway to Apshai (1983). I believe this is the last of the original DunjonQuest games (not counting the Temple of Apshai Trilogy remake) from Epyx. It is a sort of remix of the formula that aims to keep up with the new advances in console technology — this is on a floppy, but it was also available on a cartridge for home consoles. That means it is a more streamlined experience, since the game was going to played using a joystick of some sort (can you call the weird telephone that was the ColecoVision controller a joystick?). So the RPG elements are streamlined quite a bit to focus on the action and the game plays FAST.

Like, almost ridiculously so. There are eight levels. There are something like 7000 rooms in the game. But you’re timed, so if you last on any given level for five or so minutes, you automatically progress to the next level, until you get to level 8, which is endless. Its fine! But it lacks a lot of the stodgy charm of the previous games. I particularly miss the room descriptions. There isn’t a lot in this booklet.

I love the cover though. A lot of Epyx games use this Tron-esque neon styling for the cover art — probably most iconically in their edition of Rogue. More neon wireframe videogame art please.

[vintagerpg]

The Keys of Acheron (1981) is the first expansion for Epyx’s Hellfire Warrior (which I posted about back in December).

It’s kind of interesting, because up to this point, all the DunjonQuest games were sort of the story of one character (I say sort of because you only get that info in the manual, not in the actual game). Keys switches it up — this time you are tasked to find four gems (one for each level) so you can defeat the evil demon Kronus (the illustration of whom, I believe, was done by the game’s designer, Paul Reiche III). The twist here is that Kronus is actually pursuing you through the levels (similar to the demon in the last level of Hellfire Warrior), which adds a new sense of urgency to the proceedings.

Like Hellfire Warrior, only two of the levels have room descriptions — the Abode of the Dragon and the Crystal Caves. The other two, the Temple in the Jungle and the Shadowland of Kronus are up to you to navigate without help. I kind of hate that. It made sense for the labyrinth and the hell plane in the first game, but I really would like descriptions for the temple in the jungle! Apparently, though, because the first game was designed to not have descriptions in the second and fourth levels, that had to be true of the expansions, because code or something. Programming, man! It’s for the birds!

[vintagerpg]

This is the Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985), which remakes the original Temple of Apshai and its expansions, Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra. From the year 2021, you have to squint hard to see the improvements, but they were there and probably felt miraculous at the time, judging from my experience with other games of the period. The play is the same, though. And because technology is amazing sometimes, you can play it in your browser over at the Internet Archive, or grab it for  like 3 bucks on Steam!

I’ve posted generally about the game and specifically about the booklet before, so you can look that up in the feed. All this week’s posts were the byproduct of my hopes to fine more art work by Mike Mott, who illustrated the booklet. Today, though, let us celebrate the box. My original copy of the box and the disks is long gone — I just have a tattered copy of the booklet, one of my most treasured gaming-related possession, honestly. But I recently acquired a new copy of the box and, my goodness. Just look at it! So burned in my heart and brain is this box that it feels like it has always been in the house here, despite it being absent for, I dunno, thirty years? What a strange sort of ghost.

Anyway, that cover painting is fantastic. A greyscale version of it front the booklet, but seeing it in color again is a bit of a revelation (despite the overall feeling of familiarity the box gives me). The painting is by Ken Macklin, who to my understanding was part of the underground comix scene in California. His most recognizable work is, probably, the cover art for Maniac Mansion, or the large amount of work he did for the Bubsy games. Nothing I’ve seen really reaches the height of Apshai Trilogy, though.

[vintagerpg]

Tabletop RPGs and commercially available videogames were basically happening at the same time. Folks making RPGs recognized the potential for computer versions of their games early on and, in fact, the first computer versions of D&D, dnd and pedit5, both for the PLATO teaching system, appeared in 1975. Temple of Apshai (1979) was one of, if not the, first dungeon crawl videogame for home computers (Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth saw a limited informal release in 1979, but Apshai beat it to commercial release).

I’ve waxed ecstatic about Apshai before. It is a fantastic little game for the time, featuring a series of four dungeons totaling over 200 rooms among them. You basically explore them, fighting monsters and finding treasures along the way. The rooms in-game are just walls and a black floor — you have to check out the manual for evocatively written room descriptions. I kind of love that.

I picked this up specifically in the hopes that the manual had more art by Mike Mott, who did all the interior illustrations for the manual of the 1985 remake. No such luck! Though Karen Gerving’s illustrations have a charm to them — they remind me a bit of one of the artists who did work for the Petal Throne box set, actually…

Oh, and these are on tape, which is novel. My mom saw them and could not wrap her brain around the idea of programs on tape (we never had a tape drive) and that struck me as amusing for some reason, since she was an adult when they were a thing, you know?