Telengard - My First CRPG
It's no secret that I'm a little bit of a retrogamer. Having come from an era where state-of-the-art meant moving a giant pixel around a maze being chased by a golden duck-looking thing, I don't need photorealistic graphics to bolster my imagination. But going back and looking at the games of the past reminds me of the good, the bad, and the very very UGLY that have been with us ever since some MIT students decided to make their oscilliscope do something more than plot waveforms.

We complain about clones and mediocrity and lack of innovation today, but a quick visit down emulation lane will remind you of two things:

#1 - There were a TON of Galaxian and Space Invaders clones, and

#2 - There were a TON of innovative games that sucked.

My first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, had only 1K of RAM and a membrane keyboard. Since storing what was on the screen would have taken pretty much all of it's memory, it instead constantly recalculated what was supposed to appear when it was idle. This meant that as you ran a program, or even pressed a key (I use the term "key" loosely to describe pressing on the membrane in the location where a key would be), the screen would blank out. All of the computer's 3.25 megahertz processing power was too busy processing to bother drawing the screen at that point.

I wrote some extremely trivial games for that machine, but it wasn't until the release of the Commodore 64 that I had a machine capable of actually playing games. I got one hot off the assembly line (for $600!), and for a while had to content myself with writing my own games, as there was no software available for it. Then the games started appearing ... mostly ports from other machines at first. And originally they were only available on cassette. Finally, though, the disk-based games started appearing (though the C-64's disk drive was notoriously slow - only slightly faster than cassette). One night I finally got ahold of an honest-to-goodness "Roleplaying Game" for the computer. At last I could practice my mad D&D skillz!

The game was called "Telengard." I enjoyed it because it was the only RPG I had - and one of very few then available for the C64.

The game began, faithful to its D&D roots, by presenting you with randomly generated stats for your character. If you weren't already familiar with D&D (or hadn't read through the documentation), you found yourself facing some confusing abbreviations: STR, INT, WIS, CON, DEX, CHR. And the numbers were obviously generated by a 3d6 roll. The numbers were re-rolled every few seconds (or you could hit a key to re-roll them immediately), leaving you only a short time to decide whether or not to keep that "character." If you could get all double-digits with at least one 17 or 18, you were golden.

Once you chose your stats, you were able to pick a character name, and off you went to the dungeon, just below the staple of almost all Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, the tavern. Why they had a tavern sitting right above the dungeon, I'll never know. In this case, it was called, "The Worthy Meade Inn." There were something like a hundred different taverns sitting at every entrance to the dungeon, with algorithmically-generated names.

Does that sound like a lot? It was. Telengard was all about algorithmically generated everything. Yes, long before Spore. The dungeon was something like 50 levels deep with a total of about 2 million rooms. Far more than could be stored in the C-64's 48,000 bytes of usable memory. So they were all calculated. This way you had a 2-million room dungeon that never changed.

I don't remember if there was actually any kind of GOAL to the game other than to survive and get very powerful. Certainly being able to make it down to level 50 was a large enough goal that I doubt very many people achieved (without dying almost immediately because they were teleported there).

Mostly, the game was taking chances with randomness. There were random monsters, random treasures, thrones and boxes which would do random things to you if you touched them, and of course the occasional random teleport which could deposit you a dozen levels below with no idea of how to escape, which was effectively the same as killing you, but with a time delay. And when you died, it would erase your character.

Yeah, we liked a little PAIN in our games back then.

It took many, many character deaths to map out a playable section of the dungeon. I'd map things out meticulously (after my first few deaths) so that my next character might have the advantage of a safe route to the next stairway down. In case he lived long enough to use it. Eventually, I started pulling my disk halfway out of the drive after I saved the game at the Inn, so I wouldn't lose my character.

I think I got about as low as level 7 or 8. Then I got my hands on better games.

Now, if you really want to experience the joy and pain of Telengard, there's a free version out now that almost perfectly re-creates the original experience... except for character perma-death. If you remember the original, or are idly curious, or have a masochistic streak, you can try it out here:

Telengard Remake

Otherwise, there are better "roguelike" games out there (like THIS ONE!) that are superior in pretty much every way today. But it is kinda fun to go back and visit the past, and I have to admit that Telengard still has some mild entertainment value after all these years.

(Vaguely) related results of a printer explosion:
* The Evolution of Computer RPGs
* But Is It An RPG?
* An RPG In A Week
* A Couple of Classic RPGs
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Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:51 AM (Permalink)