Sword of Fargoal

One of the dungeon adventure games released for the Commodore-64 (and the VIC-20) was Sword of Fargoal, which came out in 1982. The game was a marvel in several ways, the first being that it was a satisfying dungeon crawl contained in just 14K of memory (about the same amount of memory is used today for a 640 x 480 pixel jpg file). The game also had a dungeon randomizer, so that the adventure was different every time it was played.

Starting on the first level of an unmapped dungeon, the player would move their character into darkness to discover treasure, monsters and other dungeon features. The ultimate goal was to keep moving down dungeon levels until the Sword Level was reached. This level was usually 15 to 20 levels down, and would require a lot of strategy and fighting to get there. The Sword level was a maze, which could be really difficult to solve, especially on the first visit. At the center of the maze was the Sword of Fargoal. Once the player had the Sword, they had to climb back through the levels to the entrance of the dungeon. The player had a limited amount of time to do so (2000 seconds or 33.33 minutes). If the Sword was lost on the way out (perhaps taken by a Rogue), the player would have to venture back to the level that they found the Sword, and try to make it out of the dungeon without the timer restarting.

A great thing about Sword of Fargoal was that the game allowed the player to see into areas where they had already been, but not areas they hadn't visited yet. Monster graphics were displayed in 8x8 pixel squares called sprites. Once a monster that was close by got a whiff of the character, they would pursue with as much speed as they could muster. The player character was always faster than the monsters, but it could be difficult to evade monsters in the narrow hallways of Fargoal.

Throughout the game, players would find spells such as Light, Teleport and Invisibility to aid them in their quest. Healing Potions were much sought after, as were Enchanted Weapons and Magic Sacks, which held up to 100 gold pieces each. The game would usually start getting difficult around the seventh level or so. The Assassin was an especially tough foe that could remain invisible until they appeared right next to the adventurer. Once the game started getting harder, the player would have to be more selective as to which battles they wanted to engage in, as fighting all of the monsters would mean depletion of the player's healing potions, and subsequent demise.

Another unintended benefit of playing Sword of Fargoal on the Commodore-64 was that a person could break into the game's code, written in Basic. They could then proceed to edit the game as they saw fit, including changing the appearance and attributes of monsters.

The game's creator, Jeff McCord has made a PC-friendly version of Sword of Fargoal that is almost exactly like the original, without the long load time ;)