Akalabeth: World of Doom was one of the first CRPG games, created as a side project in 1979 by Lord British himself, Richard Garriott. Then just finishing up high-school, the owner of the ComputerLand he worked at convinced him to package and sell ziplocked copies with art drawn by his mother.
So, first off? This game is almost as old as I am. I was an infant when this was released, so obviously I didn’t play it until much later. It was aged, then, and it’s worse now.
These are the controls for the Apple II version. “Return for Up, Slash for Down” makes sense if you look at the Apple keyboard.
The second big challenge we’re facing is food. You have a certain amount of food you’re carrying, and running out means instant death. That’s the big danger in Akalabeth, more deadly than combat or anything else. Keeping yourself fed.
Resource management can add a lot to a game if it’s well developed, but in Akalabeth it’s not exactly integrated into the rest of what’s going on - the economy is strange, as if your gold is just another attribute like Strength or Dexterity.
If you can manage to survive long enough to find a dungeon - any dungeon, each playthrough’s random seed provides a spate of identical dungeons - we reach the third difficulty for modern gamers… the lack of a mini map. This is a persistent issue through early dungeon crawlers - the player is responsible for any and all tracking of where they are. And this is tricky, as there’s not enough variability in the graphical representation to keep from getting lost very easily.
This here is a picture of the “overworld” game map:
What we see here is a 3x3 tiled screen with the player in the center as the plus sign, squares for forests, the tesseract lookin box is a castle, and the weird scraggle fractals are mountains.
Easy enough, but a lot of the time your map looks like this:
No landmarks, just flat plains to try and find a town or a dungeon before your food runs out. And that’s really the biggest challenge the game has to offer. Once you’ve found a town with a nearby dungeon, you have the rest of the game sorted, because all entrances to all dungeons lead to the same random dungeon layout.
From this point you just delve into the dungeon, killing monsters (which spawn in the same point for each delve) and gaining HP each time you leave. Killing a monster as Lord British requests results in a small stat boost that is dwarfed by a spell that will randomly turn you into a toad (reducing stats to 3) or a serpent-man (giving major stat boosts each time.)
Sounds like a gamble until you realize that the random number generator runs on the same seed each dungeon trip, so a spell cast on turn 9 of your delve will always have the same result.
Is it necessary to play the game? Yes.
So that’s it. That’s the process. Find a town, find a dungeon, delve and raise your stats until you need to return to buy food. Repeat endlessly.
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