The Bard’s Tale
The Private Investiblogger blew his nose and absent-mindedly pushed some half-empty mugs around on his desk. It had been a long day week month year and he was ready for a break, but the pile of old, unattended games cases weren't gonna let up any time soon. He pulled the next one from the top of the file, theatrically blew the metaphorical dust off it. The Bard's Tale. The name rang familiar. It left a strange taste in his mouth, one that he couldn't just wash down with tepid tea.
This one went back a long way, he knew. It had been kicking around, quietly, forgotten but not gone.
But how on earth it had ended up with him, he wasn't sure.
He pulled out his email folder, rifled through the backlog of newsletters, junk mail, correspondences with gents and dames whose acquaintances he once had, receipts for long-lost and broken electrical appliances. Humble Bundle. He should have known. PC & Android 7. 2013. Ticket to Ride. Anodyne. His unshakeable addiction to bulk purchases. All of it. He gritted his teeth.
There was nothing for it.
The client lead him straight there, as he knew it would, and before long he was inside. The Bard's Tale. The shape of it surprised him. It reminded him of a post-64 Zelda, maybe, or a Fable, or one of the action RPGs of yore, but it was brash and clumsy and utterly without charm. The gameplay was needlessly repetitive. The writing was terrible. Someone had clearly paid a lot of money for these lines to be delivered - hell, there were some big names in voice-acting here, names he didn't fancy messing with - but there was little in the way of entertainment value. It was all very confusing. Confusingly boring. There had to be a point to it, a purpose.
A little digging around told him "The Bard's Tale" was a 2004 product by some small-time racket known as InXile entertainment. The name wasn't known to him. The Bards Tale had been marketed as a parody game, but he didn't think it seemed very funny. There was something more going on.
The blogger tried to take pictures of his progress, but found the game wasn't co-operating with the client. He tried to push it into a window so he could screenshot it, but that wasn't working either. Someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to keep all this under wraps. Someone had a secret they didn't want getting out.
He decided to go back through the archives to find instances of "The Bard's Tale" in the news. Suddenly it became clear. This wasn't the first "The Bard's Tale" - they'd been around before. 1985. 1986. 1988. Three titles in quick succession. It seemed they'd been big hitters back in their day. But where were they now? Were they tangled in this mess, too?
Glancing back over at the file, he noticed something he'd missed earlier, something that had been hidden in plain sight all along. The three original games, right there, all in the same package. Linked together above the social media symbols. A connection which ran deeper than the title alone? He tried them out - yes, yes, they worked. They worked as if they were still meant to run on machines from the 80's, but there were games there. Text-heavy dungeon crawlers, all of them. Possibly the glory of their time, now difficult to interpret without the benevolence of nostalgia.
The blogger pondered his clues. Everything seemed to link back to one auspicious name, a name which came up time and time again. Brian Fargo.
Fargo had been there when The Bard's Tale made graphical and sound innovations for dungeon crawlers of the 80's. He'd been there again with InXile when The Bard's Tale was a bad parody ARPG in 2004. He'd confessed it all before. And what was he up to now?
The bloggers eyes went wide. Kickstarter. Of course. InXile were raising money for a new The Bard's Tale game. The Bard's Tale IV, they were calling it. It was clear to him that this case, thought cold, would never be closed.
"Rocket League?" suggested the dame from her desk, over his shoulder.
The blogger checked the time. He'd been amongst the The Bard’s Tale(s)for nearly two hours now. He was wasting his life.
"Sure", sighed the blogger. He was done with this one, probably for good. "Lets".
Next on the list is The Basement Collection.












