When home computers arrived on the scene in 1979 they ignited imagination and creativity the world over. Just prior to their arrival Dungeons & Dragons had taken the world by storm and role-playing enthusiasts couldn’t wait to translate their table-top experiences to this new electronic medium.
The result from 1979 to 1983 were a wide variety of games as developers fumbled about in the dark for a bit. There were two prominent early issues: the hardware limitations imposed on the developers and how to best translate the role-playing experience to machines.
One popular form that appeared in these early years was that of a text adventure and role-playing game hybrid. I’ve experienced and shared many iterations of this particular format. The first of its kind, Eamon, appeared in 1979. Eamon allowed you to create a character which can improve from adventure to adventure as he or she gained experience, spells, and special items. It was so popular that over 270 individual Eamon adventures have been written by various authors. What is even more amazing is that Eamon was a shareware product that was never released commercially.
There were also commercial releases that came later that would use and experiment with this same type of format. Morton’s Fork and Balrog Sampler in 1980 are two that were well done. Doom Cavern, though a largely unfinished product, upped the stakes a bit and allowed you to control three different character classes in this medium. It left one wanting more. Oldorf’s Revenge and The Tarturian would put their own original mark on this role-playing / text adventure hybrid as well.
Swordthrust, published in 1981, was Donald Brown’s commercial equivalent of Eamon. It sported an even more complex combat system as well as other new bells and whistles. It was quite good and there would ultimately be seven separate adventures created for the engine.
We fast forward now to 1983 with the commercial release of Might & Magic: Lava Pits of Aznar.
It too is a role-playing text adventure hybrid. However it is likely the BEST of all the previous games mentioned if it weren’t for the fact that you can’t finish it. There is a computer glitch or error that prevents the player from completing the game. I’ll discuss this in more detail later.
Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar was written by Rick Hoover and published by Sanctum Software for the Apple II in 1983. I can find no other games authored by Rick Hoover, much to my disappointment. There is no relation to the more famous Might & Magic series which would come later and Might & Magic creator Jon Van Canegham had nothing to do with this particular title.
The game is rather large; certainly larger than any of its predecessors. Character creation and the use of class skills in the game is where this offering shines. You can choose between an elf, dwarf, hobbit, or human as well as your alignment: chaotic, evil, good, or neutral. You can then choose to play a Warrior, Wizard, or Thief. Each class comes with a specific set of skills that you can only use through skill points. Your character will actually gain several experience levels as the game progresses. You gain experience for correctly working through puzzles and/or situations, finding treasure, and for combat. Your hit points and skill points both increase as you gain levels. You will need these skill points in order to use your skills or cast spells to move past obstacles found in the game.
I absolutely fell in love with this game. This hybrid model has always resonated with me and in my opinion Rick Hoover gets everything right. I got almost to the very end and unfortunately could not finish the game. Now whether this is a result of the emulation or whether it’s an actual bug that exists within the game I cannot say. But I loved the experience so much that I went back and played the game almost to the end trying all 3 of the different class choices.
If you choose a Thief your class skills include: climb walls, back stab, find trap, sneak, and pick lock.
If you choose the Warrior your class skills include: power leap, tower of will, battle lust, and death blow.
If you go the route of Wizard your spells include: burning hands, protection from evil, magic dart, sleep, spider jump, read languages, heal, magic rope, light, wind gust, lightning bolt, magic bridge, flesh to stone, animate dead, and open lock. Your spells work much like the class skills from the other two classes except that instead of skill points you have spell points.
What I found to be amazing and highly entertaining were the high number of different solutions you could use to get by various obstacles in the game. I really enjoyed playing through the game using the different class types. It created three very different experiences.
When you enter a new location it is described through text and then you have a status bar up above that keeps you apprised of your character’s health. You must monitor your hunger status as well as sleep status. When hunger or sleep moves from a + sign to a # or @ sign then you must eat or sleep or perish. The status bar will also let you know how many Power Points (skill or spell points) that you have, whether you have a light source on or not, and what time of day it is.
The setting takes place in an old fortress situated at the top of a volcano and the writing throughout the game is very good. The situations that you find yourself in, the puzzles and traps, and your opponents that you have to overcome are all very well done. It bears repeating that this particular hybrid experience for me was head and shoulders better than all that have come before it.
The huge disappointment is that an error or bug in the game didn’t let me finish it. The error occurs once I reach what the program refers to as Level 4 of the fortress. Any dungeon denizen that I encounter on that level automatically strikes first and will always do the exact amount of damage as my current hit point level. So it did not matter if I was at 55 hit points or 36 hit points; that first blow would always be the exact amount needed to instantly kill me. I always found myself in a shaft near the end and my encounter with a Wight causes me to perish every single time. I took all three character classes to this exact point in the game and encountered the same problem.
I used a hex editor to peer into the program and it appears that I was very close to the end. Once I exit the shaft I would have found myself in a library and then in an encounter with the High Lord (the big bad) . Once the High Lord is defeated you can then obtain the Golden Amulet of a Crescent Moon and exit the fortress via a Golden Door (the golden key you find in a hidden attic). I spent so much time with it and was so close to the end that I’m going to call this a win.
I saw that my esteemed colleague, the CRPGAddict ran into the same issue but then a reader was able to fix the programming issue so that Chester could continue. The reader also supplied the supposedly “fixed” disk copy HERE however I still encountered the same issues. I tried the original side 2 disk and the “fixed” side 2 disk with the same results every time. I am disappointed that I did not get to the final encounter nor see the final end screen but I still immensely enjoyed the experience. If the game worked properly I’d even go so far as to say it would be up for some kind of Game of the Year award or at the very least deserve the distinction of being a must play undiscovered gem. I haven’t read or encountered any description of anyone completing the game during the era nor is there much to find about it; which makes me wonder if the bug existed upon release of the game.
It would be very easy for me to offer room by room solutions or almost a complete walkthrough but I’d love for you to experience the game on your own if this sounds like something that would interest you. I know there are many text adventure fans and fans of this hyrbrid model and if you have not played this you are in for a real treat.
Next up on the docket is Maze Master from the author who would later give us the Bard’s Tale.
Until next time…
Are you sure that CRPGAddict had the same issue as you? The article you link to describes his problem as the game hanging rather than the immediate death that you encountered during the first fight on Level 4.
Leaving that aside, I wonder if the problem you ran into is a deliberate anti-piracy feature rather than a bug. Software piracy had become a huge enough issue by 1983 that games programmers were taking fairly drastic steps to make their games pirate-proof. In his 2003 book, “On Game Design”, Chris Crawford described how, in one of his military simulation games, he deliberately set the value of one of his military units to be invalid so that the game would crash just before the end of the game. Only if the copy protection code was still in place would the correct value be loaded into the military unit …
It is an interesting point William and you raise a valid question. I wish I could answer it to our satisfaction – and your point raises an entirely new area that we’ll be dealing with as we move forward as well. Even with this problem – I still want to point out that I took tremendous enjoyment from the game. Thanks as always for your thoughts
I’m probably going to try this one when I hit ’83, so I’ll take another crack at the mystery of the crashing game.
It doesn’t even have to be a copy protect issue; sometimes people just made bad copies with some bits off. There was one game I played from ’81 that required me changing a single byte in the source code which had a corruption.
Well I’m going to keep my saved games and hope that you can solve the issue one day then Jason. There was meant to be a sequel which never came to be; probably from the result of poor sales. If this was an issue during the game’s release then not many would have finished it.