Off-site Screenshot test poster

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.

He sold around a dozen copies before one ended up in the hands of California Pacific Computer Company, who immediately flew Garriott and his parents out west to make him a publishing offer of $5 per copy. According to Garriott, they sold 30,000, earning him a cool $150,000 in 1980 dollars.

A lot has been written about Akalabeth's origins and inspirations, notably Garriott's local tabletop Dungeon and Dragons game with his friends, early proto RPGs on PLATO and PDP computers, and the newer Apple II 3D Maze Games. Garriott's Akalabeth was the first to combine the two into a game with a top-down overworld and 3D dungeons filled with monsters.

It's primitive. Real primitive. In plot, in story, in presentation, but for what it does, in a lot of ways it was the first to do so. In playing it we'll see a lot of what evolved into Garriott's later Ultima series, and eventually Akalabeth was retconned into being part of the series directly.

We'll be playing the Apple II version of Akalabeth. The controls are... interesting.

Return for up, forward-slash for down? It made sense with an Apple II keyboard, which lacked up and down arrows.

But on a modern keyboard - or even something like the Apple IIe or IIgs, which had up and down arrows - it's slightly more confusing. That's the first of the big three challenges we're going to face in the game. The second? Food. Yeah, it's one of those games. You need food. Every step you take in the overworld, every ten steps in the underworld, you'll eat 1 food. Run out of food, you die. It's such an important resource that there are enemies who specifically exist to steal half your food, so we'll need to carry a lot with us at all times.

The third major foe that stands before us and victory is mapping. There's no automap, the dungeon graphics aren't sophisticated to be really distinctive, and trap doors abound. While the dungeons aren't big - 9x9 grids - it's really easy to get lost as a result.

So yeah. We need to map.

But on to setup. First thing we need, before we even think about our character, is our lucky number.

What's it do? A lot. This is our random seed for the game, and it'll determine our overworld, dungeon layouts, and even how well our magic works. See, everything resets when you enter a dungeon, including the combat RNG... which means if you cast a spell, the outcome is predictable based on how many rolls the RNG for your "lucky number" has made during that delve.

After that, we need to decide on which class to play.

Fighters can use any weapons. They can use magical amulets, but the spell cast when they do is entirely random. This makes playing a fighter significantly more difficult.

Mages can't use rapiers or bows, which doesn't sound too bad until you consider that the only other weapons in the games are axes and shields. However, the ability to choose which spell you cast when using an amulet can't be underestimated

BAD?? is an... interesting spell. Casting it does one of three things - cuts half of your hp, turns you into a toad (reducing all your stats to 3), or turning you into a lizard man (massive stat bonuses). Remember that Lucky Number RNG thing? If you know how many rolls it takes to get a Lizard Man result from the BAD?? spell, you can jump down in a dungeon, burn through X rolls attacking the air, then using the amulet to get the stat boost.

This is the easy way to play the game, gradually turning yourself into an all powerful lizard god. Easier, I should say... running out of food is easy, no matter how high your stats are. It's not impossible to beat the game without BAD??ing it up, it's just much more of a slog.

Our final character creation choice is stats. We'll roll for them, and it's really not worth bothering trying to get the perfect set if you're going to turn yourself into a lizard anyway. But here they are:

So. Thread. Vote for me.

What's our lucky number?
What's our class?
Are we going to seek reptilian apotheosis?
If not what stats do we want to emphasize?