The Bard's Tale
Name: The Bard's Tale
Programmer(s): Micahel Cranford
Publisher: EA/Infocom
Year: 1985
Description:
The Bard's Tale came out in 1985 for the Apple II and changed role-playing games forever. Created by Michael Cranford and published by Electronic Arts, this game mixed classic dungeon exploring with new ideas that made it special. Players explored the city of Skara Brae, which had been frozen by the evil wizard Mangar. Your job was to build a team of heroes, fight monsters, and save the city.
The game let you create a party of up to six characters. You could pick from ten different classes like warriors, magicians, and bards. Bards were the most interesting class because they could sing magical songs that helped the whole team. These songs could heal wounds, light up dark dungeons, or protect your heroes from enemy attacks. No other game at the time had anything like this.
Combat happened in a turn-based style where you picked what each character would do. Warriors attacked with swords, wizards cast spells, and thieves could hide in shadows. The game had over 80 different spells spread across seven magic types. You had to manage your spell points carefully because running out meant your wizards became useless in fights.
The city of Skara Brae had six main areas to explore, plus sixteen dungeons filled with traps and treasures. Each dungeon got harder as you went deeper. The game showed everything from a first-person view, which was new for Apple II games. You saw stone walls, wooden doors, and monster pictures that appeared when enemies attacked. The graphics used simple lines and limited colors, but they worked well.
What made The Bard's Tale different was how it saved your progress. Unlike other games where you started over when you died, this game let you save your party and continue later. You could even move your characters to the sequel games that came out later.
The game became one of the best-selling Apple II games ever. It proved that computer role-playing games could be as fun as the paper-and-dice versions. Many features it introduced, like automapping and character importing, became standard in later games. Games like Wizardry and Ultima came before it, but The Bard's Tale combined their best parts with new ideas.
Players spent hundreds of hours mapping dungeons on graph paper and sharing tips in computer magazines. The game spawned two direct sequels and influenced countless other games. Even today, game designers study The Bard's Tale to understand what makes role-playing games fun. Its mix of exploration, combat, and character building created a formula that games still use today.