Things never go to plan. I had high ambitions for a lengthy period of protracted painting. But the return of my collected figures spun that on its head. Suddenly I had hundreds and hundreds of models in dire straights that needed serious tender, loving care. Not that it was an issue. It is lovely to have so many figures back in my hands, even if I cannot remember painting a fair few of them.
It wasn't the models that derailed my plans though. It was a computer game. Pools of Radiance from 1988. You must know it, or at least have heard of it, if you were involved in the fantasy scene of the 1980s and 1990s. For me, it was a name the evoked incredible mysteries and unknown excitements. And in the end, those feeling were proved correct.
I'd never played the Gold Box games by SSI. I played Eye of the Beholder in 1992 on my brand new Amiga 500 plus but for some reason the mainline Dungeons and Dragons games passed me by. Probably because I was really into graphic adventures (called the rather naff title of 'point n click' these days) like Monkey Island, Lure of the Temptress and Leisure Suit Larry; and that as a older youth in 1990s Britain I was strapped for cash and could only by one or two games a year.
Pool of Radiance and other titles like the Curse of Azure Bonds were always part of my wider gaming reading. I knew about them. They seemed so advanced and grown up on one hand on the pages of Amiga Format or Zzap64! that I didn't feel they were for me, being in my mind made for older, serious teenager gamers who so eagerly snapped up my Warhammer Cottage photocopies. As the years passed, I occasionally found older issues of '80s and '90s computer mags and saw the names of the games in the mail order listings on the back pages. Special Reserve is one that springs to mind. These were computer game wholesalers who sold great games much cheaper than the highstreet. Send a cheque and wait 28 days. Oh, the excitement when you heard that big box hit the door mat or heard the words when you arrived home from school 'oh, there's a parcel here for you!'
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| I really enjoyed seeing the monster and character art transferred to 8-bit graphical delight. They are clearly worked up from TSR's illustrations and look fantastic. |
Dungeons and Dragons was too American for me. I had Warhammer, Knightmare and Fighting Fantasy and their very British Dark Fantasy vibe. I found D&D a bit naff as a youth. Mostly because the monsters sounded a bit silly compared to the horrors detailed in Puffins 'Out of the Pit', I remember thinking that kobalds in Eye of the Beholder (and the Beholder itself) weren't really nasty enough, but later on I met the skeletons and zombies and felt much at home. The spiders in Eye of the Beholder are still terrifying to this day. I had a crack and completing the PC version of Eye during lockdown but missed on to the enchanted items that control the magical gates and got locked out of progressing. Such was the risk of gaming in that magical but brutal era.
Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, the Discworld games and Final Fantasy filled up the rest of the 1990s on my Playstation. The Xbox brought Halo, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell. I dabbled with PC gaming in the mid 90s with X-Wing, TIE Fighter and Dark Forces but the sound card faffing and lack of a decent joystick lured me away to Sony's legendary grey box.
But still the SSI games were there. In Exeter, where I read Archaeology in the later '90s, there was a wonderful old book shop. The type that don't exist now. Dusty and cluttered but packed with all manner of books. It was called something like the 'Read and Return' and the idea was you could sell your old books off, buy and read new ones and then bring them back and start the cycle again. Perfect for a university city in the early-internet age where thousands of students bought and sold massive textbooks on all subjects from Acrobatics to Zoology. Bizarrely, the back of the shop had a second room with those long dangling fabric strips you used to find in shops separating the books from jazz mags. Magazines of Gentleman's interest is perhaps a more polite term.
They were read and return too!
In this shop I was able to find old copies of Robert E Howard's Conan stories, Sven Hassel's violent but very human WW2 series and of course D&D. I remember spotting both the novel versions of the Dragonlance books (which I had read as a middle school boy in the earlier '90s and enjoyed despite my misgivings about D&D) and Curse of the Azure bonds. I can recall the cover very clearly. The female warrior, a tower and a strange lizardman with a peculiar sword. I bought the lot for a couple of quid. I devoured Conan and re-read some of my favourite Hassel books too. I never did get around to doing Dargonlance again but I did end up having a bonkers late night discussion with a girl I brought back to my room. I'd met her at some party and my room was closer. After we had finished doing the things students do when they are suddenly free of responsibility and their parents' rules, she perused my room as young people are prone to do. I remember her pulling Dragons of Winter Twilight off my shelf and standing there in her birthday suit admonishing the writers for killing off Sturm!
Perhaps D&D was more interesting than I thought!?
Some time after this I found a huge box of Forgotten Realms era games in Electronic Boutique (remember that?) called the Forgotten Realms Archives. It was a decidedly flimsy box and a real step down from the solid affairs of my Amiga years but it was packed with games. And the names of those games... they stirred up memories of airbrushed art by the likes of Oliver Frey and mystical adverts adorned with fantastical sounding adventures. Pools of Darkness. Death Knights of Krynn. Gateway to the Savage Frontier. I could almost smell the cool musty interiors of those dingy '80s newsagents.
How I miss those.
Initially I was wildly excited by my purchase. I completed Eye of the Beholder at last. And even dabbled with Pool of Radiance. But by then, Morrowind had arrived and became the fantasy RPG we have always dreamed of. My massive Archive of D&D classics went they way of most of possessions (including many of my original Warhammer figures) and ended up on eBay. It felt bad at the time losing all those codewheels, journals and maps but it seemed the end of the classic era. CD-Roms for games and later DvDs. Built in tutorials you played in game. No longer was I weighed down or excited by a weighty manual or a keyboard overlay.
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| Tactile and immersive. Modern gaming has lost a great deal in the digital era. Physical copies where wonderful things to own but a pain to get hold of back then. |
After the console years, I managed to stick with Playstation until the PS4 came out, the PC eventually came calling and I've been with it ever since. I have a beefy rig. I can run anything in Ultra settings with ray tracing on but in recent times I have found that games lack something. I find I don't actually complete them any more. Cyberpunk looked incredible but I ran out of steam. Same with Red Dead 2. The other week I bought Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and I had loads of fun before, yet again running out of steam. Too much bloat perhaps. Not much of a refined experience. The last big game I played all the way through and actually finished was The Last of Us Part 1, though I have enjoyed smaller indie horror games like Still Wakes the Deep and the Excavation of Hobbes Barrow.
Not that long ago I noticed that the Forgotten Realms Archives are now available on Steam. I saw them on sale and bought the lot. They've sat there for a while and every now and then I have had a urge to try them out, especially when painting up '80s models. It was a part of the fantasy hobby experience from our time period I missed out on and I was always planning to try them out eventually. After a first go with Pools of Radiance earlier on in the year I quickly realised I had no clue what was going on. I got lost. Suffered party wipeout a fair few times and gave up. But the game, the era and the sheer mystic of that time stayed with me and I had another crack at the game this summer, starting late July.... then 85 and a half hours later I had completed it!
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| One of my characters. Despite it's age the system is easy to navigate and use after a little practice. Make sure you slow down the game in DOSbox though, on modern hardware things are really rather zippy. |
I'd abandoned playing multiple state of the art modern games for a primitive DOS based experience and become totally hooked in the process.
So what did you get back in the day and what do you get with a digital release these days? Sadly, I don't own any of the physical materials anymore, though Stuart Klatcheff does and he has sent me a few photos of the bits and bobs in his collection. If you were buying the game in 1988 you'd have got a lovely, illustrated re-enforced carboard box that nearly all games came in in those days. Just like Citadel boxsets of yore, this was packed with artworks and onscreen snap shots of the game itself. I find these fascinating and strangely nostalgic to look at even if I never played the original games or own the models! Inside this box were the gaming materials. A manual explaining how to play, a quickstart card (remember those?) the famous codewheel for copy protection and the adventures journal that contain all the background fluff as there wasn't space for huge amounts of text in the limited code. Additionally, these entries served as a handy copy protection technique in an era when photography and photocopying was as prevalent as it is today.
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| The game world. You clear each of these blocks in turn and then return to the City Clerk for reward and further clues of where to adventure next. About two-thirds of the way into the game a wilderness area opens up and you get to explore some of the wider environs. |
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| Thanks to the Gold Box Companion you can negate a great deal of the brutal, random unfairness behind AD&D 1st Edition making the bossfights tough but very entertaining. |
demonsihing the writyers
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