48/100
Players22 ratings

Where to get it

1979 · Richard Garriott · Role-playing

Akalabeth

In the game, the player character visits Lord British and is instructed by him to kill certain monsters. The final mission is to kill a balrog, and after this has been accomplished, Lord British proclaims that "thou hast proven thyself worthy of knighthood".

Released: 1979
Platforms: Apple II Commodore 64 MS-DOS
Genres: Role-playing
Developers: Richard Garriott
Publishers: California Pacific Computer Company
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: First person Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Fantasy
Country: United States
Languages: English
Time to beat: 21hcompletionist

About

Akalabeth: World of Doom () is a role-playing video game created in 1979 for the Apple II by Richard Garriott, and published by California Pacific Computer Company in 1980. Garriott designed the game as a hobbyist project, which is now recognized as one of the earliest known examples of a role-playing video game and as a predecessor of the Ultima series of games that started Garriott's career. Garriott is the sole author of the game, with the exception of title artwork by Keith Zabalaoui.

›Story

'Tis said that long ago peace and tranquility covered the lands. Food and drink flowed freely, man and beast lived in peace, gold and silver abounded – it was the Golden Age of Akalabeth.

Mondain, second born of Wolfgang, a great king of old, wished to gain his brother's inheritance and so he used his great powers for evil, creating deep dungeons guarded by daemons and Balrogs. Now blood flowed freely in Akalabeth, and foul creatures soon came to roam near the surface. Mondain cast such sickness and pestilence upon Akalabeth, that both man and beast lived in constant fear. Thus was the Dark Age of Akalabeth.

There arose from the land a man, pure and just, to battle the Dark Lord. British, Champion of the White Light, did battle with Mondain deep within the labyrinth of dungeons, eventually driving him from Akalabeth forever. British of the White Light was proclaimed Lord British, Protector of Akalabeth. Alas, much damage had been suffered unto the lands. The Revival of Akalabest has begun.

Keywords

procedural generation
maze
monochrome
dungeon crawling

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The game attempts to bring the gameplay of pen-and-paper role-playing games to the computer platform. The player receives quests from Lord British (Garriott's alter-ego and nickname since high school) to kill a succession of ten increasingly difficult monsters.

The majority of gameplay takes place in an underground dungeon, but there was also a simple above-ground world map and text descriptions to fill out the rest of the adventure. The player could visit the Adventure Shop to purchase food, weapons, a shield and a magic amulet; the player's statistics can also be viewed here.

Development

The game was made by teenager Richard Garriott in Applesoft BASIC for the Apple II while he was attending high school in the Houston, Texas suburbs. Begun first as a school project during his junior year using the school's mainframe system DEC PDP-11, the game continually evolved over two years under the working title DND with the help of his friends and regular Dungeons & Dragons partners who acted as play-testers. Final development of the game began soon after his initial encounter with Apple computers in the summer of 1979, on an Apple II bought for him by his father and, later, on an Apple II Plus, but Garriott did not expect that the public would see his work.

Early versions of the game used an overhead view with ASCII characters representing items and monsters. However, after playing Escape, an early maze game for the Apple II, he instead decided to switch to a wire-frame, first-person view for the underground dungeon portions of the game, making it the first computer role-playing game with such graphics. The game asks the player to provide a "lucky number", which it uses as a random seed to procedurally generate the rest of the game, including dungeons and player stats; by using the same number the player can always return to a given world. The Ultima Collection version added savegame support while still using a similar random seed.

Reception

According to Richard Garriott, Akalabeth sold roughly 30,000 units. As he earned $5 per copy, these sales totaled $150,000 in revenue, which Garriott called "not a bad return for a hundred hours of work by a high school kid".

Steve Jackson reviewed Akalabeth in The Space Gamer No. 36. Jackson commented that "On the whole, I recommend Akalabeth highly. The graphics are better than I've seen on any similar game; the program is varied and fairly logical. And it's fun".