Telengard

Telengard is an earlier example of a "dungeon crawler" role-playing game--albeit with a top-down view- with either real time movement (DOS version) or turn-based movement and turn based combat. Telengard is also played in real time, which means that monsters can attack even when the player's character is not moving.

Released: 1982
Platforms: Apple II Apple II Plus Atari 8-bit Commodore 64 Commodore C64/128/MAX Commodore PET FM-7 MS-DOS PC-8800 Series PC-9800 Series TRS-80 TRS-80 Model I
Genres: Adventure Roguelike Role-playing
Developers: —
Publishers: Avalon Hill
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Fantasy
Country: United States
Languages: English

About

Telengard is a 1982 role-playing dungeon crawler video game developed by Daniel Lawrence and published by Avalon Hill. The player explores a dungeon, fights monsters with magic, and avoids traps in real-time without any set mission other than surviving. Lawrence first wrote the game as DND, a 1976 version of Dungeons & Dragons for the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer. He continued to develop DND at Purdue University as a hobby, rewrote the game for the PET 2001 after 1978, and ported it to Apple II+, TRS-80, and Atari 8-bit computers before Avalon Hill found the game at a convention and licensed it for distribution.

Its Commodore 64 release was the most popular. Reviewers noted Telengard's similarity to Dungeons and Dragons. RPG historian Shannon Appelcline noted the game as one of the first professionally produced computer role-playing games, and Gamasutra's Barton considered Telengard consequential in what he deemed "The Silver Age" of computer role-playing games preceding the golden age of the late 1980s. Some of the game's dungeon features, such as altars, fountains, teleportation cubes, and thrones, were adopted by later games such as Tunnels of Doom (1982).

›Story

Nobody knows who built the great underground labyrinth called Telengard. Some say that the souls that perish there feed some unspeakable demon. Others say that it is a testing ground for wizards and warriors. Even the most seasoned of fighters sometimes do not return from the nethermost levels of the dungeon. But, like gamblers, even the most successful of adventurers return again and again down into the circular stairways tomblike corridors of Telengard, risking their very lives for gold, treasure and magical powers.

Keywords

magic
roguelike
teleportation
attributes
skeletons
treasure chest
potion
cga graphics
rpg elements
merchants
sleeping enemies

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

In Telengard, the player travels alone through a dungeon fraught with monsters, traps, and treasures in a manner similar to the original Dungeons & Dragons. The game has 50 levels with two million rooms, 20 monster types, and 36 spells. It has no missions or quests, and its only objective is to survive and improve the player character. The game is set in real-time and cannot be paused, so the player must visit an inn to save game progress.

In the early releases such as Apple II, the game world has no sound and is represented by ASCII characters, such as slashes for stairs and dollar signs for treasure. Unless the player enters a special cheat code, progress is lost upon dying.

Development

While a computer science student at Purdue University, Daniel Lawrence wrote several games for the university's PDP-11 RSTS/E mainframe computer, and one grew into Telengard. In his 1976/77 college summer breaks at home, he worked at BOCES in Spencerport, New York, where he wrote a dungeon crawl game called DND in the BASIC programming language for the DECsystem-10's TOPS-10 operating system. He had been influenced by the pen and paper role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. At college, he ported the game to Purdue's PDP-11 RSTS/E.

The game's mechanics grew from conversations at the Purdue engineering building. Part of its real-time nature descended from the need to not have players monopolize the few shared computer terminals.

Reception

Norman Banduch provided an early review for Telengard in the December 1982 issue of The Space Gamer, saying that "Telengard could have been a good game, but is marred by poor programming and lack of polish. If you don't want to rewrite it yourself, wait for the second edition".

Troy Christensen reviewed Telengard for Different Worlds magazine and stated that "Telengard is one of the finest computer games around today, it is inexpensive, full of excitement and it has the ability to intrigue both the inexperienced and experienced alike. Telengard reminds me of a mixture of adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and the boardgame Dungeon. I would strongly recommend this game to anyone who has a Commodore 64 and who enjoys adventure gaming. I don't think anyone will find this game disappointing or boring."

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

Platform	Released	Regions
Atari 8-bit	31 December 1982	North America
Commodore PET	31 December 1982	North America
Apple II	31 December 1982	North America
TRS-80	31 December 1982	North America
Commodore C64/128/MAX	31 December 1983	North America
FM-7	31 December 1983	Japan
PC-8800 Series	1 January 1984	Japan
PC-9800 Series	1 January 1984	Japan
MS-DOS	31 December 1985	North America