Akalabeth World of Doom - video game 1979

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classic retro games

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Published on April 23, 2022 1:00:32 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuMav1wJGk

Game:

Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979)

Duration: 7:36

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Akalabeth: World of Doom (/əˈkæləbɛθ/) is a role-playing video game that had a limited release in 1979 and was then published by California Pacific Computer Company for the Apple II in 1980. Richard 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[1] and as a predecessor of the Ultima series of games that started Garriott's career.

Gameplay and technology
Garriott is the sole author of the game, with the exception of title artwork by Keith Zabalaoui. 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.

The game used concepts that would later become standard in the Ultima series, including:

First-person gameplay in dungeons
Requiring food to survive
A top-down overhead world view
Hotkeys used for commands
The use of Elizabethan English
Garriott's earlier versions before D&D28b 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.
While crude by modern standards, in 1980 Akalabeth's graphics and dungeon crawl gameplay mechanics were considered quite advanced, and the game attracted a large amount of attention. And, since Akalabeth was written in Applesoft BASIC, an interpreted language, it was a simple matter for users to modify the source code to suit their needs or desires. For example, the game's magic amulet, which occasionally did unpredictable things like turn a player into a high-powered Lizard Man, or a weak Toad, could be set for "Lizard Man" with every use, progressively increasing the player's strength to the point of virtual indestructibility. One could also set the player's statistics (normally randomly generated and fairly weak to start) to any level desired. Also later Origin Systems offered the source code on their FTP servers.

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