Gaming Saturday

AD&D: Pool of Radiance
Commodore 64/128        SSI (1988)

My favorite type of game is the role playing game genre. Pool of Radiance is the first RPG I remember playing. It came out in 1988, and my two older brothers played it quite extensively. I was only six or seven at the time, but I would sit in the room and watch them play (much to their chagrin.) After a while, I began to try playing it myself. None of us ever got very far in the game, yet it was still impressive game play at the time.

This was the first video game that was made that used the Dungeons and Dragons rule set. It took place in the Forgotten Realms universe and centered around the town of Phlan. It adhered to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules, which were the current rules being used for the tabletop dice version. The first step in the game was to create your party of six characters, roll for their stats, and name them. That took a long time! Then it was time to go and explore the town and the slums nearby.

We had the Commodore version for our old C-128. It used the old 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Needless to say, these disks did not hold a great deal of information. Since this was an epic RPG it required six or seven disks to hold all the info. You would have to flip the disk almost every time you did anything. Each time you entered or left a zone, you would have to flip or insert a disk. The disks were also password protected so you would have to use the passcode wheel whenever you wanted to play. That was always a challenge since it could be difficult to line up the symbols and read the correct code in the windows.

This was the game that started my love of RPGs and I still keep a special place in my heart for it. I would love to try and play it again sometime and it appears that there are some emulators on the web that run it. Maybe I just will try it sometime...