Chrono Review #1 - Akalabeth: World of Doom

The facts

The opening screen of Akalabeth on Apple ][

• Game title: Akalabeth: World of Doom
• Master List entry: RPG #19, in the 1980 timeline
• Original release date and info: sometime in 1980, see this blog post from the Digital Antiquarian for more info
• Platforms: Apple II (1980), Windows (1998, part of the Ultima collection)
• Available for purchase: FREE on GOG
• How long to beat: 2h main, 3h main+sides, 5h completionist

Akalabeth is a game of dichotomies. There are two platforms to play it on, the original Apple ][ or the DOS port from 1998. There are two “classes” you can play as, a warrior or a wizard. And there are two ways to play the game, either the long and patient way, or the speedrun way. As a result, you can have a wonderful time playing a little throwaway game that tickles your lizard brain receptors, or deal with a frustrating slog of identical hallways, invisible traps, and an exponential difficulty curve. Regardless, the most surprising thing is that this 45-year old game, built as a fun project by a teenager named Richard Garriott, is still able to get its hooks in you after all this time.

The story

Let’s take a step back and discuss the Origin of the game. Richard Garriott was a Texas teenager who was deeply entrenched in the nerd hobbies of the time: Advanced Dungeons&Dragons and computer programming. I will not relate the whole biography of the future Lord British up to this point; instead, I suggest you check out this wonderful video by Majulaar. In his senior year of high school (or freshman year of college, the chronology is muddy) Garriott programmed a small game using the BASIC language on his Apple ][, the ubiquitous (though expense) personal computer platform of the time. This was a time before the internet, when homebrew games were not readily available, and computer games in general were few and hard to come by. Garriott was working at a computer store during the summer, and decided one day to fire the latest version of his pet project on one of the store's computers. His boss was walking by, and being very impressed with what he saw he suggested the store should sell copies of the game Garriott had titled Akalabeth (a fortuitous mispelling of a term from Tolkien's Silmarillion).

Little is left nowadays of the original release, and I couldn't find a playable version of it anywhere; but the Museum of Computer Adventure Games History has a page dedicated to the release, and you can see a pdf of the original art and manual the game came with. The game was by no means a smash hit, due to the very limited distribution network of ONE store; but one of the few copies it sold made its way to the California Pacific Computer Company, a computer software and game publisher based in Davis, CA. How the game made its way from Texas to California I do not know, but Garriott had included his address and phone number at the end of the original release, and a phone call and a handshake later, CPCC agreed to publish the game in a wider distribution, and the story of Lord British was off to the races.

For this review, I’ve both played through the GOG version, and set up an Apple ][ emulator to play the CPCC-published original version (though I strongly recommend setting the render speed to max to avoid wasting time during screen refresh). The Apple ][ version lets you earn retroachievements, while the GOG version is easier to set up and a little snappier, but has some unexpected behavior.

First clicks

The introduction to the game itself is barebones, and only the manual gives you some backstory, though it is essentially just flavor text to color your adventure. The version of the game I found on the internet archive did not contain instructions, but had some charming rudimentary graphics (potentially hiding some loading behind the scenes). 

The first illustration shown after starting the game

The second image, showcasing a dungeon entrance

Gotta be honest, you won't see anything THIS exciting while playing

The game starts by asking you a “lucky number”, representing a seed for the randomization of the game, and a "level of play", representing the difficulty of the game. Then you roll random starting values for all your attributes: hit points, strength (tied to damage), wisdom (tied to hit chance), stamina (tied to defense), wisdom (determining your starting quest), and money. You can reroll these until you get stats to your liking, and then get to pick whether to be a fighter or a mage, the latter only able to use a single weapon (the axe), the former not being able to control the result of the magic amulet. Finally, we get a shop menu, where we can buy food and weapons, before hitting the Q button to start the game. 

You are now dropped in the world without any idea of what to do, unless you have read the manual. This was the early age of home computers, where (to my understanding and research; I was not born yet) Arcade games and ports dominated the videogame market; while instruction manuals existed, the games were simple enough that you could pick up and play them without many issues. Part of the reason E.T. for Atari 2600 is considered such a bad game (it’s not) is that it is utterly inscrutable without the manual, something that was still very unusual in 1983, three years after our game got published. 

Reading the manual carefully we learn how to parse the overworld map, and recognize mountains, dungeons, and towns; and most importantly learn that we need to look for the castle: “To win the game it is necessary to visit the castle. From this point one may embark on a quest by which the game is won”. So we do just that, and start moving about the 20x20 map looking for the castle; I hope you bought enough food to start, because each step in the overworld will consume one whole ration, and if you’re out it’s an automatic game over. I’m not sure if the fault lies in AD&D 1st edition’s food rules, or Garriott’s liking of survival aspects in his real life D&D campaigns; but the need to buy a ton of food because you consume it while moving is an annoyance that will last a few more Ultima games before becoming somewhat manageable.

Not enough food? Sorry, you'll starve to death.

Let’s assume you survive long enough to find the castle. You’ll be greeted by this screen:

Oh, NOW I deserve a name since I'm in the presence of the mighty LORD *smh*

You finally get to name your character and get assigned a quest, to kill a certain kind of monster, depending on your wisdom stat. 

Seems easy enough: kill one skeleton and become a knight, 20 minutes in and out.

Lord British kindly increases your attributes by 1, and sets you on your merry way. Funnily enough, you can refuse Lord British's call for adventure, in which case he tells you to BEGONE! Nothing bad happens, and you can talk to him again, but the main quest chain goes through him, so there really isn't any point in saying no. 

The game loop

You enter the first dungeon you see, and the game truly begins. Inside the dungeon, you switch to a first-person perspective, with wireframe drawings of walls, chests, ladders, and enemies. The dungeons all have a randomly generated layout, though the “lucky number” you picked at the beginning determines the parameters that generate the dungeons, so picking the same lucky number and dungeon again guarantees the same layout. You move around the area, looking for the enemy Lord British tasked you to kill, going through doors and secret walls, and up and down ladders. Food is consumed for every action, though thankfully only 0.1 units of food are spent with every movement/attack, I should spend a few words on one of the most irritating feature of the game: a lot of walls you see are actually fake, and can be walked through, but there is nothing denoting such walls in-game, and because of the low refresh rate of the Apple ][ (and the lack of sound cues) it can be very hard to tell if you've gone through an invisible wall or are just pushing against a cul-de-sac.  

The first-person view inside a dungeon

Enemy encounters are pretty simple: you see the enemies attack you, and you can attack with a weapon from your inventory, or with your bare hands. If you're a fighter, you mainly want to use your rapier, and a bow and arrow if the enemy is away from you; as a mage, you have a choice between the axe and the kill spell on the magic amulet (which doesn't actually kill, so it should be called the "damage" spell instead...). If you manage to kill the monster, you earn some gold and, secretly, some extra HP are added to an invisible bonus pool, that you can claim when leaving the dungeon. If you run out of HP or food, you start over from scratch, as the game (at least until the 1998 port) has no save feature. There is a pleasant variety in the design of monsters, but all of them behave essentially the same: they approach you and keep attacking you until they die, or (if some conditions are satisfied) escape from you in a straight line to regen hp, in which case you wish to pursue them and trap them in front of a dead end to butcher them. 

Two notable exceptions to this (and both of them can bugger off for this) are the thief and the gremlin. The thief has a chance of stealing one of your items at random, including the one you're using to attack (there's not equipment screen in the game); if it’s one unit of food it’s not a big deal, but these jerks appear in early levels, and few things are more frustrating than having them steal your only axe, forcing you to hit with your bare hands. 

Thieves are so annoying, especially early on when your inventory is scarce...

One such thing though are the flaming gremlins, who have a chance to steal 50% of your food. Food stops being an annoyance after a couple of trips, except if you stumble upon one of these nuisances and cannot manage to kill it quickly. Facing one of them most likely will entail another trip to the surface to spend all your money on the food they stole.

... but gremlins are so flippin worse. [Screenshot taken from a source code repo, since I can't seem to encounter a single one of these jerks when I need it...]

After we kill our skeleton, we go back to Lord British to get our well-deserved knighthood. Except a lordly title is not so easily gained, and we are then tasked to kill a thief, and then a rat, and so on and so forth, each enemy being more dangerous and located deeper within a dungeon than the previous one.

He's altered the deal, pray he does not alter it further (he will)

The loop from that point on is pretty straightforward: enter dungeon, explore it to try and kill a specific monster without running out of food, climb out to restock and get an updated quest from Lord British, repeat until the last monster (the trademarked Balrog, re-christened "Balron" in the DOS re-release) has been defeated. Once you report the slaying of the Balrog the game doesn’t end, but there isn’t anything else for you to achieve besides personal objectives, like challenging yourself to go as deep as you can. 

My progress so far...

At this time I’ve beaten the game once in the DOS version (by using the speedrun/cheeky method) and I’m trying to beat it once the long way with the fighter. I’ve picked a fixed seed and a dungeon near the castle, and have been working hard to map the first few floors, so despite dying multiple times I keep a bit of knowledge with each run, and get to go a little deeper. I have now to find and kill a gremlin, and by my count (and the retroachievements list) there should be three more monsters after that.

So the game seems pretty straightforward, and it sounds like only bad luck can prevent you from a successful run, right? Unfortunately not; the issue (and the reason the game is very frustrating without using the cheeky trick) is that the quests are not repeatable and are limited, so your stats are hard capped at +10 from their starting values. And that’s only if you start with the lowest wisdom, so you get the quest to kill a skeleton first! Most characters start with higher wisdom and deeper in the quest chain, so they are more likely limited to half a dozen or so level ups. This is not quite enough to comfortably get to the lower levels with any starting character, so you really need to be patient until you roll a character with high stats but low wisdom if you wish to beat the game “the honest way”. 

I will put in a few more attempts at that (and at getting all the retroachievements) before posting the final verdict. We also still need to talk about the cheesy way to win the game. Hope you’re ready to shed your humanity for some lizard skin...

Thank you so much for reading! As one of the first posts on the blog, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. Did you play Akalabeth? Did you ever finish it without using the amulet? Do I have any hot takes you disagree with, or did I get some factual information wrong? Any good resources on the game I missed? Feel free to let me know! We'll be back next week with an update (and hopefully a review score...)