I was talking to Anna last night on IM. When she left, she said she was going to go play Bard's Tale and some other game. I did a double-take at Bard's Tale cause I haven't heard from that game in forever. Could a new version have come out? Sort of. They apparently bought the naming rights, but not the engine or the fiction involved.

Part of me is upset at the lifting of an honored part of my childhood for a nearly unrelated game, but the other part of me realizes: By today's standards, the original game sucked. Even the story, which they could have used, was itself pretty bland.

But once upon a time those games were the absolute best ever. EVER!

And it actually still has something over the more modern games that I've seen that appeals specifically to me: multi-character, single-player mode. Basically, I could control 6 (in the first and third game) or 7 (in the second) characters at once. Obviously they all moved together, but they fought separately (the game was non-dexterious, another benefit). It was one of my first introductions to considering inter-character relationships. Since I couldn't be all of the characters at once, the characters I created were probably the first characters I ever created anywhere.

The characters had really, really stupid names and were pretty crude in nature, but when my brother would take over the computer I'd go outside and start playing some more, playing all of the characters and have the characters talking to one another. I was never as good at it as my brother was. Though I don't think he ever solved the game, it was really fun to make copies of his characters, renaming them, and going around to thrash the weaker characters that were in spitting distance of The Guild (the starting point). Since I was aping my brother's characters (copying and renaming them), there wasn't too much challenge there so the things that could have made stuff really interesting (like characters dying) never occured. It wasn't until much later that I tried on my own, let characters die, and came up with much less pathetic names*. At that point, however, I was sixteen or seventeen and had a driver's license (not to mention a 486), so I stopped when the nostalgia wore off.

At some point a couple years back I started thinking about my characters again and trying to come up with an interesting story involving them. Unfortunately, the idea got tangled up and had too much spillover, so it'll probably never happen.

This site has all kinds of information on all three of the Bard's Tale games as well as some BT novels that were apparently written. Unfortunately, they appear to have exceeded some bandwidth limitations so a lot of the site is down presently. I'll link to it again next month when bandwidth starts anew.

I tried to get ahold of some ROMs or whatever it might take to play the old games, but unfortunately I couldn't find very much useful. There are some all-in-one copies on Amazon.com, but I'm not sure I'm willing to pay $60 for a used copy of a game that probably won't work on my system anyway. If I were that serious, I could start thinking about EverQuest.

On the other hand, the documentation alone that came with those games could well be worth the price of admission. Next time I'm down in Texas, I'll have to see what remnants of the original haven't been thrown away yet.

* - For those you dying of curiosity, in the section below I list the characters names as best I can recall them.


Dave's characters:
Monster (Warrior)
Exudus (Warrior or Palladin)
Maestro (Bard)
Father Sauchers (Sorcerer)
Illure (Wizard)

My original characters: Keep in mind, I was ten!
Killer, a warrior (I was ten!)
Clipper, a palladin (I didn't know what a "clip" was, other than that people on TV got in trouble for it so it sounded nefarious. I didn't realize that palladin meant "good guy")
Tiger, a warrior (This one was named by a friend of mine that was obsessed with tigers)
Sikic [psychic], a monk (I named him, my brother spelled it. To thi day I don't know if it was an honest misspelling or if he was making fun of me)
Kriket, a bard (The best name of the lot and my friend Frank came up with it.)

My revamped characters: I actually tried not to come up with good names so that if the characters died (which they did), they would be replaceable. But still head-and-shoulders above the original set.
Ryuj, a palladin (This was originally the name of a character on Frank's copy of the game. We meant to name him Ryan but mistyped. Looking at a keyboard, I don't know how that happened, but I actually liked the name so used it later on)
Simon West, a warrior (Simon West is some hollywood dude whose name was inserted into a really bad movie. I liked the name so it stuck).
Demonus Macbeth, a warrior (Named after a couple of characters from the Gargoyles series)
Sir Lance, a palladin (hokey, but so is being a palladin!)
Bartholomew, a warrior (For some reason, I liked this character the best.
Greenbelt, a rogue
Starnwalt, a conjurer - No idea where this one came from.