Retro: Tales Of The Unknown: The Bard’s Tale
The Bard’s Tale wasn’t the first computer role-playing game by any
measure, but its conversion-from-DOS was the first any of us had
actually played. The previous Spectrum fantasy games were grown from
first principles of what a videogames should be, with D&D as an
indirect influence. Conversely, following on from Ultima and Wizardry,
Bard’s Tale was an attempt to – basically – be Dungeons and Dragons on
a home computer. It was a particularly American desire, it seemed.
When I was interviewing assorted developers about D&D’s influence, Big
Huge Games captured the zeitgeist elegantly: “Back in those days I’d
say the holy grail of teenager boys learning how to program was to
figure out how to ‘make the computer play D&D’. Because if we could do
that, what else would we ever need?”.
Read Retro: Tales Of The Unknown: The Bard’s Tale
for the complete review.
