The Bard’s Tale Trilogy: Turn-based fun
No other role-playing game has filled my sleeping and waking hours more than The Bard’s Tale, from Tales of the Unknown to Destiny Knight to Thief of Faith. Well, this isn’t entirely true, especially if you consider all the RPGs that have come out for the PC and the myriad consoles. But The Bard’s Tale rules the RPG domain on the Apple II.
My Apple IIc may be dead (may the computer gods bless its merry electronic soul), but the games I loved playing on it live on in this day and age—and The Bard’s Tale trilogy are among these.
Don’t know anything about this granddaddy of RPGs? Read on.
The Bard’s Tale: Tales of the Unknown is a fantasy computer role-playing game developed by Interplay Productions in 1985 and distributed by, whoah!, Electronic Arts. This brainchild of game designer Michael Cranford is based loosely on traditional Dungeons and Dragons gameplay (yes, the tabletop, pen-and-paper, roll-the-dice type of game).
Here’s an excerpt from a short review on the trilogy:
Ever since the original Dungeons and Dragons board game came out, role-playing games captured the imagination. But with RPG board games there was always a lot of calculating, making notes, rolling dice, collecting cards, etc., involved. There were many things you have to take care of, but would prefer not to have to. This was where computers came in.
The computer took care of all the complex calculations, of all the variables, and the most important thing was you didn’t have to worry that it would try to cheat you, like some human players tend to do. Thus, the RPG genre got transferred to different computers quite early on.
Although The Bard’s Tale is a classical RPG, it’s somewhat different from other RPGs. First, you don’t get to customize characters. You need a party to go on a quest, like with every classical RPG, but you only get to select the races and the positions of party members. There are no skills, wisdom, magic or any other points to distribute either randomly or intentionally. You only create characters and make up a party to go on the quest.
A pretty gloomy review, yes, but from a 2008 perspective. If you look at the three games with the eyes of a child living in the 1980s, you’ll see that The Bard’s Tale is quite advanced. Character sprites are animated. Almost everything you see on screen is in color and rendered in 3D.
I’ll write a more detailed account about my adventures in The Bard’s Tale in a few days. For now, let me crawl the streets of Skara Brae and wait for wandering monsters to ambush my party.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You can download these games, demo or full, from any of these sites. The Bard’s Tale, however, seems to be protected by copyright, so be sure to download only from legal sources.
