The Bard’s Tale Retrospective

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen looks back at The Bard’s Tale (the original one), mostly highlighting how horrible a lack of automapping really is.

In fact, people seemed to think this now-lost art was actually a core part of the game. Take Bard’s Tale’s sequel which describes its new wilderness areas as (a mapping challenge never before seen in a fantasy game, and a whole new way to get lost). Christ. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. While viewed from the first-person, this wasn’t a true scrolling 3D environment. You pressed forward, and your trundles an entire square forward. Play comprised of taking a step forward, pausing, carefully noting with a few pencil marks the walls and then progressing, occasionally interrupted by traps, fisticuffs or trips back up to the city to heal and recharge spell-points. Our Maths lessons-sans-Maths were all about collating everyone’s work. Which could go awry: our map for the first level of the Catacombs stretched across three textbooks before we realised that the dungeon loops every 22 squares.

I never completed Bard’s Tale. The (play) key of my Spectrum +2 snapped off when I was wrestling with the multiload, leaving Hyland and Holmes to rush ahead in the three weeks it took to be fixed. Holmes got tied-up battling in Harkyn’s Castle, stuck in an attempt to grind the 396 Berserkers (When you faced off against enemies in Bard’s Tale, it arranged them into four groups. At low levels it may be (You face death itself in the form of. a Halfling). As you progress, you get things like (You face death itself in the form of. 5 gnomes, 4 orcs, 3 magicians and a Wild Dog) which does make you suspect Magnar must be the proverbial charming motherfucker to get all these diverse personages to join beneath his banner. But its all low double-digits figures until you open a certain door in Harkyn’s and get the ominous message (You face death itself in the form of. 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers). Erk!) Only Hyland persisted to the final confrontation with Mangar, where he discovered the game really hadn’t bothered with a proper end-sequence.