Akalabeth: World of Doom

Akalabeth is one of the earliest Apple II computer roleplaying games. It was developed by Richard Garriott when he was around 19 years old.

In 1979 […] I was working at ComputerLand. The real benefit of working at ComputerLand was that I had access to an Apple II, and I was able to write games on it.

The owner of the store, John Mayer, told me, “Richard, […] we really need to be selling this on the store wall.”

An early version of the game had already been written by the time Richard started working at ComputerLand but it was at this store where Akalabeth was first sold. Richard had access to a computer terminal at school, then his father bought an Apple II for the home and later an Apple II was also purchased by his school. (A terminal computer looks like a normal computer but all the actual number crunching happens remotely on a mainframe, in this case a PDP-11).

Prior to making Akalabeth, Richard used the school terminal to write 28 small CRPGs and test programs, named D&D1 to D&D28. Gariott rewrote D&D28 for the Apple II which allowed him to add graphics. Initially this rewrite was named D&D28b before it became Akalabeth. Due to the experience gained making the previous 28 D&D games, Akalabeth was quite refined on release, at least for computer games of the time.

You can see a youtube playthrough below.

The game was sold directly in the ComputerLand store and later picked up for distribution by the California Pacific Recruiting Company.

Setting

Akalabeth is commonly refered to as Ultima 0 in the Ultima series of CRPGs. The game invites the player to explore the world by moving around a top-down map drawn with simple lines on a black background. Upon finding a dungeon the player can enter and at this point the presentation switches to a 3D first person view where the player can fight monsters and find treasure.

The game starts with a screen that displays the following text to introduce the world.

Many, many, many years ago the Dark Lord Mondain, archfoe of British, traversed the lands of Akalabeth spreading evil and death as he passed. By the time Mondain was driven from the land by British, Bearer of the White Light, he had done much damage to the lands.

‘tis thy duty to help rid Akalabeth of the foul beasts which infest it, whilst trying to stay alive!

Mondain appears in many of the Ultima games which is one of the reasons why Akalabeth is often grouped with that series.

Goal

The goal of Akalabeth is to become a knight by hunting and killing a series of monsters for Lord British. Once you defeat the last monster, at the highest difficulty setting of the game, the virtual Lord British requests that you report your win to the real-world Lord British; Richard Gariott.

Here’s a screenshot of the win screen taken from the DOS port of the game.

Character Creation

A new game invites the player to first choose a “Lucky Number”. This number is used to seed the random number generator (RNG) which determines how the dungeon levels will be laid out, as well as actions that make use of RNG such as opening chests, using amulets and so on.

Then the player is asked to chose a difficulty value from 1 to 10, this is used to determine the hitpoints each enemy has.

Next, the stats for the player character are rolled and displayed with an option to reroll, if the player isn’t happy with them. Once the player accepts the stats they’re asked if they want to play a fighter or a mage and the game begins.

These are the stats in Akalabeth with descriptions taken from the instruction manual.

• Hit Points - amount of damage the player can absorb before dying.
• Strength - influences damage against monsters.
• Dexterity - influences chance to hit a monster.
• Stamina - influences player defense against monsters.
• Wisdom - “This attribute is used in special (quest!) routines”
• Gold - “Money!! Cash!! Assets!!”

These are standard Dungeon and Dragons inspired stats. After confirming you’re happy with the stats you have a choice of character class:

1. Fighter
2. Mage

Fighters can use any weapon in game, whereas Mages are more restricted. When a mage uses an “amulet” they can choose a spell to cast, for fighters a spell is chosen at random. Fighters are the harder class to play.

Here’s the character creation flow:

The final stage of character creation allows the player spend their gold to buy weapons and provisions. All items in the game can be bought from the shop without restriction. This is uncommon in CRPGs, accessing new items is part of the standard CRPG progression but it’s not a feature that started here.

Akalabeth also tracks your character’s name but you don’t type that in until you first encounter Lord British in the game world.

Control Scheme

A platforms physical controls shape the type of games that get made for it. Akalabeth was controlled via the Apple II keyboard. This was before keyboards became somewhat standardised. The best image I could find of the original Apple II keyboard is below.

Notably there are left and right keys but no up or down. Above the left and right keys is the “Return” key and that’s why Akalabeth uses it for forward movement and the slash key is used to move back for the same reason.

The other controls are:

• x enter location
• s display character statistics
• a attack (only available in dungeons)

The other interactions in the game are handled via menus and typed input prompts. For instance to use the amulet, you press a to attack, then type m to “attack with amulet” and then a numbered list is displayed allowing you to choose how you want to use the amulet.

Exploration

The game starts with an overworld map known as the wilderness. These days it’s a little hard to parse but the character is a small + in the center of the screen, surrounded by various line drawings that represent mountains and other geographic features.

A group of four squares is a shop and a cross is a dungeon. On the wilderness map there’s no combat but each movement consumes food when there’s no food left the character dies. The wilderness contains multiple shops and more food can be purchased there. When you move on to a special grid square you can press the x key to enter it.

Entering a dungeon switches the display from an overhead perspective to a first person view, using simple line based graphics.

The dungeon can be explored by moving around a tile at a time. The left and right key turn the player around to face a different direction and the forward and back keys advance or retreat along that direction. Dungeon exits are shown as ladders and these are activated by pressing the x key. To go a level deeper into the dungeon the player needs to find a ladder embedded in the floor or a hole. To go up you use a ladder in the ceiling.

The player can walk over a hole and nothing happens, it has be interacted with to use. If the player press x then the character drops down the hole to the lower level. This differs from a ladder because there won’t be an immediate way to return to previous level.

Dungeons have doorways but you can just walk through using the forward and back keys. Other CRPGs of the era often required a special interaction such a press a key to kick the door. Grid spaces in the dungeon may contain chests and these are opened by simply walking on to them. The log area at the bottom of the screen informs the player about what they found in the chest. Commonly this is gold, described as “Pieces of Eight” in game. Chest also contain items such as amulets, shields etc. Monsters and chests can both exist on the same tile in a dungeon, so you need to kill the monster before you can access the chest.

The dungeon layouts are randomly generated but are persistent for the duration of the playthrough. The seed for the generation is taken from the lucky number the player chose at the start of the game. Despite being random generated if you enter a dungeon you will start next to an exit tile, so there’s some consistency in how the world is linked together.

Sidenote: In the MS-DOS port all dungeons are the same, this was not true of the original Apple version.

Dungeons have no limit to how deep you can venture. You can also step on a trap which will deduct some hitpoints.

Inventory

The inventory is a list of predefined slots multiple items of each type can be collected:

• Food
• Rapier
• Axe
• Shield
• Bow and Arrows
• Magic Amulet
• Gold

Given the way Akalabeth is written hitpoints could also be included in this list but as they feel thematically different, let’s not. Only fighter characters may use rapiers or bow and arrows. This is an early example of class based restriction of items. Therefore the wizards in Akalabeth may only use axes which does some interesting world building on it’s own!

Systems

The systems in Akalabeth are derived from D&D. The main loop is combat, finding loot and buying equipment at a shop. There is no way to sell items at shop, the player may only buy.

Slightly more novel systems include food/starvation and a magic system based around the use of amulets, rather the D&D Vancian magic system. Many early RPGs did not have quests or objectives but in Akalabeth doing Lord British’s missions are front and center and the game is better for it.

Food

Moving in Akalabeth uses up food. If you run out of food you starve. One food point is deducted per move in the wilderness and 0.15 points are removed per move in the dungeon. The amount of food is always displayed in the bottom right of the screen.

To get more food you can visit a shop from the wilderness and exchange gold for food. One gold buys 10 food. In this way the game requires you to regularly surface from dungeons and go to shops to avoid starving. Any deep dungeon dives require the player to first purchase enougn food.

Combat

On encountering an enemy in the dungeon you can press a to attack. Once you’ve chosen to attack you’ll be asked to chose a weapon, if you have no weapons you can press h for hands. Otherwise it’s r for rapier, a for axe, s for shield and b for bow. These attacks all have different stats with the rapier being the best.

The game includes a bows and therefore a ranged combat system. The player can attack with the bow at any time in the dungeon and an arrow will shoot up to 5 squares in the direction you’re facing. Axes can also be thrown. The magic amulet may be used to perform a ranged magic attack. Each time the amulet is used, it has a 25% chance of being removed from your inventory.

Combat is round based: you do your action, the enemy does a counter action and so on until combat is resolved or you’ve run away.

Special Abilities

Not all the creatures are big bags of hitpoints with a name; some have unique features.

• Gremlins - can steal half your food. A mechanics that’s not all that fun.
• Thieves - can steal food or any other item you’re carrying.
• Mimic - disguised as a chest.

Advancement

Experience levels do not exist in Akalabeth. Instead, hitpoints are gained by exiting a dungeon according to how many monsters you defeated. The number of hitpoints rewarded is according to how deep the player ventured and the enemies encountered.

As the Digital Antiqurian puts it “The game has no concept of healing or of some theoretical maximum hit-point value; hit points are simply a collectable commodity, like gold.”

This is an interesting diversion from D&D hitpoints but from a mechanics perspective it’s mostly an historical oddity.

Lord British increases all attributes by one point when he gives a quest.

Amulets can be used to give a chance to transform into a lizardman and this multiplies all stats by 2.5 including hitpoints! This can be perform multiple times but the transform spell comes with significant risk.

How the amulet works depends on your class. As a mage, when you use an amulet you can choose to cast a spell but as a fighter the spell is chosen randomly. If you choose the spell “Bad?” you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting the lizardman transformation. Unfortunately the other two possiblities are “Toad” that sets all of your stats to 3 and “Backfire” that halves your hitpoints. This makes amulet-advancement a risky strategy, given that players couldn’t save and load in the original Apple II version of the game.

Quests

The wilderness doesn’t just have shops, dungeons and mountains; it also has Lord British’s castle. When you enter this location you can accept a quest from Lord British. The quests are all of the same shape; go and kill monster type X. You’re helping clear the land of evil and in a way this reminds me of the Witcher, although we’re still a few years off from these books being written.

Here is Lord British’s kill list:

1. Skeleton
2. Thief
3. Giant
4. Orc
5. Viper
6. Carrion Crawler
7. Gremlin
8. Mimic
9. Daemon
10. Balron / Balrog

Once you have your target, you can head off to a dungeon and perform the basic dungeon loop; explore, kill, loot, shop until you find the creature in question and dispatch it.

You can then return to Lord British to collect a reward and get your next assignment. This quest structure repeats until you’re assigned to kill a Balron (the first version of the game used the name Balrog). When you return to Lord British for the final time he’ll deem you worth of knighthood. You can continue to play but from that point on, you have won.

Legacy

Akalabeth is the game that launched the Ultima franchise which goes on to have a big influence on modern gaming. Akalabeth certainly has a number of enduring traits such as a fondness for using Elizabethan style-English, the recurring Lord British persona of Richard Garriott, Lizard men and the Mondain character who returns in several of the Ulitma games.

Ultima was one of the first CRPGs on consumer hardware and therefore a greater potential reach compared to the earlier CRPG limited to the PLATO system.

Overworld Map

Mechanically a lot of similar things have been done earlier on PLATO but one innovation that seems novel is the introduction of an overworld map. This is a game trait that pops up often in JRPGs and is popular throughout the genre.

3D

Akalabeth is the first 3D CRPG for consumer hardware. It’s a similar style to that seen in earlier PLATO CRPGs such as Moria but developed independently. The fact that a similar view and control schemes were developed in two different places suggests it’s something other developers would also probably have eventually invented.

Release Date

The are numerous release dates proffered for Akalabeth. Richard comments directly on the dating in this quote from The Digital Antiquarian.

However, I wrote it in 1979 at the end of high school, before college. Then with the encouragement of friends and most importantly John Mayer the owner of the local Computerland, where I worked summers, I invested in my own zip-lock version of the game, which sold 12-25 units. Shortly after I was contacted by California Pacific who offered to distribute it nationally. They did in fact sell 30K units.

Down through the years, I have occasionally stated both 1979 and 1980 as the release date of Akalabeth. Clearly 1980 is accurate. But the game, in fact was created in 1979. It’s core code was in fact made on a PDP 11 (if memory serves) from the few years previous, using a teletype as the output. The final teletype version was called D&D28 becuase I wrote (mostly in notebooks and a few fully typed in) 28 D&D like games. D&D28B was the original name for Akalabeth… in 1979!

For the details I’ve chosen to use the 1979 date but the Apple II as the platform and BASIC as the language as that’s how it was eventually distributed. For this game there was no discrete release point, so I’ve simply chosen the earliest.