Beneath Apple Manor

Beneath Apple Manor is the first commercial, mass market CRPG. Up until this point playing a CRPG required access to either PLATO or a mainframe computer and such access was restricted to a relatively small group of people. Beneath Apple Manor was released on the Apple II, which was available to the average person willing to buy one.

Don Worth wrote the game in 1978, while working at the University of California, very shortly after the Apple II came out. Beneath Apple Manor is in many ways a roguelike, yet it predates Rogue by a couple of years. Beneath Apple Manor is also an originator game, it builds on the Apple II’s Dragon Maze example but Don had not played any other CRPGS (or been aware of any) prior to writing the game.

As a game it’s pretty simple though not very playable for a modern player.

Goal

The goal of the game conforms to a classic pattern of early CRPGS: find X. In this case the X is a golden apple. The manual gives a little more color saying it is a “magical focus” and source of power.

Finally, in a dragon horde many levels below Apple Manor you may even find the ultimate object of your quest, the fabled golden apple.

Gameplay Video

Here’s a playthrough of 1978 version and some discussion of the game in general.

Start Game Flow

The game begins with a splash screen showing the name of the game, followed by a few questions:

Something has gone wrong generating this figure

The settings state asks the player three questions:

1. How many rooms per level?
2. Black & White or Color?
3. Difficulty Factor?

Rooms per level isn’t a meaningful choice to give the player but there it is. Black & White vs Color is the choice between ASCII type representation of the levels vs colored blocks. This isn’t a meaningful choice now but at the time not everyone necessarily had a color monitor. The difficulty factor is a number you chose between 1-10 that tweaks monster stats.

The dungeon generation state is a screen that’s displayed while the dungeon is generated.

Once dungeon generation is over, you’re placed into the game and you can start playing.

Character Creation

There is no character creation in Beneath Apple Manor. You cannot even name your explorer.

The player character has four stats:

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Intelligence
• Body

These all have an initial value of 20. This is an early CRPG and it doesn’t follow the standard stat conventions. Each stat is it’s own pool of points that are spent for doing various actions or when certain events happen. Body is equivalent to hitpoints. Attacking drains your strength. Running drains your dexterity. Zapping and teleporting drains your intelligence. You can regain points in the stats by resting or leaving the dungeon.

If you look in the code these stats are defined on line 320:

EXP=0:PSM=20:PS=20:PIM=20:PI=20:PDM=20:PD=20:PBM=20:PB=20:PA=0:PW=0

Beneath Apple Manor is mostly written in a Integer BASIC, the : allows different statements to be written on the same line. The first variable defined is EXP which is experience. Then PSM which probably stands for “Player Strength Max”, followed by PS which probably stands for “Player Strength”. During the game when strength is reduced, it will reduce the value in the PS variable and when it’s increased there’ll be a check to make sure it doesn’t go over the max PSM. Then it’s the same pattern for Intelligence, Dexterity and Body (hitpoints). The final two are PA probably “Player Armor” and PW probably “Player Weapon”. When you find a weapon or armor these numbers increase.

Exploration

Beneath Apple Manor built on this concept for a single-player game by randomly generating the dungeon levels and only allowing you to see the area next to your character. Monsters could be moving all over the place outside your immediate vicinity and you wouldn’t know it.

The keys to move around are based on the compass directions; N, E, S, W. You can also press T to teleport to a random position, at a cost of 10 intelligence points.

The game is top-down and grid-based, and you can choose between an ASCII-like version or one that uses blocks of color to represent the world. The “world” is a series of dungeon levels, viewed one at a time, standard early CRPG fair. The levels themselves are procedurally generated. The dungeon is “infinite”, as long as you can survive you can keep going deeper.

At the beginning of the game you can only see the tiles neighbouring the character and as you move from one tile to another more of the dungeon tiles are revealed. This is like an early fog of war and comes from the earlier Dragon Maze example demo for the Apple II.

The dungeon occasionally has doors and you can use B to attempt to break down a door or K to attempt to kick it down. Both these actions reduce your strength by 1. A door must be kicked or broken each time you want to move through that space, this is a legacy of D&D. You can also press L to listen at doors which reveals enemies on the otherside. Not all enemies are revealed by listening, enemies such as ghosts are soundless.

You can use the I command (for Inspect) to search for secret doors. Inspecting causes a turn to pass.

You can encounter chests and chests may be locked. If a chest is locked you’re asked if you would like to try and break the lock off. Chests may be trapped and cause you damage.

If you run out of dexterity you cannot move until you rest. You can rest using the keys 1-9 denoting how many turns you’d like to rest. If your strength reaches zero you can no longer attack.

On exiting the dungeon you can choose to return at a deeper, and harder level, by choosing the option “DEEPER”.

Combat

The combat is turn based and the controls are A to attack, R to run which is helpful to disengage from combat. When you run you move several tiles at once. The run command chooses a direction automatically if there’s only one option or otherwise allows you to choose. Both run and attack are actions that can fail. Running halves the characters dexterity and attacking reduces xwstrength. There’s also a magical attack you can perform by pressing Z for Zap. Zap requires you to be next to the enemy, there are no ranged attacks.

Both you and the enemy have a chance to hit or miss per turn. If the enemy hits you then your body stat is reduced by the amount of damage the enemy inflicts.

Enemies are different from each other. For instance, ghosts damage your strength stat (including it’s maximum value!) and undead enemies are only damaged by magic weapons. Slimes can damage armor. For example, if you were wearing Magic Armor, then if it’s damaged it drops down to the next strongest armour type: Plate Armor. Trolls can heal themselves which might be the first occurrence of this classic CRPG trope.

Equipment

In the dungeon, chests are the way you find items. If you find a sword it’s automatically equipped. There’s no notion of equipment slots in this game. Swords maybe magic which increases your attack and allows you to kill certain enemies. Chests may also contain potions which can double your strength, silence you, make you clairvoyant, poison you and so on.

If you exit the dungeon then you can use gold to buy items from the shop. The possible weapons are:

• DAGGER
• HAND AXE
• SWORD
• MAGIC SWORD

and the possible pieces of armor are

• LEATHER ARMOR
• CHAIN MAIL
• PLATE ARMOR
• MAGIC ARMOR

The shop and items you can purchase are a classic CRPG progression. You fight monsters to get gold to buy a better weapon to fight a stronger monsters and repeat.

Progression

If you leave the dungeon you can spend 10 experience to upgrade any stat by 1. That’s all there is to the character progression.

Death

Beneath Apple Manor makes a break with permadeath by allowing you to save your game on exiting the dungeon.

Invariably, players would meet their demise at the hands of one of BAM‘s denizens. Dying in BAM shaved a few points from each attribute, but let players continue their quest. Worth wanted another option, a method of resurrection that players could factor into their strategy for winning the game. His solution was the brain scan. For a price, players could scan their characters, a process that saved their stats, gold, and inventory. Upon resurrection, characters reverted to the state of their last scan.

Worth and his friends had invented the brain scan spell while playing D&D, which featured no default method of raising fallen avatars. They hated the fact that when their characters died, they were gone for good.

Brain scans are save games that get written to disk.

Development

I made a list of the actions you could have in D&D (eg. listening at doors, bashing down doors, opening treasure chests, etc.) and implemented them one by one in BASIC. I wrote some things in assembler to speed things up (eg. the display updates, sounds, etc.)

If you want to check out the BASIC source code the file to read is BAMSE.S.

Legacy

Not many game developers cite Beneath Apple Manor as an influence but it’s one of the earliest non-mainframe CRPGs and one of the first commercial CRPGs, though arguably The Devil’s Dungeon beats it.

The game has the first “infinite” dungeon, you can keep descending for as long as you like. (At some point it will probably go weird due to numbers overflowing but practically for a player it’s infinite.)

There’s also a noise system, where some actions generate noise that can attract monster’s attention. There’s a rudimentary stealth aspect in that monsters only “awaken” when you get within 3 tiles of them.

BAM keeps some aspects of D&D that other games shed, such as listening at doors for monsters. Using stats as pools of points is interesting as well and one could imagine an alternate timeline where later RPGs build on that idea.