The Pits of Baradur
- Released
- 1976
- Developers
- Michael Stecyk
- Justin Grunau
- Release Platform
- PLATO
- Resolution
- 512 x 512 px
- Language
- TUTOR
Baradur is another “lost” PLATO dungeon crawler.
My two friends Justin Grunau and Michael Stecyk programmed The Pits of Baradur (a reference to The Lord of the Rings, which was another of our obsessions at the time). They even let me design one of the dungeon levels.
Griffith M. Morgan III, Lost Empire, Irregular Magazine, 2012
Though it’s currently not playable on Cyber1 I was able to ask Justin about some of the details.
It was 2D top-down, but I hard-coded the dungeon levels which I had designed on paper; machine generation didn’t occur to me back then at age 15-16. My friend Mike and I coded it. I drew the monsters etc as best I could & I named it
Twitter Conversation, 2021
So we can at least say, it was a top-down dungeon crawler with pre-authored maps. I hope it manages to be restored on the Cyber system.
Influences
J.R.R Tolkien's Work
The Pits of Baradur (a reference to The Lord of the Rings, which was another of our obsessions at the time) Griffith M. Morgan III, Lost Empire, Irregular Magazine
Further Reading
Here are a selection of resources used in the article and for further reading.