Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cloudy Mountain has the player explore an overworld map and delve into dungeons to find and reunite two halves of a crown; the ultimate goal of the game. The overworld map is top down, the dungeon delving, at least for me, feels like it doesn’t really commit to any fixed perspective and is more symbolic.

Tom Loughry developed Cloudy Mountain for the Intellivision in 1982 while working at APh Technological Consulting. APh worked closely with Mattel on the Intellivision, including developing games. This was around the same time Don Daglow, who wrote the 1975 game Dungeon, was also working on the Intellivision however, he was on the internal team at Mattel.

Tom apparently got his start in the game development industry by helping some friends who were working for a company called APh Technological Consulting. APh was a company that was contracted by Mattel (yes, the same company that sells Barbie dolls) to develop games for its Intellivision console which was released in 1979.

Choicest Games, Where are they now? Tom Loughry

Cloudy Mountain was originally released under the name “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”, in 1982 but was renamed to distinguish it from it’s sequel Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Treasures of Tarmin. It’s the first officially branded Dungeons and Dragons video game but few people would say Cloudy Mountain is an RPG. There are no stats, equipment or advancement, instead it’s an early action game in the spirit of Atari’s “Adventure” game.

Mattel first used the D&D brand for it’s “Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game”, but this was a physical product, a board game with electronic elements rather than a video game.

Gameplay Video

If you want to get an idea of how the game plays, then check out the long-play video above.

Setting

Cloudy Mountain has basic chunky graphics, there two game views; a world map and a dungeon map. The world map is a top-down view of a map with mountains, rivers and plains switching to a dungeon when the player enters and mountain to explore the caves. You need to defeat monsters using your bow and collect tools that open up a path to the Cloudy Mountain where you can complete the game.

Goal

Journey into a land of treasure, adventure and dark, dark danger. Lead a 3-man expedition through winding mountain caverns, in search of tools and arrows. Within the caverns, deadly monsters lie in wait. Slay the monsters, overcome the obstacles of a hostile land, and enter the legendary Cloudy Mountain. Here you’ll find the Crown of Kings…and the deadliest terror of all, the Winged Dragon.

Description from the back of the Cloudy Mountain game box.

To complete the game you must find both halves of the crown. Each half is guarded by a winged dragon boss that must first be defeated. Once you find the crown you’re teleported out of the mountain and the game ends with an image of the crown under your party.

Character Creation

There is no character creation, you’re a stick figure guy and that’s all you need to know.

Health is represented by your character’s color: black (full health), blue (2 health), red (1 health). When a character takes three hits, they die and the next member of your party takes their place in the same location. You have three party members total - lose all three and it’s game over.

The party starts with three arrows but can find more as they explore the caves in the game.

Input

Intellivision’s method of input is rather eccentric here’s a photo of the controller.

And a photo of someone using it. The controller is held in the same manner you’d hold a mobile phone today. It looks uncomfortable compared to where console controller design eventually landed.

Intellivision games came with slipcards to insert into the controller that explained what the various controls did. Here’s the Dungeon and Dragon’s slipcard.

There’s an illustration from the instruction booklet here, to give a better sense of where all these buttons are:

Luckily you can also play using the keyboard.

The input controls are as as follows:

For the overworld the keys 1 to 9 control movement, the game allows diagonal moves. By pressing the 0 you can check how many arrows you’re carrying. There are no other actions you can do on the overworld map.

In the caves, movement switches to the disc control, while the 1–9 keys fire an arrow in the corresponding direction. If you hold the lower key on the side of the controller the character runs instead of walking. The clear button is “pick-up”, 0 retains its function from overworld and lets you know your arrow count. The enter key lets you exit the cave, if you’re next to a ladder.

Exploration

The game is divided into the “strategy map” which we might call an overworld map today and the “caves” which are the equivalent of dungeons. The maps differ mostly in their sense of scale. On the strategy map you move the player over large distances, in the cave map things are a smaller scale where you’re fighting enemies and exploring subterranean chambers.

When you start the game one of four different overworld maps is chosen for you play. This adds some nice surface-level variety.

The overworld map has mountain tiles and as you approach the mountain is revealed to be one of a number of colors:

1. Grey - easiest.
2. Blue
3. Red
4. Purple
5. Cloudy Mountain - hardest and end level.

Different colors determine how hard the dungeon will be and what monsters live there. You enter caves by moving your character onto a mountain and pressing the button mapped to enter/start (#1 on the keypad). You can exit the cave by finding a ladder and hitting the Exit button.

The caves are procedurally generated and they appear more organic than games of the time. Instead of a rigid grid system with straight corridors and box rooms one might have seen in Rogue, the caves are more polygonal and twisty.

Inventory

The inventory is simple; you have an arrow count and a few tools that can be found and that’s it.

The way you track your remaining arrows is novel. Pressing 0 makes the game emit a series of clicks — the number of clicks is your remaining arrows. There’s no visual counter; you just listen and count.

Items

There are a few items you can find and once found, they stay with you for the remainder of the game.

• Boat - may spawn in Blue Mountains. Allows you to cross rivers on the overworld map.
• Axe - may spawn in Red Mountains. Allows you to pass through forests on the overworld map.
• Key - may spawn in Purple Mountains. Allows you to pass through black walls on the overworld map.

In addition to these tool items you can also find quivers which replenish your arrows. The number of arrows you get depend on the hardness level you’re playing the game on.

Hardness	Arrows Per Quiver
Easy	11
Medium	9
Hard	7
Very Hard	5

The are also the two halves of the crown that need finding, both of these exist somewhere in the final “Cloudy Mountain” that can reach using the other tools.

Combat

In Cloudy Mountain, you fight monsters in real time, aiming your bow in one of 8 directions to defeat them. The combat is quite arcade-like. There’s no magic or advancement in this game.

You start the game with three arrows in your quiver and you can find more arrows as you explore the dungeons. You cannot carry more than 9 arrows at a time. When you fire an arrow it’s consumed and therefore you must be careful with your shots. Running out means you cannot attack until you find a quiver.

Any arrow you shoot will bounce off a wall once and this can make it easier to hit certain monsters depending on where they’re standing. Thankfully, you cannot hit yourself with an arrow. You can shoot arrows while moving.

There are eight monsters in total. Depending on the monster they can take multiple arrows to kill. When you kill an enemy the game communicates this by replacing it’s sprite with a ghost for a few seconds. Some of monsters have clues that indicate their presence. The indicator may be a sound that’s played if the monster is nearby or tracks you can see on the floor.

The monster types include bats, spiders, rats, snakes, demons, blobs, dragons and winged dragons. The monster are mostly the same but are some special abilities - spiders can steal arrows, the blob cannot be killed etc.

Systems

Levels and the map have elements of procedural generation. The book “How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie” explains the game uses a linear congruential generator algorithm for level generation. This algorithm is a type of early random number generator but I’m not clear exactly how it was used - for instance if parts of algorithm linked up the cavern system, or if just used the algorithm to get random numbers which where used some other procedural system.

You can take a number space and mix it around all you want. And by very carefully doing that, you can come up with some acceptable results that will give you a fairly random universe that’s different each time.

Tom Loughry quoted in Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie 📖

Development

Chris Hawley began developing the game at APh, Mattel’s Intellivision software contractor, with Tom Soulanille assisting; they had a dungeon you could wander through, lit as you explored, but no objective and no way to win. Tom Loughry, who finished the game, recalled the state it was in:

They had this dungeon that you could wander around in with lights that came on… But that’s all they had. And they didn’t know how to make it into a game.

Tom Loughry on Intellivisionaries - Episode 6 The Dreadnaught Factor, 2014 🎙️

What turned it into a game was the layer Loughry built on top of that dungeon: a top-level map to travel between caves, audio and visual cues that telegraph danger, and a series of monsters to defeat.

I added the top-level map and the audio and the visual clues, and the bat to get in the way of the audio clues, and the little blob to scare you half to death when you couldn’t hurt it and it just ate your arrows, and all of the ladders in the top level.

Tom Loughry on Intellivisionaries - Episode 6 The Dreadnaught Factor, 2014 🎙️

The first release was titled “ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Cartridge”; the subtitle “CLOUDY MOUNTAIN” was added when the sequel, Treasure of Tarmin, was released.

Legacy

Cloudy Mountain by most measures is not a RPG and it stacks up poorly against the more complex games of the earlier PLATO system. At the time, it was technically impressive and even quite tense and scary for players. In 1982 Dungeons and Dragons was a phenomena and that IP certainly helped sell the game.

It sold over a million, I know that

Tom Loughry on Intellivisionaries - Episode 6 The Dreadnaught Factor, 2014 🎙️

It does introduce some firsts drawing on the abilities of the Intellivision platform and the more action based games released on it.

Difficulty Modes

This may be the first RPG where you can choose a difficultly to play. This isn’t common even in modern games. Difficulty is chosen from the title screen by using the keypad to start the game.

• 3: Easy
• 2: Medium
• 1: Hard
• DISC: Very Hard

Harder levels increase the speed and number of monsters, the number of supplies to be found is also reduced.

First Licensed Dungeons and Dragons Video Game

Cloudy Mountain is the first licensed Dungeons & Dragons Game, unless you count the LCD handheld game released by Mattel in 1981, which I don’t :)

The guaranteed minimum to be paid was as high as $3,000,000, to TSR for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This license was so high because Mattel’s electronic board game Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game had been a top-selling game in 1980. To secure a license, the Product Manager Kathy Austin Lockton, who conceived of the idea for the original electronic boardgame, traveled to Wisconsin to meet TSR co-founder Gary Gygax.

Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie 📖

Eight Way Movement

This is more a quirk of being released on the Intellivision but it gives that first taste of breaking free of grid-based movement and being able to roam free. You can also move and shoot at pretty much the same time which introduces the feeling of a move living game world.

Novel Use of Sound

Sound is used to foreshadow the monster you might encounter in a dungeon and for tracking your remaining arrows.

Influences

Dungeons and Dragons

Like sports licenses, the impact of the Dungeons & Dragons licenses was aspirational: the videogames were to invoke the experience of the role-playing game. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, this included battling beasts in dungeons, gaining items like a boat to cross rivers or an ax to cross forests. Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie

Further Reading

Here are a selection of resources used in the article and for further reading.

• 🌍 Intellivision Revolution: History
• 📖 Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie | ISBN: 9780262549509
• 🌍 Intellivisionaries - Episode 6 The Dreadnaught Factor, 2014