Darklands designer interview

Games
1

I ran across some really interesting video interviews with the main designer of of the 1992 Microprose game, Darklands, Arnold Hendrick. The interviews were conducted by Matt Barton as part of his retro gaming “column” for Armchair Arcade (http://www.armchairarcade.com/).

Arnold Hendrick worked at Microprose, and prior to Darklands he worked on a number of early military sims there, not to mention working with Sid Meier on Pirates! He was the main designer on Darklands, and the chats focus on Darklands, with detours to his earlier work at Microprose, the problems with bad program management, RPGs, MMORPGs, and a horrible memory bug that made the game unwinnable and that took six months(!) to fix (post release, no less). If you’re a fan of Darklands, or of early computer gaming history, these are well worth watching.

This is Matt’s video blog entry for Darklands, in case you’re not that familiar with the game (shame on you!).

The interview spans 3 chunks of 15 minutes each:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I remember buying Darklands - I think I purchased it used, because my copy came with the official “patch disk” which fixed the memory bug. From what I recall, it came on 11 5.25" floppies. I could have gotten it on those newfangled 3.5" floppies, but I got it on the 5.25" just to be sure - I either didn’t have a 3.5" drive or maybe I thought the five and a quarters were more reliable, I don’t know. I do recall it took forever to install, with all those floppies!

My main memory of Darklands was of the incredibly detailed, 100+ page oversized manual and how completely chock full of information it was. I loved just looking through that manual (and every time I see a “manual” these days that consists of 4 pages of install instructions and 3 pages of ads, I die a little inside). Funny enough, I don’t recall PLAYING it that much. I think part of the issue was that the massive complexity sort of paralyzed me. I was never sure - should I be working on Alchemy? Praying to a saint? Fighting these guys? Working on my speech skill? So maybe I never played it that much, but I still really loved that game.

I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that someday a version of Darklands will appear on GOG.

Until then, enjoy these interviews.

2

“Tis the spoor of a dragon.” Ooh!

Also I remember stumbling across the witches coven (random world encounter), and it was awesome.

But yes, the game mechanics were stupidly difficult. I have it for DOSbox on my PC right now, but… eh. Too difficult to get into.

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I was fairly young when it came out, but I had been following it’s development (and delays) as much as you could at the time, and I remember totally losing my shit when my dad and I walked into Electronics Boutique to buy something else and Darklands was there on the shelf.

I recall it being really, really buggy when it first released, but having played it more down the road they eventually got it into pretty good shape.

No other game quite like it though, and to this day I think it has one of the best character creation systems ever.

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I remember just sitting there making endless characters. I don’t think I ever got anywhere with the “story”, but I would just hunt down the Raubritters.

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Arnold Hendrick also did one amazing “mini” boardgame, a fantastic $5.00 “cut the counters out yourself and play on a paper map” game called Dragon Rage, as well as the best pen-and-paper rpg rules set of all time, a little game called “Swordbearer” that deserved to be huge. (Swordbearer’s problem was that it was a rules system for people to build worlds around, but it came out at a time when other games–like D&D (Greyhawk; Forgotten Realms), Runequest, etc. were all about being set in pre-built campaign universes.)

6

Whoa, small world, this guy is my producer now at Gazillion. I opened this thinking, Arnold Hendrick – wait, i know that name…naw, can’t be him…then the video loads, and whoa, it is!

7

Tell him to join Qt3!

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Several years ago I had to do the great gaming box purge because I just didn’t have room for the stuff anymore but I made damn sure to hold on to my Darklands manual. It’s certainly not the thickest as far as Microprose manuals go but it’s an enjoyable lite history text on medieval Europe.

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Thanks for the links :)

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Darklands was awesome.

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One of the great things about the manual was how they went into the background and where they would have really liked to expand into, and basically the sky was the limit as far as historical areas and situations to get in to and manipulate. Was truly an amazing game (that needed heavy patching, 10 disks in the mail for v7 if I remember correctly). So many great things to love about this game.

— Alan

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Oddly enough, I recently was going through a backlog of stuff I got off Home of the Underdogs and similar places and trying them on the netbook. Got around to Darklands a couple weeks back (works fine under Dosbox). Had never heard of it before.

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Darklands remains one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I’m amazed how they could achieve so much with so little. Its text descriptions of cities, villages and castles, combined with a bit of background art, brought these locales to life in a way that even games with the best 3D graphics cannot match. And I still think that text-based storytelling and choices are the best way to make non-combat skills actually useful in a computer-based RPG.

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And it was hugely influential in its way. I remember when the first Baldur’s Gate came out, the devs cited Darklands as the primary inspiration for that game’s pauseable real-time combat.

Tedious as hell to play, but it was an awesome, inspired piece of design.

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Putting together components in alchemy for making potions of explosives and other nastiness was just plum awesome. Guns did make it a bit overpowered, even if they did take awhile to reload (probably should have been longer).

— Alan

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The Matt Chat show is pretty awesome and definatley worth looking at, as this interview shows. While I owned Darklands, I never got very far in it. But this interview does remind me just how amazing Microprose was at the time. It seemed like everything they were doing was brilliant, though in the end a lot of the post-Civ stuff didn’t really turn out as well as expected, which lead to their decline. Still, it was a great time to be a PC gamer.

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I bought it right after it came out, and don’t remember how or when I bought the patch …but that came with the Clue Book, which I completely wore out. It had pages and pages of charts with alchemy formulas, saints, etc.

I’ve only watched the 1st part of the interview, so they may mention this later, but to me the most important thing about the patch was that it allowed you to save in dungeons and other extended scenes. That was the main gamestopper for me when I first played it. In the original game, you had to get through an entire scene (dungeon, huge mansion, coven encounter, etc) without dying, and without quitting, or it was gone. Great for the hardcore types, but even way back then I couldn’t usually keep going for hours on end. And the clue book (this was mostly pre-internet, remember) pointed me in the right direction for the “main” plot line after months of playing.

Fantastic game. And when I started my first fight in Baldur’s Gate, literally my first thought was “this is just like Darklands” in terms of the pausable real-time combat. I’ve always been sorry it didn’t continue.

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Matt Barton also wrote Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games, which is a nice coffee table book with a lot of two- to three-paragraph bits on a couple dozen games.

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Hendrick’s blog is interesting as well: http://mmotidbits.com/

Its like Hrose, with less stupid and more practical experience.

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Very interesting analysis of APB’s failure on his blog. The basic idea as to why APB failed is stuff I’ve seen before but I really enjoyed reading his analysis as to the exact failure points and his suggestions for fixing it.