| AKALABETH (AKA ULTIMA 0) |
 
In 1979, Richard Garriot, aka Lord British, developed a randomly-rendered dungeon crawler for the Apple II and named it "Akalabeth: World of Doom" and sold it in Computerland Stores on his own in Zip Lock Baggies. This would be the prototype for one of the most successful, influential, and popular (as well as hardware-boundary pushing) Western RPG Series - ULTIMA. This game would eventually net Richard a deal with Sierra On-Line - then just starting out with Ken and Roberta's "Mystery House" - but eventually Ultima would breakout into another company known as Origin Systems.
Akalabeth was pretty much what I described - a dungeon Crawler. The player names his character, rolls stats like in Dungeons & Dragons, then "Lord British" - the series titular ruler, dungeonmaster, and figurehead, sends you on various fetch quests into the randomly generated dungeons, which you will need to buy enough food, get enough weapons, and other tools, oh, and did I mention FOOD, to survive. Your character eats through his stash of sustainance like a Monster Truck doing 75MPH up a mountainside! It's not hard to die of hunger in this game. Just saying. The original version of Akalabeth was only for the Apple II, it was later ported to oother platforms, and unofficially ported to PC sometime around the mid-late 1980's. It never got an official release until 1997 as a part of the "Ultima Collection" CD - which I bought for $9 at a Pawn Shop in 2003. The original "bootleg" release was not color, but the Ultima Collection release added CGA color and added Adlib music and sound to it complete with an auto-detect utility that only works on VGA systems. Today, not many people play this one because it is, indeed, kind of difficult, and a bit less fleshed out compared to what the later releases were known for.Starvin' Marvin, My Experience I got Akalabeth from a Russian download site originally, something 20 years ago, and was not too terribly impressed with it, so I never really played it much. The Ultima Collection made it just likable enough. But alas, this is one tough quest.... First off, if characters allowed, I'd rename my character "Starvin' Marvin" - no, not after the poor adopted kid from South Park, but because this effer' is STARVING! Seriously, if you bought a bag of hamburgers for this guy, he'd be eating one hamburger with every step - I'm serious, this guy eats like PAC MAN. The most important thiing, more than anything else in Akalabeth, is food. Christ, we're suffering from inflation and rising prices and my grocery bill is less IRL than paying for this guy to go hunt around a cave 5 feet away! I don't need to consume 9,250 bags of tater' chips to kill a giant hunk of Jello (Gelatanous Cube) that's blocking a doorway (maybe he should EAT the gelatanous cube instead of attacking it with a dagger). Has anyone ever asked Richard if Akalabeth was a super-high-altitude locale? Either way, I pull it out once in awhile to play but It's not one off my favorites. There's so many better games in the Ultima Catalog. The big deal with Akalabeth, is not what it is - but what it represents. Here we had aa 17 year old kid in Texas, who develops his own game, distributes it himself via computer stores selling it on his own, and creates such a ruckus that he gets signed to a brand new computer software company (Sierra On-Line) and starts creating things that are quite a bit better, initially reusing the code of this creation. |
