Akalabeth: World of Doom

It cannot be overstated the domino effect that the Ultima series had on the world of Videogame RPGs, and while a game like Akalabeth today is a very primitive and antiquated experience it's incredible to see what they managed to achieve with the limitations of 1979 technology. In Akalabeth you create a character, buy your equipment and then get thrown into the world were the King Lord British gives you a series of monster killing quests in order to become a Knight, as the player your role is to explore the dungeon finding the enemies and then return to the castle to claim your reward. After beating the final monster the game just keeps going infinitely and becomes a challenge to see how deep into the dungeon you can descend. Your stats are randomly generated at the start and you only get a boost in those once you clear a quest, with the exception of HP that raise by entering and exiting the dungeon after killing some monsters. The world is generated depeing on a "lucky number" you type at the beginning of the adventure, after that the core of the game is exploration while managing your HP and food consumption while also making a map of the dungeon floors. Food gets consumed everytime you take a step and if you run out of food you die. You only have two classes to choose from, a fighter and a mage. The Mage is the recommended class for having an easier time since the magic pendant can make dungeon exploring really easy, and there's also a spell that let's you transform into a Lizard Man giving you a massive permanent stat boost and making the game a cakewalk, while the fighter is for the players that really wanna test themselves. The experience itself is very primitive and mostly consists in hours of grinding, but if you're into videogame history and want to experience how the RPG genre basically started for videogames then give this a try.

It's game history. One of the first game for apple II. you just have to play this!

Akalabeth it's such an important game for the whole CRPG thing. It's a game that you can't ignore if you are interested about the subject, one of the first commercially successful CRPGs out there. It opened the path for most CRPGs we now know. Now, as far as the game goes, it's pretty much unplayable for "fun". It's frustrating, it's hard, it's obnoxious. The story it's pretty much all written in the manual, you don't have too much story to follow in the game, you basically need to find X-es on the map, do the dungeons and then follow the quest at the castle. Sounds pretty, but it's brutal. Everything you do in the game takes food. You pretty much need a whole country food resources to be able to move around wherever you want in the game. Dungeons are also painful. Most of the monsters you find are stealing your food. If you want to get into the adventure that is Akalabeth, you pretty much need to expect to die of starvation and start over. That's what you will be doing most of the time. Now, as i describe the game as an unplayable game, some might as why i would give it 5 stars. Because it deserves. At the moment when it was released, it was an awesome thing. Everyone should try it and view it as the piece of gaming history as it is. In this times, a game like it it's not intended to be fun, as you definitely have better choices. I'm really thankful to GoG that they made this game available as free download. Great job!

A shame that my little brain can-t play the game at all. I found it extremelly hard to navigate the menus and how to do the actions required. Maybe I need to try a little harder.

Much like the early stone tools of Neanderthals, or a credit card imprinter (google it ;)), Akalabeth is a game that is only relevant today from a historical or academic perspective, not an artistic one. It is and was an achievement only for pushing the technical boundaries in computer gaming in its time. It is not a creative achievement, for it has neither inspired music, or story, or even sprites. It is not an achievement in game design, for there is no real strategy or variation in gameplay, particularly if one uses the MA/LM strategy. The fact that this game-breaking strategy (and a relatively easy one) exists in one of the earliest RPGs is exactly one of those elements that should fascinate any gaming scholar. All of this is not to bash or diminish in any way its importance, or a resentful criticism. Quite the opposite. Because the greatest achievement of Akalabeth was perhaps, to inspire a young Richard Garriot to pursue game design, and any GoG user surely knows the results of that labor. So, thank you Akalabeth, (even if I spent more time on you than i should have ;)) for being the stepping stone to getting the Ultima Series, which many of its games were and are great achievements in all aspects of game design.