
Sword of Fargoal by Jeff McCord
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Sword of Fargoal is a dungeon adventure game published in 1983 through a game company called Epyx who were famous for other adventure games like Temple of Apshai. Epyx pioneered writing games for a newly released computer called the Commodore 64, which had a whopping 64K of RAM to boast about!


Game History
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Sword of Fargoal was based on a game called Gammaquest II that the author, Jeff McCord [me], had written in Lexington, Kentucky, in his Henry Clay High School computer science class. Personal computers had just come out and were being introduced into some schools for the first time. There were two main choices at the time: the Apple II and the PET Commodore, which had 4K of RAM.

Gammaquest II had the concept of creating randomly generated dungeon levels which, when generated in the memory of the computer, could be revealed onto the screen piece by piece as the character walked around exploring. It could be likened to a person carrying a torch which showed the area immediately around them, and then stayed lit as if being mapped behind them.

Off to California
I noticed that my friends enjoyed playing this fledgling game, and kids actually began staying after school and playtesting the game, suggesting improvements, and inspiring Jeff to come up with ways to add new spells, traps, and other features. The graphics were crude because the PET only had one character set with a limited number of characters that could represent the dungeon pieces, objects, and living creatures.

After having skipped one too many chemistry classes that I got an F, I managed to complete the game before going off to college. During my first year in college I learned that an acquaintance from another high school in Lexington had successfully sold a computer game for what seemed like a lot of money. So I decided to submit the game to about three or four game companies to see if they would be interested in publishing it.

Two game companies responded with interest, and one, Epyx, based in Sunnyvale, California, offered a $2000.00 advance on royalties if I would come out to California and publish the game on a new computer called the VIC-20, also by Commodore. The game was written in BASIC, so it could be easily ported to that machine, which was a massive 20K of RAM. In addition, it had the ability to design a custom character set which could be made to form dungeon walls and the shapes of characters and object. It also had the ability to do some simple sound and music.

In the new design, monsters and fighters abounded in the dungeon. Also, there were treasures and gold that could be found, including magic spells, healing potions, and other tools useful to survive in the dungeon. When the character had finished a dungeon level they could then go down stairs to the next level, and so on until they reached the Sword Level. At that point, the challenge of the game was to run like heck and get out of the dungeon before a timer ran out.

The Ultimate Game Machine
The game was completed and released on the VIC-20 and my game Producer, Susan Lee-Merrow (who eventually went on to become the well-known Producer of the Living Books series for Brderbund), guided him through the writing of the manual and naming the new game. I wanted to call it Sword of Fargaol, where gaol was the Old English spelling of jail. Susan suggested, rather wisely, that it should be changed to the much more understandable Sword of Fargoal.

The goal was far indeed, because the two Epyx playtesters, Rick ------ and ----- ------, played it exhaustively and always found the eventual goal of rescuing the Sword to be very difficult. They were able to do it once or twice, but I may never have been able to finish the game (I cant remember)!

The box illustration and the illustrations inside the manual were done by a famous book cover illustrator named Terry Barr. Terry was known for illustrating many As Quickly after the VIC-20 game was released Epyx asked me to translate it to the Commodore 64, a newly release 64K machine which had double the pixels on the screen, over three times the RAM, and a special sound chip and graphics tool called Sprites which would be useful in game designs! It was the Ultimate Game Machine!!

When I finished Sword of Fargoal for the Commodore 64 the timing was just right. There were tens of thousands of the machines being sold for about $200-250.00 apiece, and in some places you could even get an additional $100.00 rebate for a short time. There was a demand for games for this new machine.

Since SOF was written in BASIC, and the transitions between dungeon levels was slow, I subcontracted my friend, Scott Carter (now Corsaire), to write some supporting assembly language code to speed up the screen redraw, etc. Otherwise, the game remained primarily in BASIC and was an efficient 14K in size, smaller than most modern word processing files.

Epyx released SOF in 1983 and there were over 30,000 units sold within about a year. I, being only 19 or 20 years old at the time, made about $1 in royalties per unit, and survived for about two years on the proceeds.


Insider Stories
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The game had some flaws which required problem-solving. First of all, the Commodore 64 hadnt any protected memory, so copy protection was difficult to achieve. I designed an innovative copy protection system which could detect when someone was trying to launch the program without going through the launching utility.


Fan Sites
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Because of the continued interest in Commodore 64 games, Sword of Fargoal is enjoying somewhat of a Classic Game status. Recently, Manuel Polik, creator of the Epyx Shrine, did an interview with me and created a Sword of Fargoal page! Check it out [here] and explore his Epyx pages as well!
 
