Sword Of Fargoal was written by Jeff McCord for the VIC-20 in 1982:
And in 1983 upgraded to the C64:
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Creators speak: 
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I talked with Jeff McCord about Sword Of Fargoal
After my first request for some little input to the Epyx Shrine, he already answered a lot of questions I was just about to ask. So here's the story of Sword Of Fargoal in his own words:

"The game was first written for the PET Commodore (4K), one of the first personal computers. It was originally named "Gammaquest II" and it was playtested by several fellow students at Henry Clay High School in Lexington Kentucky, many of them staying after school to play the game in the computer room. I submitted the game to about three companies when I was in my first year of college at the University of Tennessee and two of them said they were interested in publishing it. I took the best offer, from Epyx in Sunnyvale California, because it would mean that I would be given $2000 in advances on royalties and I could afford to move out to California.

I translated the game to the Vic 20 computer (20K) and the game rule book was written and the packaging designed. My Producer, Susan Lee-Merrow (who eventually went on to fame as the Producer at Brderbund of "Living Books"), said that the obscure new name I had given to the game, "Sword of Fargaol," should be changed to "Sword of Fargoal" with the "o" and the "a" reversed. You see, I had had the clever idea of calling it "Fargoal" like the Old English spelling of "GAOL" meaning "JAIL." But Susan was right to think that most people wouldn't get that!

Soon after the Vic 20 game was released I was asked to translate the game to the most popular computer game machine (at the time), the Commodore 64 computer with a whopping 64K of RAM. At that time, the program was 14K, smaller than most word processing files of today. I wrote it in BASIC and hired a friend of mine, Scott Carter (now Scott Corsaire), to write an assembly language routine to help speed up the transitions between levels. The game was released and had a very healthy response for its day. I ultimately made about $30,000.00 in royalties over the course of about two years, enough to live on and to go on to work for another game company, Electronic Arts, on another game design. That second game -- a really cool one -- was designed but never completed, but I plan to publish it some day!"

So, you didn't have a job at Epyx, they just published your finished product?

"I worked at Epyx as a freelance game designer mostly in 1983. That is when I independently did the translation to the Commodore 64, but I also consulted for them doing graphics for one other game. There were full-time playtesters (two) that tested all of the games in-house, including mine. They were great guys!"

Did Epyx influence SoF in any way? I mean, either by direct suggestions or indirect via their 'Aphsai' games? Was SoF influenced by other sources at all? I mean 'Rogue' and stuff? All these games share a lot, I think. What would you say made SoF different from them?

"Epyx at that time was very very respectful of their artists. We were each assigned a "Producer" and we were treated very nicely. I was given free reign to write the story in the instruction booklet and to even work with the artist, Terry Barr, on suggestions for what the illustrations should look like. Mr. Barr was a well-repected book cover illustrator and had done several Isaac Asimov book covers.

The game was all my design and Epyx didn't try and fiddle with it. Keep in mind that this was one of the VERY FIRST C-64 games, so there was no Rogue and others to influence it. I was not familiar with Temple of Apshai until I came to work for Epyx. In fact, keep in mind the original game was written for the PET Commodore, and only the PET and the Apple II existed at that time.

SOF was different because it generated a random dungeon level each time you played. That is still something that I think is lacking in most games, even today."

It does very well for a BASIC game, I think. Even in '83 BASIC was rather uncommon for commercial products, or? Was BASIC just the best choice for that type of game, or do you think the game would have profited from assembler?

"BASIC was the only language I knew. There were only a couple of things within SOF that I felt really needed to be sped up with Assembly Language, and we caught one of them (the transitions between levels). I always wanted to compile the whole program but never learned how to do it successfully. I think it was impressive to only be 14K worth of programming and have it do all that! I was proud of the logic in my code."

Is there something in the originall gameplay you are especially proud of? Or can you think of something really bad designed? You know that: "If I'd had more time, I..." stuff. I for instance really missed the opportunity to load/save. You played down to level 8 or deeper and then suddenly died and lost all your achievments. This was really frustrating sometimes.

"I agree with you about the need to save the game in progress. This was one of its greatest weaknesses. Unfortunately we were literally at the BEGINNING of the C-64 in those days, so there was no way to actually do it! The only other weakness of the game was that it was DAMN HARD!! I think I only got the Sword and got most of the way out once or twice. The playtesters didn't do much better!"

What do you think about Megasellers like Diablo nowadays? Striped down to it's basics, it doesn't offer much more than SoF, or?

"I am on a Mac so I don't know much about some of those games. I have seen a couple and read reviews that even refer to SOF because of the "torch view" approach to the game."


Trivia: 
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While trying to analyze the source, I found this message in the memory:
"YOU WILL HAVE TO TOP THAT TOBY"
Of course I asked Jeff to explain that:
"LOL! That is funny about the TOBY thing! I put that into the code because I KNEW he would be fishing into it to find a way to CHEAT!! (which he did). I had forgotten about that..."


What Sword Of Fargoal to play nowadays? 
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The C64 version of Sword Of Fargoal works on a higher resolution text mode than the VIC-20 one, so the playfield of a dungeon level is nearly double-sized compared to the VIC-20 one. On the other side this means that you are progressing faster in your quest on the VIC-20. The C64 version offers improved multicolor sprite graphics of the monsters, whereas on the VIC-20 you only get redefined charset monsters. This is of course just a cosmetic difference. In gameplay the two versions are very similar. I'd say that the VIC-20 version is a bit easier to play and not as unfair as the C64 version. But I can definitely recommend both versions, since they're very addictive!


Winning Strategy: 
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Sword Of Fargoal is VERY hard. To have a small chance to win it, be sure to read the complete manual, especially the really valuable Tips sections. If you still see absolutely no chance to win it with fair methods, here's some ways of cheating:
Play it on an emulator or with a freezer, so that you can load & save your state.
To manage to go up with the sword fast enough just save on the entry of every level, then press 'Q' to quit. Now when the complete map of the level is shown, memorize the right way and restore the last save state.
When your sword get's stolen on your way up, type the following:
RUN/STOP
SF=1:CONT:
Voila, it's back!
