Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 165: The Bard's Tale

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

It's a double dose of bardy delight! First, Jason Wilson and Rowan Kaiser join Jeremy and Bob in the studio to talk about the importance of Interplay's The Bard's Tale. Then, designer Michael Cranford regales us with the saga of its creation.

This Week in Retronauts. Go, Bard! Hi, everyone. I'm sorry. Welcome to... The next episode of Retronauts, to enter your ear holes. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this week we are talking about the Bard's tale.

And with me on this fine and festive occasion, we have, of course, that guy. It's Bob Mackie. I'm Bard Simpson. Who the hell are you? I was not going to make a Simpsons joke, but then you did it, so now it's okay. It's okay. The seal has been broken. And also over there.

Big Barda. Are we the new gods? Yes. All right. And finally. Sorry, I'm giggling in the corner. This is Jason Wilson at GameSpeed. And I just have to say, Jeremy, that might be the most ridiculous intro yet you've had for a retronaut.

Really? I can't stop laughing. I'm sorry. That's really saying something. I know. So, yeah, this week we are talking about the Bard's Tale. And this is like our ultimate episode from a couple of months back. This is a roundtable discussion for half an episode with same people.

It's almost as though we recorded them back to back, followed by an interview with, the person responsible for the series, Michael Cranford. But again, instead of just dumping you guys into an interview with no context to say, like, here's a guy talking about a game he made, why should you care? We are telling you why you should care. And it's because the Bard's Tale is one of the, I would say, one of the early pillars of role-playing games. And it was innovative. Yeah, it was a pretty big deal back in the 80s.

And it kind of faded away. There were only a few sequels. There was a lot of inviting and a lot of just drama that happened that I think sort of cut the series life short. And the creator actually left after the second game. So, you know, it didn't really survive until more recently when it's kind of come back. There's a few lessons there, but one of them is get your contracts in order before you start things. Yeah. And I don't really want to go too much into all of that because it sounds like it's pretty much water under the bridge at this point for the people who,

were involved. But definitely, like, you get the impression listening to people who were there back in the day talk. And you get the idea that there were some hard feelings. And it was a pretty tough situation. So that's why the Bardstale went away. But in its prime, in the mid-80s, it was way up there as like a must-play RPG series. And I think the original Bartstale was like, for a while was the best-selling PC game of all

time or something like that. Yeah. So what's great about the barred scale? Which, of course, you know, in the early 80s, that means it sold a few hundred thousand copies as opposed to several. $490,000, I think. Okay, so almost $7.000. So that's a lot. It's, you know, it was a smaller industry.

So don't think this is like a game that, you know, sold $50 million copies or something. It's no like Tetris or Grand Theft Auto 5. Yeah. It's still very successful for its time. Yeah. So its big innovation was music. And it brought in. Well, it was the Bard's tale.

Yeah. And it brought in the Bard. Now, the bard, as a class of Dungeons and Dragons, this is one of most fucked up things ever to come out of Gary Gygax and Dave Arnson. It was a mess of a class, very difficult to get into, very hard to play. So, yeah, actually, as someone who has not really played a lot of D&D and has never even looked at the Bard class, what the hell? So it was kind of this outlamation of, oh, it's a fighter, it's a thief. It plays music that gives you persistent buffs during your gameplay. And it was just kind of a, but it was this weird prestige class that was at the back.

It wasn't even the players' handbook. It was in the Dungeons Masters guide. So it was like, this is for advanced advanced Dungeons and Dragons players only. That's true for every game with the bard, though. Even non-roleplaying games, like even in Monster Hunter, there is a hunting horn, which is a bard class. I know. It is hard to wrap your mind around, like, playing the different songs in battle. I've tried.

Yeah, it's rough. Like, I want to learn that thing. But it was... This is definitely a game whose influence you see in the Final Fantasy series. There are a lot of final fantasies with bard class characters and dancer class characters who basically have the same role that you see here. Entry Notesty also has it has like the dancer class which does a lot of status buffs and enemy debuffs and that sort of thing. And then you've got the chanter and pillars of eternity, which is a bard. So it was the first game to have a bard.

It was the first game that had music as a spell. So if you think about the persistent buffs you have in MMOs today, that's what the Bard songs were. There were things like The Travelers Tune, and I was kind of like the, you know, part of the theme of The Bards Tales. What fascinated me about this series was, in my youth, I was, I thought I was going to be a musician, either a saxophone player or a tuba player. And so as I was studying music and all the school and playing D&D and playing all these games, what I loved about the Bardstale was the songs. And that's what really pulled me in. And every party I had had a bard. And that barred was played music.

And so you played your music. And after you played your song, you had to go drink. So you had to go to the bar, get a drink. You can play again. Wait, that's, this was in The Bard's Tale or D&D? No. Oh, well, Bard's Tale. Like the drink recharge.

Is that a mechanic or just like a thing you did for his narrative? Well, no. You can only play it so much before you rest and had a drink. Okay. So, you know, they were spell slots, if you think about it in that way. The songs are spell slots. And so the spell, you could play them, and so they would have effects that were making better in combat or improve your accuracy or, you know, help you with your strength and hit points. And no other game had done this at the time.

You know, this was persistent buffs weren't really part of what was going on with video games outside of combat. Now, in combat, of course, you had buff spells, but didn't have these outside of combat. So you said music was a big factor in the Apple II version. that include actual music. I assume that there was no persistent music, but did you hear songs that your bard could play? Yeah. Okay.

Wow. Yeah. And the Apple 2GS was the best version of the game. It had the best graphics, which were just mind-blowing at the time. They actually, with the monsters, when they came up, they would move, little bits of them would move. They have these animations.

But it was the music, because at the time, it had the earliest end built computer MIDI system that came with the 2GS. And so it had all the songs, and those songs were playing whenever you played the songs. And so, you know, when you're playing most of these role-play games at the time, there wasn't really a lot of music in them. And you had sound effects, but he didn't really have music. So that also gave you an atmosphere as you're going into the dungeon. And if you put yourself into the roles of your characters and the Richard Gameplay there, you know, one of the whole roles of a bard is to, you know, keep up your party barrel.

And when you're going through this big, dark, and gloomy sewer, it's nice. have a little ditty going on in the background. So it's called the Bard's Tale, but technically you didn't have to put a bard in your party. Is that correct? No, but it sucked if he didn't. Okay. So it's one of those games where you really need the buffs

and the elements that the bard brings to the party. It helps. You don't need it, but it was punishingly hard. One of the things about this game was it had all the old tropes of these old dungeon crawls. It had the spinner traps. So when you go through a – you would find a square, you're going through your dungeon, and you would spin. If you didn't catch the flash of the screen, you'd be going off in a different direction. It had teleport traps.

It had these big groups of monsters. One of the big jokes is towards a fight with 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers. So it was like groups of... Yeah, four groups. For groups of 99 because it could have do 100. 99 was the cap on one group of monsters. And what's funny is the alpha for the Bardsale 4, which is going to be coming out this year, alludes to that very thing. And the Bardsdale had a little bit of humor in it.

Not full-throat humor. It was more like, oh, you have to kind of look at it or kind of look at it. But it was the way some of these monster groups were built. But I did the 2000s game, like, a really, oh, we're not going to talk to departure. We're not going to talk about that game. Well, you're not a fan. I hate that. Really?

I hate that game. Wow, because everyone seems so positive on it. You're the first person I've heard say, like, the Bard's Tale for PS2 was not good. Well, it was a PC game. Okay. Now, the only saving grace about that game is it comes with the old Bards Tales on PC and on iOS. I assume on Android. I don't know.

I don't have an Android. But, yeah, I think that thing is horrible. That's because I want the – it's a single player. It is totally tug-a-cheek. Some of the jokes are pretty sexist. Some of the jokes are pretty stupid, in my opinion. the music component's cool. Yeah, that era of game writing humor does not age very well.

No, it's from the same era as BMX, Triple X. Yeah, and it's an action RPG. You have to tread with careful. And it's an action RPG, which to me is not the Bardstale. The Bardstale is a turn-based role-playing game. And the new one is, you know, it's turned-based under the hood. And you have positioning, and it's a little different than the original Bart's. tail games, but it's a very good evolution.

Yeah, the original Bardsale games, you didn't see your party. It was just like text-based battle displays. You know, it was magic, it was wizardry, up to a point. You definitely didn't see 396 berserkers at once on the screen. You would see one, and he would be

sitting there, his accident would be moving. So it did have animated character sprites in battle, but representational. Yeah. And the other thing I really love about the first Bardstale game was it took place all in one town. Scarabri. You're saying, not like the real Scarbray.

Which is in Scotland? Yeah. Scarabri is a city in Scotland or like the ruins of a city or something in Scotland, right? Ireland, I thought. Oh, Ireland. Okay. Some place in the British Isles. It's somewhere in the British Isles.

I'm sorry. You know, Russian Jew here. I have no idea. A dumb American. I don't know. Yeah. So there's a couple other things, too, that I really love about this as I've been digging into its history.

I had no idea until I started prepping for this podcast. Larry Holland started with the Bartstaff. Yeah, I discovered that too, and I was doing research. Like the key personnel, Michael Cranford was the original, you know, designer and the person he was a fascinating character. Yeah, there's an interview with him at the second half of this episode. And his GDC talk was pretty interesting, too. Other heavy hitters on the series were Brian Fargo, who people definitely know from Obsidian. And Larry Holland was the composer.

for the music. Brian Fargo of Interplay, not Obsidian, and then Enixio. I always get those two weeks. And now, of course, now he's got his own, you know, crypto project going on. Of course. I knew we were going to talk about blockchain. Is this the first mention of blockchain on return? I think so.

I think we have to end the podcast. But you can't forget Rebecca Heinman. Right. She's next, yes. And I feel like the friction between her and Michael Cranford is, something that still kind of simmers under the surface of things, even if they supposedly have buried the hatchet. Yeah, I don't know.

But, you know, so after Michael left, Rebecca becomes kind of the lead person carrying the water for the series with Bardsdale 3 and Dragon Wars. Which, you know, in itself it's kind of funny because the Bartstale is also one of the first early IP fights in role-playing games. And in all the gaming, actually, if you think about it. Yeah. But, you know, you came back to Larry Holland. He did the music in the Barnes.

the original Bards Tale. And he went on to do the X-Wing series. And music had a huge role there. Now, of course, it's all John Williams' Star Wars score. Right, but he came up with like the I-Muse system, didn't he? Yeah. He was the one who like came up with the way that works. Yeah.

And so what's another great thing about the Bards' Tale was, you know, it's got this little tree of people who went on to do bigger and bigger things too. It was the first role-playing series that really challenged Ultima. You know, that wasn't, it was outsold it at times. Yeah. My magic and wizardry never really pulled that off. Right. So that was the other thing. Yeah, wizardry had its fan base for sure. Yeah.

And like I said in the ultimate episode, like if you talk to sort of, you know, foundational, you know, foundational Japanese game developers, Japanese RPG developers, they're like, oh, I loved wizardry. Yeah. But it was definitely like, I get the impression that it was, you know, very much for sort of people who were RPG insiders and each game built on the last one. and even expected you to carry forward your party. You couldn't play Wizardry 2 unless he'd beaten Wizardry 1.

And I think that was the case through 4. Right. So, like, this is... I mean, it's hard for people to get into it. That can make sales difficult when you have to have finished your 100-hour grind. Yeah, that's like build your own long tail right there. Now, what was really cool about the Bardstale, too, was you could bring into your characters from Ultima, you know, which is your one avatar, or, you know, your group from wizardry and play in the Bardstale, which was. you know, at the time, very different.

You know, he didn't have that kind of stuff. Each game kind of builds about it. One thing I loved at it, as at the time, the big D&D world was Greyhawk. And Greyhawk had a whole group. I never even heard of that one. Oh, so that's the original world of Gary Gaggagic. Okay. And that's the original D&D settings.

And so all the named spells are of wizards of that world. They were either player characters of the original groups or others that they made, you know, the Mordecaidans, Diodolukes, the Bigby's, the Bigby's has his hand spells. You know, Mordecai had his mansions and stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And the Bardsdale had a bunch of these names spells in them after wizards that had been in this world. One of course is Mangar, which is the bad guy of the first game. And that was another thing that come back to me is, you know, it was trying to build a narrative, even with its spells. Yeah, you know, I've heard of things like Bigby's big hands.

whatever it's called, and didn't know why it had that name. Now, knowing that makes it makes more sense. Yeah. And so then you get to the next Bardsdale, and you take a look at Dragon Quest. You've got your bags. Well, you know where the Bakes came from Bardsale 2. And you can store your stash there. Bardsale 2 had casinos, which oddly enough were in the Apple games, but they weren't in the PC games.

And you could go and you played like this derivative blackjack. Those are also in Dragon Quest. So, you know, you see these areas. And in the later games of the Bardstale, you're going through and you're visiting other towns or other dimensions. And you're assembling items, artifacts to take on the Big Bad at the end, which is in itself, you know, kind of a D&D derivative. But it's not something you really do in a lot of the roleplay games of the day. You mentioned the fact that this game takes place in a single city, but we didn't really build on that. Yeah, the first one.

So can we kind of talk about how that fits into the evolution of RPGs at the time? Because, you know, you had wizardry like we talked about in the Ultima episode, which was just like keep going deeper into the dungeon. Or Wizard E4, which was get out of the dungeon. Yeah. But it was a dungeon. Whereas Ultima, you know, started introducing towns and like world map and, you know, a much bigger world. Whereas this kind of feels like it splits the difference. Like there is the city on sort of the outside and it does break the dungeon.

into multiple pieces. Yeah, and it kind of progresses. The town is where the first place where you can fight to get experience. You fight the low-level monsters. Your orcs, your hobbits, because at the time... Hobbits aren't violent, what? Oh, yeah. You fought groups of hobbits.

You fought groups of everything in those days. You can kick puppies, too. Why not? Well, I was like, you didn't kick puppies, but they fought dogs. No, I'm just saying, like, you know, you're going to fight Hobbit, you might as well But that was like, you know, and another side is, you know, in some games you had hobbits, some games you had halflings, some games you had bobbets, etc. You know, everyone played with the language back then in a way they did it with dwarves and elves and other races. And then you would go to your first dungeon, the sewers, which would be underneath a plate. I think I hear the bard.

That's not me. I'm not listening. Someone's buffing us. It's great. And then you go from one dungeon to another. that's in other locations at the town. At the same time,

you know, you have your adventure's geared where you go to save your game because at this point you couldn't just save anywhere in an RPG

and you had your store Garf's equipment shop. He had a name, which I also loved. And you'd go in there and he would buy himself stuff. You had to go to the temple to go get healed

or get your levels restored after an energy drain attack or other things. And then the adventuring guild is also a place where you can go level up. You couldn't just level up in the dungeon. You had to come out

You had a little plus next to your name or asterisk that you'd come out and you'd level up. And so you'd go from there, you'd go, you'd go sewers, there'd be the catacombs, there'd be Clarion's Tower. Clarion was a Wizard of Renowned in this world, growing up all to Mangars Tower, which was also in town. And then, this seems like it's the sort of progenitor of the gold box game. Yep, that's exactly what I was going to say. It sounds a lot like pool of radiance. Right. Well, yeah, but you got remember of pool of radiance, too.

you had an adventure Montreal from D&D in it. Right. No, I mean, pool of radiance was, you know, that was about bringing real D&D into video games. Yeah. But like the idea of being in town, some zones of town are not that safe. And you're going to find different key, you know, mission components within the city. Like, that's very, very pool of radiance. Except pool of radiance, of course, didn't have, like, the text display for combat.

It's more of like an Ultima, three-style combat where it's a positional. Yeah. It's a tactical. Yeah. Yeah, a little space. And a Gobuck's games are themselves fascinating. We should discuss at some point. Oh, yeah.

We should definitely have some gold box episodes. But so that was, you know, it all took place in this one town, Skybrae. And then the next game, you go visit other towns. And then in Barnstale 3, you're going to other dimensions. And these dimensions, you know, the apocalypse has happened in Bart's Tale, Scarbray's and Ruins, you know, the mad god Targent, which is the bad guy who's doing all of it. has taken over, but then you're going to other realms, and one realm is an elf realm, where everything's great, and there's no apocalypse, and it's like, oh, well, why don't we just move here, you might think? But, you know, that's a part of the gay progression, and, you know, there's a land that's all of the dwarves,

and then there's another land you go to that has a city of gnomes, and as you're going through these artifacts, and, but you take a look at the Martel 3, and, you know, Final Fantasy fans here, geomancy, chronomancy, comes from Bartsale 3. Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I didn't realize the Bartstall series expanded so much. familiar with the first one. Yeah. But going beyond the bounds of Scarabri to like a huge world and other dimensions even.

Yeah. And then what's really interesting about the Bartchell 3, that's where Rebecca behind him and takes over from Cradford, after Credford leaves to go get his philosophy and theology degree. Yeah, I found that fascinating. I never hear anyone leaving Games for academia. I hear the opposite all the time. That's what I did. But I never heard that before. So I guess he was into it.

He was a devout Christian or is it about Christian. He was about, and, you know, names of some of these cities are coming right out of the Bible. Yeah, that's something in the interview portion of this podcast. He talks about, like, how he just kind of took names out of the Bible and was like, I'm sure someone's going to call me out on this, and no one ever did. Just like Evangelian. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I mean, you know, which is interesting in contrast to the moral panic at the time that was going around role-playing games

and Dungeons of Dragons in particular, you know, he didn't see that with the Bardsdale. And it wasn't because it was, you know, he had some Christian elements to it. No, it was just because, you know, the moral panic police never got to the Bardsdale. You know, it's also, you look at the cover of it and it, you know, a nice little bard in a dungeon type thing. It's not like the giant demon on Ultima 3. Yeah, yeah. But what's interesting also about the Bardsale 3 is it's the first one to have an auto mapping, which was at the time, revolutionary.

and now you have games where they do the maps automatically or you can turn it off. Yeah, you have a series Entry and Odyssey which exists entirely to say, no, we've taken away the auto map and you have to do it. That's the selling point is that it doesn't have the feature that every other game has had since Bardsdale 3. Yeah, and then the Bartsdale 3 is also where a Philo-Deckel stack pool comes in.

And some of you might know them for other things you did in games, other things you did role-playing, or novel. He's become a quite a prolific author. I did not realize he got to start in games, actually. I thought he was just like the guy who was like, I love me some... Video games and Dungeons and Dragonss and Tilly's, and I'm going to write about Wedgantilis. No, he started his writing credits with games like the Bartsdale and Dungeons of Dragons. That's interesting.

And now he's, you know, quite a couple of shots. That's a double X-wing connection right there. I know, isn't it? It's interesting. It just goes to show you that, you know, Orgin, you know, made all these great developers. You know, you have the same thing with Surtec, with wizardry, and then, you know, Interplay had its own lineage of strong developers as well. Yeah, and of course Interplay did a lot more than just the Bardstale, and we can talk about that some other episode. But, yeah, like there are several of these companies that you look back and you're like, so much came out of these.

I guess I didn't realize Bard's Tale was quite so... It had its names. So fundamental, so formative. It had its names. And it was, you know, totally overshadowed in some ways. The Bardstale series never got its true conclusion. It had a game called Dragon Wars. And what's really funny about that was, okay, well, they couldn't use the Bard's Tale name because of conflicts with EA.

So they make Dragon Wars. Wait, so what's the conflict with EA here? Did EA buy Interplay? EA held the license for the series as the publisher. Okay. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So they published the game, and that was one of those check-your-contracts things. And so what was interesting here is the game's almost done. There's no dragons in it.

It's kind of ripping off the kind of myth of Gilgabash in some very loose ways. And so at the end, Rebecca Heimann's adding dragons to it. So they can have dragon wars. Oh, yes, that's right. There's no war and there's no dragons. Yeah. Now, the game got very good reviews, and it got a very good reception, and some of the elements that we had talked about from the earlier games had made it into it. But, you know, the fact that he didn't have the Barnstale name, even though it was, in many ways, a continuation of Bard's Tale, was kind of sad. And now we have the Bardstale 4 coming out for sure.

What was cool about Dragon Wars is Wasteland was the first RPG in my record. collection where you're actually using skills, character skills, and it brings in some of that interplay, so, you know, they're working there hand at hand, you know, and you're using, you know, oh, you can swim, that helps you get across the water, and strength lets you help a stone, and you know, your skills play an important part of the game, and that was something that hadn't really been in role-playing games up until Wasteland. Right. And so it continued along with that spirit, and the other things, the auto-mapping, it goes

on there, too. But yeah, that was what was interesting about drag wars should be. And then the series is just gone. I found it pretty fascinating. I know we're running out of time in my research, though, but they had Bardstale had sort of a Mario Maker release where they had a construction set.

Bardstale construction set. Does that predate? I know it predates RPG maker. Does it predate like any sort of thing like this? The original construction set was pinball construction. I mean, in terms of RPGs. I meant in terms of RPG. There was one called the Adventure Construction Center, which I can't remember which year it came out, but I used to make basic role-playing games in it, and then I would have my brother play to make him cry. I guess it just shows how popular this was, because now there's software for people to make their own and distribute their own Bardstail games. Yeah, and at the time, it was kind of like this little theme.

There was also one for the Go-Box games, it's a little bit of adventures, where you can make your own games. And at the time, you could spread around on Usenet and other bulletin boards. People are still making things in that. They are. I believe it. I mean, there's still some great music coming out of Mario Maker. They're not Mario Maker, Mario Paint. And there are still new Doomwads every day.

So go nuts. Yeah. But, you know, that's another thing that I love about some of these older series was, you know, the Go Box games, Barnes Tale. You know, it's like, okay, well, you know what? Here's some tools, make your own adventures. and that's something that a lot of games never let you do still. And we're lucky that, you know, modding has been embraced by so many role-playing game developers over the years. But at the time, it was kind of a new thing.

But, you know, technology was evolving then, and there was no internet to spread them on widely at the point. So, you know, you could make games like my brother and I just made stuff for each other. So, kind of as we wind this episode down or this portion of this episode down, I'm curious to know what, what you guys have experienced in terms of the bar to tail, like what has been your relationship? ship with the games. How'd you discover it? That sort of thing. I'll start. I haven't really played that much Bardsdale. I did play some of the NES version in like, oh, jeez, 1999, 2000, just out of curiosity. I never touched that. Yeah, it wasn't really optimal. It's interesting because I believe my interview with Robert Woodhood will have been published by the time this episode comes out.

And he says, much to my surprise, that the NES version of Wizardry One is the definitive version in his mind, like the best version. I had no idea. Yeah, I was like, uh, but yeah, he said he like really thinks it turned out well and really liked the, you know, like that version. I love how the NES became such a phenomenon that became the place to port. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but I don't feel that that was necessarily the case with the, the, the,

Bardstale. It was a different publisher. Like Aski did Wizardry, and I'm pretty sure FCI Pony Canyon also did. It was them. Yeah. They did Bardstail. They did the Gold Box games. They did Hills Far.

They did Ultima games. So they had a lock on this stuff. I think it was all through EA. But they didn't do a good job with it. But anyway, that was pretty much my experience. Aside from, you know, like dabbling a little bit with the 2004 Bardstale. or what? Non-canonical.

Non-canonical. What about you, Bob? I had the exact same experience as you. I bounced off of the NES version. Again, too complicated for me. And I've only really known about it in terms of it being very influential that I never actually went back. I can play some old games that I feel like old RPGs. There's something extra crusty about them that makes them extra hard to break into.

So, like, that's sort of where I draw the line. They're not forgiving. They're not forgiving. They're hard. You die a lot. Oh, yeah. Especially in the Bartstow. you die a lot.

Roan, what about you? So what I mentioned, the box was non-threatening. It actually ended up threatening my weird family. Well, threatening's not quite the right word. But, like, for whatever reason, like, I would go to, you know, the local game stop, and I'd be like, I want this RPG. I want this RPG. But when my mom saw this one, she said, no, you can't play that until you have read, like,

the Arthurian legends. I don't know what triggered that in her. Like, all of these have, you know, some sort of Arthurian, you know, symbolism going on. Now, the box for the Bard's Tale had a bard in an end playing and then it had kind of this background of a map with all these symbols on it. Yeah, I don't know what made her think that. So I did not, like, as I was playing all the gold box games and Baltimore and all these things that, like, all these things that, like, were just like, give me all the RPGs you have. The Bardstale, I only came too much later and did not, was not able to, like, fully throw myself into it in the way that I might have had I grabbed it in 1987 or whatever.

So my two series that I really fell in love with were writing magic and the Bardstale. Those were my two. The Bardstale was my favorite. That's the one that when I think about my nostalgia for games of yesteryear, that's what I think of. But how did you discover the Bardstale? When we bought an Apple 2GS. I think, yeah, you mentioned that. My dad bought an Apple 2GS and it came off a bunch of games that he bought from the person, including the Barnstale games.

Okay, okay. And that's how I discovered it. So it was sort of passed along from a previous owner. Yeah, yeah. We bought an Apple 2GS like eight months after it came out from some group in Gernville. Hmm. Okay. I got married in Gernville.

That's all I know. That's all I can tell you about. What's a Gernville? It's a place where they make cheese, I think. So Gernville is in Sonoma County, wine country. That makes sense. Right off the Russian River. It's the gay mecca of Northern California.

Oh, that's right. Jeremy, you got straight married. I did. It was weird. They were like, what? It's chetrified. We don't understand. No.

It wasn't actually in Gernville. It was like five miles outside of Gernville at an inn. But anyway, it's a really pretty area. But it's not where I would think, like, get a hot new, used Apple 2GS. Well, what was funny was it was out in West Sonoma County, I lived in that grew up in Santa Rosa, that there was this Apple 2 user group

that took root. Okay. Back in the days of AMUG and things like that. Yeah. And so that's where my dad got it. He obstincentally got it for my mom to help run the business that my dad had. And it became

where we did our homework and played our video games as most computers probably did in the 1980s. I'll use this as a digital Rolodex for my recipes. Lots of things were sold through. Lots of computers were sold through Middleman instead of big box stores back then, right? Like your Apple dealer

or whatever. Ask your Apple dealer. Well, you still see some of those signs? Some of these computer shops, you know, Apple dealer. And there was this one that was all the way out on West Santa Rosa that was this, a big Apple dealer for years. And I don't think it's there anymore, but he was there

for, you know, I think I'll tell about three or four years ago. All right. For the, you know, very small segment of, you know, Santa Rosa listeners to retronaut. Okay, so we are out of time for this segment of the episode, but I did want to thank you guys for coming in to talk a little bit about the Barstale. Yeah, I guess there aren't quite as many games in Bardstale's series, like the umbrella as there are for Ultima. So I feel like we had a pretty... Or by magic or wizardry. Right.

We had a pretty thorough discussion here. But definitely worth exploring Bards Tale 4 when it comes out hopefully later this year. Yeah. And there's also the Mages Tale, which is like a VR. It's a VR kind of riff on the Bards Tail world. And I haven't played it because I don't have a lot of time for VR games. I don't have a lot of time for any games anymore. But, you know, people who have played it say they really enjoy it because it's Harry Potterish.

But better than the Harry Potter mobile game. Oh, my gosh. Anyway, so yes, that wraps it up for this segment of retronauts. Stick around for the second half of this episode where Michael Cranford will tell you all about the Bards Tale in his own words. In the meantime, I have been Jeremy Parrish and these fine people here with me. Jason, why don't we start with you because you definitely carry this episode. I'm Jason Wilson, the managing editor at GameSpeed where when I do write, it's usually about RPGs. You can find me on Twitter talking about RPGs and all kinds of other things that annoy the hell out of me.

at Jason underscore Wilson, and that's all lowercase. Rowan? I am also at Gamesweet. I am the PC guest post editor, and I am on podcasts like 3MA and Secrets of the Universe, and now this. And I am Rowan Kaiser, all one word, on the Twitters, where you can usually find me yelling about Ultima. And the NBA. Both. That was my turn.

What is your turn? Okay. Hello. It's Bob Mackey, everybody. I find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. and I do other podcasts as well those are Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons, and what a

cartoon that is an exploration of every cartoon, every week, a different cartoon of a different series. So look for both of those and whatever you listen to podcasts with. Have you done Mask yet? No, we have not. I hope you don't. Okay. I will take that off the list. I don't think it was on the list.

Probably when you guys do GI Joe. I will. You'll be on that one. But yeah, so I have my own Patreon with the great Henry Yilbert. That's the Talking Simpsons Patreon. Patreon.com.com. slash Talking Simpsons if you go there. For a measly five bucks a month, you can get exclusive series like Talking Critic. We went through the entire series of The Critic,

Talking Futurama, all season one of Futurama, and tons and tons of exclusive podcasts, including interviews with Simpsons writers and showrunners, a community podcast and specials and things like that. So yes, that's patreon. com slash Talking Simpsons. Thank you very much.

And finally, I am again, Jeremy Parrish. Yeah, you got that part. Retronauts, though. You didn't get this part. Retronauts is at Retronauts.com. It's a podcast. You can download. Retronauts.com also has other things.

things that aren't podcasts that you can read. You can fill your eyes and ears with Retronauts. It's amazing. The show, of course, is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. You can subscribe, get early access to episodes, get better bitrate quality. It's great. We love you.

Thanks for supporting us. Thanks for listening. Please stick around for the second half where Michael Cranford will once again tell you why the Bards Tale is the coolest thing he ever did. So thanks, guys. Gamefly is the best way to buy and rent all your favorite games. Gamefly puts video games where they belong in the hands of the gamers who love them. With your monthly subscription to Gamefly.com,

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shocking and the victim claims the attacker boasted about being a 200-year-old vampire. To hear the whole story, you must go to podcast1.com or make sure you get the new podcast 1 app. It's a story you don't want to miss. All right, so for this segment, I'm here at Game Developers Conference 2018, with Michael Cranford, the designer and programmer for the legendary RPG, 1984 RPG? 8485. The Bardes, yeah. And you gave a presentation yesterday, a post-mortem on the creation of the game and the development. And it was a pretty interesting talk.

We'll probably cover some of that ground. So that may be sort of old hat for you, but I think most people listening to this were not at the panel. So it'll be fresh to them. But I'd also like to talk to you about, you know, the sort of place that the Bard's Tale represents in the development and evolution of video game RPGs. and, you know, the inspirations you brought into that. And, you know, as someone who was sort of there on that first or second wave of CRPGs, how you took that, that raw concept of role-playing games and adapted that into the limitations and capabilities of computers, to me that's really interesting, is taking this sort of

abstract concept from really another format and turning it into, you know, something that worked on a computer. So, yeah, if you wouldn't mind giving just like a little bit of background in yourself and kind of, I guess, maybe how you got into RPGs in the first place? Well, I was always a really prolific science fiction fantasy reader as a kid growing up. So my interest in the whole area and the genre was inspired by that, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and then from there into just a diverse range of different authors, I read all the a time growing up, but didn't watch TV very much. And I think I became first connected to it

through a play-by-mail game company. I've had some advertisers or something, Flying Buffalo out of Arizona, and they had a spinoff on D&D called Tunnels and Trolls, and they had solo adventures. So I happened to get some of those, and I think I might have wandered into a gaming store, actually, and seen some of their material. And that's where I first got exposed to it and started becoming really in. interested in. It was the sort of solitaire adventures that were at first interesting to me that I could play, interact with the game, and I didn't need anyone else. At that point, I didn't know anyone else that played these games. But then over time, I became aware that there were other

people interested in it and started doing some Dungeons and Dragons tabletop stuff and getting involved with it. But my frustration, actually, it's really funny at the time was so much that the gaming was so unstructured that it wasn't clear what the limits were as to how much you let people get away with. And, you know, there were so many areas to fudge the play. And that was frustrating to me. So the idea of it when I finally came to understand that a computer could be involved in this, then it's just the rules are set. And the system works the way it works. And if you live or die, that's just sort of the way to it. So there was something about that that I felt brought some structure into the thing. And so to me, it was sort of a

a perfect synergy between the kind of gaming I wanted. Now, there are limitations with the computer, but I thought we can ultimately exceed all those things and build enough intelligence into this that it feels just as natural as tabletop gaming, but structured like real life is where you can't get away. You have your magic, but you can't get away with things, and the dungeon master can't fudge it and, you know, do something he's not supposed to. So it sort of developed that way for me, and then the relationships that I built with some of the guys I met in high school playing Dungeons and Dungeons. So you talk about the lack of

structure for tabletop RPGs. To me, that's always been kind of one of the appeals of the format is that, you know, it does sort of come down to the quality of people you're playing with, but there is a, you know, the human element that's really hard to reproduce. And even now, I think, you know, there are some incredible, impressive RPGs on the market, you know, that have some great emotional storyteller, which are three. Right. But, you know, there's still, sort of scripted. Yes. So I'm curious. Like you actually saw that at the time as something of a plus for computers. Yeah. Well, I again, it's a trade-off. So I recognize that you're giving something up here. There is a dynamic call, but I didn't feel like a lot of people that I were playing with were great

storytellers anyway. So it wasn't, I didn't feel like I was losing a whole lot. But, and I had this sense, I could even do what I was doing, because I felt like my dungeons were really, complex and you know had a lot of cool story elements in it that would have been almost impossible to fit into a into an application but um but i had that hope that it would ultimately be that and you know in time you know i don't know with the technology we have now i think you could really almost do everything but but you're right there's a human element and there is there if you have a really good dungeon master it's there is something there that it's difficult to capture in any kind of software but but that's not what i found out there most of the time

Well, it sounds, you know, from the way you described your, the dungeons you created for tabletop games and panel, it sounds like you kind of approach tabletop gaming as a sort of a multi-disciplinary creator, not just like a writer, but also an artist and like a dungeon designer. Yeah, and you know, I think part of it too was because of how I came into doing all this, I didn't have, I wasn't told how to do it. So to me, it was like, I'm going to make this a story. It's going to be an adventure. It's going to be like a great novel.

It's going to have a visual component to it. So I was an artist. So I did really elaborate drawings, and I used the drawings. I fit things into the drawing. So it wasn't just window dressing. They were critical. And I have guys like Brian Fargo studying the drawing. They're like, what's that right there?

And they'd ask me, what's that thing we're seeing peeking out behind that rock right there, you know? And some of that stuff was relevant. And some of it, I was just kind of messing with them in the drawing because I knew they would scrutinize everything. You know, and then something would go wrong, and I say, see, you missed this clue right here. And they love that stuff. So, so that, it just became a lot of fun developing these visual and also complex puzzle-solving sorts of adventures. And that was the thing that was so fun about it to me. And then combat was just sort of, you know, the flavoring that tied everything together rather than what I was seeing coming out on a lot of these can campaigns, which were all just about, you know, fight after fight after fight after fight.

where you're just fighting your way through some building or something like that or some wilderness campaign. It just wasn't very interesting to me. So mine were all more about a story. There were a lot of NPCs in my adventures that would come to life and help you and provide special clues or keys to getting past certain things. I always did a lot of that. So when I finally got into developing some of these software things, I was always trying to

implement those kind of ideas. So I guess you didn't approach dungeon design necessarily from, you know, like the top-down bird's-eye view that most people do, but more from like a, like, almost, you know, like one of those Mac Venture games. I don't know if you've played, you know, the Icom adventures like Shadowgate and that sort of thing, where, you know, it's kind of like you're traveling through a dungeon, but it's not, you know, it's not a top-down view. It's not a first-person viewpoint, like in Bard's Tale. It's more of like scene to scene to scene. It seems very much like the same kind of approach.

It is like that. And to whatever degree, there was a top-down. it was sort of not real important. It was more, you know, simplistic is the way I did it. Yeah. I mean, I did want to make it make sense. So if you found a secret passageway, it did make sense to cut back to some other place in the adventure. So I did map some things out. But that was the least important part of it for me.

Right. Yeah. In a way, it sounds kind of like your approach to tabletop gaming was similar to what the guys who found infocom did with Zor. Yes. I mean, that was really an interpretation of the role playing game in itself. Except then instead of having combat where you have like two potential fights in the game, it was really built around solving the puzzles and looking at each, you know, the description of each room, you know, with the text description. Absolutely. I played Zork and that was the kind of game, that was the kind of gaming that I liked to do.

So no question. And there was combat in there, but it was definitely intentional and not just like I'm putting three orcs here and five goblins here or something like that. And that just, that kind of stuff boring to me. Right. So kind of that, that, um, an artistic rendition of kind of what they were doing with text adventures at the time. So this would have been like mid-70s. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So right around the time that they were creating Zorg and, right. Had you played, um, colossal cave or adventure or anything like that? I played adventure. Yeah. I don't remember colossal cave, but I played adventure. It's the same game.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I played, I played adventure and, uh, there were. I played all the Scott Adams adventures when those things rolled out. I loved those. So that was all part of my early Apple kind of experience. But, you know, again, when it came time to create an RPG yourself, instead of going with that, like, story-driven approach, you definitely had some story elements to the Brow's Tale, but you definitely drew more on Wizard.

And I think, yeah, and I think it was that was it. I was sort of, I think Wizardry was such an influence, and it was more start with this. and then what else can you bring into it than it was looking the other way i couldn't see a path to getting that exactly but i could see taking wizardry and kicking it up five notches and so that was that was why i ended up doing it that way if this had all continued you know over time it ultimately would have been something different and when i eventually did centari alliance i did put more story elements starting to do more of that at that point but that it actually became

rather complicated, which is what bogged that product, the project down, is just the amount of animation and all the things like that, you know, Bards still started off really simple and a lot of, you know, automated combat and things like that. So made it easy to get the game done in the first place. So nowadays, I mean, it's different. If I was working on it now, I'd be thinking more along the lines of the way I started all this, probably, and a lot less on, you know, canned sorts of experiences. Do you still play a lot of RPGs? Have you dabbled much in the recent moments?

The only game I've really played in recent years has been World of Warcraft. So I've played World of Warcraft in spurts at different points, but that's about it. And I tried a couple others, but I've not really found anything. And even World of Warcraft's got, you know, some flaws, but enough content that it was, there were points that it interested me. But, you know, I haven't really played a, role-playing game that is really like, wow, this is it, to this point. I haven't had that experience. I've had some, I just had this great visual experience, interactive experience

playing Majes Tale this last year, but that's really, that's really almost sort of another thing entirely. Right. Yeah, I mean, I kind of see Mages Tail as sort of a descendant of your own work. Yes. And I feel like, you know, it's sort of a few steps removed. You know, the, the the interim steps would be something like Ultima Underground or, you know, Elder Scrolls or something where you take that first person perspective and you put it into a fluid first person movement. And then, you know, you take that the next step and suddenly you're inside the virtual reality experience. Right. Yeah, I tried Elder Scrolls a little bit. I just, but I've been so busy. It's been difficult to get into anything. But that was something that was

interesting. And, you know, I don't know, maybe I would have enjoyed it if I'd had time to sink into it. But, yeah, I feel like, you know, the Elder Scrolls. Scrolls games and stuff, you know, sometimes some of the stuff by BioWare does a pretty good job of kind of almost reproducing that human element that I was talking about just because the games are these enormous sandboxes and there's so much to do and you take it at your own pace that your experience is going to be different from every, like everyone has a different path through the game. So it's not the same as, you know, having a GM like sit there and calculate like, okay, what can I do to thwart them next?

But maybe that's about as good as computers going to be. Maybe, maybe, yeah. So before we get back, you know, too far into Bardsdale, I wanted to ask about your influences in other spheres, like as an artist, an illustrator. I don't know if you still do much illustrating now. I didn't know. I stopped, you know, when I got into, I did up until the point where I was doing a lot of coding

and then I had like a new creative outlet. Outlet is the way I felt about it. But back in the day, I've always been a Marvel comic book collector. So I have still to this day tons and tons of X-Men and Spider-Man comics. And that was a big thing for me, just doing comic kind of style illustration. But then some of the art like Frasetta's art on the Conan books and things like that, I was always really inspired by that. So it was probably a combination of those kind of things,

sort of the science fiction, fantasy cover art and comic art. was a big thing for me. Yeah, I'm definitely, I've always been a comic officiant. Yeah, I noticed those, the illustrations that you showed yesterday reminded me a little bit of maybe like John Byrne or someone. I don't know if he was a big influence on you, but I'm assuming you also read like Conan Comics. Yes. The non-superhero comics that still existed back in the series. Right, I did. Yeah. Yep, that stuff had an effect. I was, I actually collected a lot of stuff and I think I collected some of his stuff but I had a lot of a lot of art that I was cutting from different things that I was scrapbooking and

things back then and drawing so but that that was where it all started for me it was that was a big part of my experience was illustrating so for me it all kind of blended together you know the gaming and the and the art and the comics and all of that yeah I mean that that is something that I think you're kind of at the the forefront of seeing the computer as this sort of multimedia synthesis. And obviously, you know, the Apple 2 was only capable of so much. But, you know, you had companies like Rotor Bund that were producing things, you know, like art programs, drawing programs for Apple 2.

And Apple was, you know, the Mac, I guess, came out the same year as Bartstale or right around the same time. Right around. That was really like an art-driven machine. Yes, yes. So it feels like Bartstale was very much sort of of its time. yeah yeah no I agree I remember when the Mac came out too and just I never thought that system was going anyway it's so funny when I first yeah yeah no it was really amazing at the time

I was there when it was rolled out we were up and I was up at uh electronic arts development conference and and they were showing us you know some of the first systems coming out and I just thought this is just not going to do it and it was black and white then you know it wasn't even color, so I couldn't picture it. I thought Apple's gone wrong here on this whole thing, but then they write it and they fixed it. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about wizardry and the influence that that had on you. Because I, you know, I look at the history of RPGs, and I see games like wizardry and some of the early Richard Garrier stuff like Calabath and Ultima, even Zork, if you want to go there, is like the first wave of computer RPGs. And I feel

like Bardstale kind of kicked off the second way, because, you know, it was a game inspired by what had come before in that medium, even though, you know, we're talking about a very compressed time period of like three or four years. Like, there's still, you know, enough time to, to look and process and synthesize and say, okay, I mean, you said yourself that the idea behind Bardstale was that you wanted to surpass the limits of wizardry. Yes. Now, that's absolutely it. I mean, I have to, I can't take credit for the framework for the way the game was set up. It was definitely an experience that I had playing wizardry

that was so profound in a way impact on me that I it was like drawing a bunch of connection points for me between gaming in the past and you know what a computer

moderated experience like that could be but then it was just limited in so many ways but had such a huge impact to me. I would just love the game. And as I was playing, I was just writing out constantly thinking of ideas. I wish I could do this. I wish I could do that. And I was just generating a list because I thought, I think I can do this. I think I can actually write something that's like beyond this. I mean, I knew I could in a sense, but I was just inspired. And then I was thinking, I wonder if people would want to play this, because I sure would. And then I just kept going on it, rolling on it. And I had this

thought, I think this could really be something big and people would be really, you know, intrigued if it was, you know, times the, had three times the depth of wizardry or something, you know, and better graphics and everything else. I think this would be really powerful. So it was definitely standing on the shoulders of Woodhead there when he, when he put that together. I mean, I think it was a brilliant implementation of, you know, a Dungeons and Dragons experience. No question. So, yeah, I recently interviewed Robert Woodhead about, you know, the creation of wizardry. And he said that the game that they created, the very first wizardry, used every single sector of a diskette for Apple 2. Like, they couldn't have added anything more to the game. So, you know, wanting to say,

like, going in and saying, I want to do this better. I want to make this bigger and badder. Like, that was actually, you know, kind of pushing what the system could actually do. Like, did you realize at the time, or did you have sort of like the naivete of inexperience to just power you through? Well, no, what I knew is that because he had written it in Pascal, so he's got this now big runtime engine that he's going to need to build this higher level language on. You just didn't, writing a higher, it's like writing in basic, you know, but the basic kernel was part of the, part of the Apple. Pascal, he had to have a software kernel. They had to read it. So, so I'm thinking all the overhead from this is what is making

this so slow and so limited, knowing that I'm, I'm a 6502 assembly language developer. I knew I could, I had, you know, it was like I had 10 times the room space he had to do this. So, I mean, maybe not 10 times, but five times the amount of space he had, plus the efficiency of machine code running through there, you know. So I knew it was going to be a lot faster and I had a ton more, you know, system resources that I could put in there. But I was in that same spot. Even when it came down to Bardstall at the end, I was like down to sectors on there and like loading, you know, chunks of data into memory. I'd get down to where I'd be 15 bytes from the end and I'd have to change monster names, you know, to make them shorter so that I could fit in another monster instill. you know, have it all there. And I came up with little compression algorithms for different

pieces of data that were in there because I ran out. So he really was, I think, limited because of the Pascal thing. And I knew just because of that, that I had a ton more that I could offer. Interesting. How did you know that it was quoted in Pascal? I don't remember how I knew. It was obvious. So it was either on the box or there was something that loaded maybe, and there was some telltale sign of it. But I don't remember how I knew, but I knew. So that's something I don't think you really talked about yesterday was how you got into programming and, you know, how you learn 6502 machine language, which is, you know, that's, I wouldn't say esoteric. Like, it definitely had a lot of value in the Apple II era.

Right. But, you know, that's still like not just a casual pickup and learn it kind of thing. No, there was a funny thing. So Brian got an Apple II. and I was over at his house and I walked in and I he said hey check I go what's that and he said oh yeah my parents got me a computer and I go what's that and I because the only computers you know about in that time are the things that are in you know huge rooms you know sending the you know spacecraft up to the moon so I'm like seeing this little thing I had no understanding of it and he started explaining it to me and it I'm and I'm like wait a minute you can tell it what to do and he's like yeah check this out and he's showing me some basic so he'd already been mess up

with it probably a week at that point. And right away, I said, can we write games on this? And he said, oh, yeah, there are games on it. And anyway, so we started playing around with it. And that was the beginning of it. And then my, another friend of mine, these were my wealthy friends, okay? Because my parents, I told them, I said, hey, we got to get a computer and they're like, why? What's, what's that? Yeah, we don't know a computer until I was in high school. Right, right. So, and then my other friend, his parents got him one. And I was over at their house hanging out and I'm just like getting time on their computer. I go, hey, could I, you know, he's well, I got dinner coming out. I go, could I just like sit in your room and, like, write

some code? So I was doing that for, and that's how, then as we were going, Brian and I started, we wrote this adventure together. Then we knew a guy who was doing some programming who was more advanced than we were. He was, I think, maybe first year college. And he had a way of integrating graphics in with a text adventure format. And so he taught us a little something about doing that. So then we started working on a combination, image, text adventure format. And then right about that time, I got hold of a book. It was like a self-published book by some guy on, you know, basic use of 6502

assembly language to do graphics. It was like he was a graphic programmer, and this thing was, like, printed on a Xerox machine or something, and I don't know. He was selling it, and I happened to get a copy of this. I just absorbed it, and I was in short time, like, beyond the book and writing stuff. So that book, actually, and I don't remember what it was called. It was like principals of 6502 graphics or something, and it taught me everything I needed to know to sort of keep going on my own, and that was where that really over the last year

or so of high school put me in a spot where I could, you know, and then the rest of game development, I just pieced together myself, sort of the idea of a sort of integrated loop that kept running, you know, where you watch certain events and took certain actions and had certain background effects. All of that just sort of clicked in my mind. So I didn't have any formal training in any of that, but I figured it all out. And yeah, so then by the first year of college, I was, I was really just writing a whole number of different arcade action kind of games. And then I happened to get a copy of wizardry and that changed everything. So one of the things that I think

sort of first wave RPG developers had in common was a lot of experience with shared computing systems, colleges and that sort of thing. doesn't really sound like you had that in your background. So I wonder, do you think that sort of informed your approach to, or changed your approach to game design, like how you approached tackling the concept of a computer RPG versus someone who, you know, like Robert Woodhead had been on Plato systems and done a lot of muds in that sort of thing back in the 70s? Probably, yeah. I hadn't been involved with muds. So yeah, that probably would have changed my approach. My approach was more

like this solo adventure kind of idea, this idea of me playing Dungeons and Dragons and not needing anybody else because the system would be the dungeon master and this idea of individuals being able to game on their own rather than having to find a group of people

and sit down at a tabletop. That was the experience I was looking for and found through wizardry and wanted to offer people on an even higher level. So, yeah, Yeah, if I'd had more of that communal experience, you know, maybe I would have thought differently. And maybe also I would have had some ideas about, you know, multiplayer gaming, you know, down the line. But none of that occurred to me, really.

The idea of integrating, you know, the, you know, the internet as it started to unfold with some of that just wasn't something that made sense for me at the time. So kind of revisiting that question and, you know, about, you know, about. the limitations of the Apple 2 and that sort of thing. Do you feel like technical limitations foster creativity? And so, like, can you talk about how? I think so. I think any time you have a limited palette to draw on, you can, you can, when you reach the limits of one thing,

you then can sort of put your back in that corner and focus on other things. And so by having very limited graphic and processing capability, it allowed, once you get comfortable with that, then you can spend all your time and energy thinking about content, thinking about gameplay and things like that. But if sort of the, if everything's unlimited in the sense of like the complexity of the interactivity and processing power

and memory and disk space, it's difficult to know where to invest your time. You think, well, I can just make this look a little bit better. Maybe I should. Maybe I should put more time in it, more time on it. Next thing, you know, you've split your resources in a way which are maybe not going to end up with the best product in the end. And it's difficult not to, especially in today's world, want to make something look as good as possible.

But in fact, you might be a lot better off stopping, saying this is good enough on how it looks. What is going to really make this fun and engaging for people? So I think that, yeah, I think that the limitations there made it easier to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what is going to make this thing fun. and today I think there's so many distractions in development that you don't really know where to sink your energy. That's my suspicion. Yeah, that was something you said yesterday in your panel.

Graphical complexity has taken over and replaced substance. That's a pretty strong claim. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? I mean, I don't know if you have examples or if it's just like a feeling you have. Well, I mean, you can... Not that I want you to necessarily call out

other developers. Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to. I think that I don't really think that's fair. I think that I think the way I pointed it out yesterday when I'm speaking is a good way because I think it's intuitive for a lot of people. When we came to the Star Wars movies, I think that was a really good example where there was a human connection in the first three movies, despite the fact that the effects were rather weak, that the latter movies have not been able to recapture. The people, the characters, the actors, and the characters that they portray, they draw us in, we identified with them. So we see ourselves in these people, so we become immersed in the storyline, and in their victory, we have a victory. So that was the experience of the first three Star Wars movies, I think, in their victory, we find victory, and we have an experience of that victory.

And then you have the next three movies, and you just can't relate to anybody in these movies. And the graphics were amazing. The complexity of the world that was built was amazing. But there was no human connection really. And the people, most of them, do I hate this person? Do I like this person? But I don't relate to this person. All of that was missing.

And apparently, Lucas had no sense of how to draw people into the story any longer, except if we make it look amazing, I'm sure people will really love this. And this is, I think this is, this is. is a seduction of technology is in thinking if I just make something more complicated, it's going to have a bigger impact on people, whereas in fact, that's not the way we relate as people. So today, my son plays a lot of these games. He calls them pixel games, you know, they're kind of these retro gaming style where everything's blocking, like a Minecraft sort of experience. And, you know, a lot of people look at that and go, wow, this is, why would

anybody even want to play a game like this? But it's, the graphics are secondary. And, I think that that's something that a lot of people miss today. I think it's being missed in Hollywood, and it probably has missed a lot in gaming, but I wouldn't call anybody out. But there are points where I really feel like they're not thinking about what makes something fun and what engages people.

They're thinking more about how to make this more complex or how to make the world bigger or how to make it as hard as possible instead of how do I draw people in experientially. They see themselves in the game. They project themselves into it. They identify with the story. They identify with the non-player characters and things like that.

But clearly, you're not averse to, you know, graphical experiences, as much as you've said great things about The Mages Tale, which is very much, you know, like an experience, a graphical, oriented, immersive VR game. In a perfect world, the graphics are amazing and you don't sacrifice any of these other things. So, yeah, that's the ideal world. The perfect world is one where. The graphics are so amazing. You don't even remember that this isn't the real world. And so when we achieve that, which is achievable in VR, especially as the technology improves, it's going to take gaming along with it. But does that then take the place of everything else that really matters and what makes the game immersive and powerful and life changing for people?

And I think that's the problem. Is people put their energy, time, focus on one thing and don't do the other thing, or they don't. don't know how to do the other thing. I mean, how did Lucas not do that again in the movies? Did he not know what made those movies good for people? Or we don't, well, we can't know. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you interview him and ask him, or maybe ask him for me, because I'm interested in knowing why he didn't understand why those movies were so good, because he apparently didn't. You know, I think the Star Wars prequels show the importance of collaboration and knowing your own weaknesses. Like, Lucas has said in interviews that he's not a great storyteller that

He thinks in terms of structure and technical things. And, you know, the prequels were great in those senses. But in terms of, like, directing humans and, you know, even Wenger is a really good actor, but there's only so much he can do when he's staring at a rubber jar, jar, our head in front of a greens crew. So, yeah, like, I think he just needed to loosen up a little bit and let other people direct and let other people have more input.

Maybe. I think that's, you know, I think when you get great games, a lot of times, you know, games now. when the expectations and technology is so much more complex, they mean to be at Bardsdale, it really does come down to not one person's vision, but many people like understanding how to work together to realize a vision. Well, and this is another problem.

I think that like the more people that you have involved, maybe the more difficulty in getting like a coherent vision realized is there. Because when you've got, you know, a huge team of people, back in the day, when I was doing, this stuff. There weren't big teams. It was mostly one person did the work. And you had people that would support you with graphics or sound or whatever. But it was predominantly one person coding and designing and coming up with things. That was very typical back at that time. And that's almost, I would think, unheard of nowadays. And the productions are so massive that you couldn't,

you couldn't do that. So letting somebody sort of be out front, be the star and sort of carry most of the weight. I think to the degree that that has happened, because there are some really brilliant designers that have sort of carries some of these designs. You see some of the best designs when their visions really hit with people. And those are the ones you tend to take notice of, and the designers that you tend to think of as sort of the rock stars doing it. Nowadays, it's just harder, though, because I think there's a team mentality, and it could be that, you know, sort of one vision that carries everything never really has a chance

to come to life because there are so many people involved in the production. Yeah, I mean, you see a lot of that now with independent games, that one person's vision And maybe meaningfully, a lot of those games have graphics that are really not that much more advanced than what you put together in 1984 for Bardstale. Something like Undertale, which is really just one person's creation, has really resonated with people, you know, all around the world because it tells this really interesting story that kind of inverts a lot of expectations about video game narratives and video game design. But I don't know that that would have worked, you know, at a large scale. Like, if this had been a AAA game. yeah it wouldn't have come it wouldn't have come to life the same way so i want to running a little bit out of time but um i do want to put together two things that you said

in your panel yesterday that i think uh speak a lot to the design of the bard's tail you said magic lets you extend yourself in ways it should be impossible speaking in terms of like you know game mechanics and the vision for bard's tail and you also later said technology allows us to transcend human limitations. I kind of feel like those are two very closely related statements. They are. Yeah, I think that what I, and my, my, my thesis is that this is part of what people want in life. This is sort of the way people tick.

They want to exceed limitations. They want to be more than they are. They want to be everything that they feel they should be. And technologies are attempt to realize that. And we use devices to try to overcome limitations, to, sort of compress time and space to be multiple places to you know nowadays you can be on the other side of the world without moving at all it's that idea and and a lot of a lot of technology is really implemented for that purpose and magic is really a way of doing that also so in a

game context which i think why science fiction and fantasy blend together so well is because they they those things are are utilized for the same purpose and and to give of us this same experience. So me and my games, I wanted magic to be the center point of the game and I wanted people to have that sense of becoming everything they want to be. I say immortal and unbeatable to, you know, sort of have power over the circumstances of life and magic gives you that. Technology gives you that. And so we can deliver that experience in the context of a game. So as I'm developing a game, I'm always thinking how do I deliver that experience to people where they feel like I've just, and I even create limited.

in a game so that I can give people the magical power to then transcend it and have this experience of like, I just lifted myself to this higher level. So it's kind of a positive realization of, you know, an experience of fulfillment and destiny is the experience I always wanted to leave people with because that's the thing I got. And I got that from wizardry. So, or at least a taste of it from wizardry. And I wanted to deliver that in my game. So anytime I'm designing, I'm always thinking in those terms, you know, helping people to have an experience of being like the best they can be even better than they would have imagined through their character and sort of their immersion in the game. I guess kind of as a corollary to that,

you also mentioned something about, you know, in terms of the game design, you created boundaries and limits in order to create opportunities to surpass them. So I feel like that all feeds into this, this idea of, you know, ascending to a higher play. Yes. So, um, it's kind of like with my kids you know it's like setting rules and limitations for your kids so that you can reward them when they do well and then they have a certain experience of accomplishment you know and and responsibility in that and so that experience in life of setting limits and but then having a way to exceed them is there's a certain experience and and that experience is like i think intrinsic to being human and and i think when you in a game you can deliver that intentionally by setting a limit in the game

in the game. You can't do this unless you happen to have a certain magical power, magical item, and then giving that to them. It's contrived, but it gives people that experience. And then as they progress up, they find themselves more projected into the game. Right. Yeah, I think it's interesting that you talk about this

sort of elevation and, you know, becoming the Archeryage in Bardstale 2. Around the same time that you created a Bardstale, Ultima 4 came out, and that is a game very much about sort of similar motifs. you know, about ethics and morality and about setting a good example and, you know,

ascending to become the avatar. I am assuming you didn't, you know, interact at all with Richard Garriette as you were making. I didn't interact with him, no, but I played the games as I was playing. That was, Ultima was one of the games I played a lot of back in that time from. I don't remember a whole lot about it now, but I remember playing it a great deal, which is why I built the capability of loading Ultima characters into Barge Tale ultimately because I had characters that I could roll over. myself doing that.

So, Wizardry and Ultima were the games I was playing. So, yeah, but I never met the guy. But it's interesting that you both sort of arrived at the same destination independently because I don't think, you know, Ultima 1 through 3 really spoke to what he would do with Ultima 4, such a big departure. Right. And, you know, that was a 1984 game also. Right.

So I'm assuming you didn't play Ultima 4 and then saying, oh, I've got to start adding this in the hard stuff. No, no, I got it. Like I said in my talk yesterday, I got. I got a lot of this sense of from Lord of the Rings, and I did have sort of a meta sense after those books of realizing what he was doing in those books and what his goal was in the development of the characters in the books and drawing the reader into the book. And so I knew his general strategy, and I thought, this is what I want, this is the kind

of adventure I would want to build also to draw people in this way. So that was an undercurrent in my design. And maybe it was with Gary at also. So maybe he had similar kind of inspiration, I don't know. Well, I think he was partially inspired by the moral panic surrounding RPGs. And I thought it was interesting that you and your panel mentioned, you know, taking a Christian worldview on things and talked about, you know, pulling influences from the Bible in terms of names for Bardstale 2. As a kid who grew up going to church every week, I kind of, you know, in the early 80s, I got a sort of front row seat to the moral panic surrounding RPGs. Right.

For the longest time, like I was always hearing, you know, Dungeons and Dragons is evil. You shouldn't, you know, be involved in that. I didn't buy it, but I certainly saw a lot of it. I'm wondering if, like, did you have a lot of experience with that? Yeah, yeah. My mom was down on it, actually, at the time. I gave me a hard time about Dungeons and Dragons, but I said, listen, mom, you're missing this because Tolkien was a Christian and C.S. Lewis was a Christian and the Narnia books are the same genre as this. And I said that the issue is not the game itself, but what you do, it's the content in the thing.

So, you know, so I dealt with some of that. And I mostly didn't pay attention to it. But it's like how it is today. I mean, you know, you've got, you're going to have games and movies that are going to, the genre doesn't matter. It's what you do with the genre. So, you know, you've got Narnia and you've got, you know, Game of Thrones. And my kids watch one and not the other. So it's like that.

So you just make good choices, you know. And I knew that at the point. So, yeah, so my approach was, it would never have even occurred to me to put sort of unsavory things into the game. That's not the way I'm wired. And if anything, I think sort of undermines this idea that I was trying to talk about, it's just sort of ascending to this higher level. Why not? I mean, that's becoming all that you're supposed to mean, it means not becoming something you probably shouldn't be and isn't good for you anyway.

So let's give people positive. and leave out the negative and you're not people aren't going to feel deprived because they become some amazing destiny night hero and not you know some you know slave traitor or something like that oh i wish i could have been a slave trader or something not nobody you know i just i just don't need to deliver that experience i don't think that's as fun to me well i was also wondering did you have to deal with like ever being bearing the brunt of that that sort of public outcry against RPGs with the Bardsdale, or did that kind of pass over? Yeah, I never heard anything. I never heard anybody say anything to me, like, you shouldn't

be working in this or doing these kind of games or anything like that. At the point that I was finally doing the games, my mom had, you know, was, I was out of the house, so I didn't have to deal with her anymore. Her criticism, and later on, of course, she didn't, she had a completely different mindset about it, so it was all fine. But I, no, I never had anybody say anything critical to me. I've had people over the years say, hey, listen, my parents were upset that I was playing some of these games, but then I was able to show them my copy of Bardsdale 2 with the biblical cities on it, and they said, oh, okay, this must be all right. I've been told that a number of times. So great, you know, if that got somebody out of trouble, that's terrific.

All right, well, we need to wrap this up for time, but, you know, just to wrap up, you haven't really been working on games in a long time, but you mentioned, you know, kind of wanting to get back into the industry. Like, do you have any thoughts about where you'd like to go with a project? You know, recently, I've done a number of games. They're voice interactive role-playing games for the Amazon Alexa. And the company, if any of who's interested, the company is daysfly, daysfly.com. And I've done three games right now.

One's a kid game. One's kind of an easy role-playing game. and then one's a full combat, probably takes 20 hours to solve extensive role-playing game. And I'm looking to do some more stuff along those lines. But I have been asked recently if I'd be interested in coming back into the gaming industry, and I would take a good hard look at an opportunity to do that. And I would see myself in more of a creative role at this point because the technology and software architecture I've been involved with up to this point

is so removed that I couldn't take a year to get back up to speed on, you know, the latest game engines. So I'd be looking for more of a design role, probably, if I got back into it. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone should know their strengths. Right. So yeah, no, I'd be open to it. And I haven't thought a whole lot about it, but just with some of these other projects I've been working on now, I'm finding myself, you know, more interested in this again. And yeah, so I might look at something if an opportunity popped up. All right. Well, thank you for your time and for your responses. That was Michael Cranford, creator of the Bardstale. And that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts.

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I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. Trump was asked at the White House, his special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.