![]() McCord was open to this, but since the original game in both its PET and VIC-20 incarnations was written in BASIC, he enlisted some help from his friends Scott Corsaire and Steve Lepisto to incorporate machine language routines for sprite-based graphics, enabling the game to run at a more comfortable speed on the new hardware. His producer at Epyx, presumably believing this to be too difficult to pronounce for most people, successfully convinced him to change it to Sword of Fargoal.Ī year later, the C64 launched, bringing with it a whole new market to tap into, so Epyx asked McCord to port Sword of Fargoal to the new machine. Taking the opportunity to revamp and polish the game, McCord initially renamed it Sword of Fargaol, with “gaol” being a reference to the Old English spelling of “jail”. The prolific, popular developer-publisher Epyx offered McCord the opportunity to publish a VIC-20 version of Gammaquest II in 1982. McCord was still at high school when he wrote the game between 19, but many of the features that would form an integral part of Sword of Fargoal were already present and correct: most notably the randomly generated dungeons, and the way in which the map gradually reveals itself as you explore rather than it all being on screen from the outset. That and the fact it had very little in the way of security it was very easy for anyone to “break” into a BASIC program and fiddle around with it for themselves, which is actually the way many people learned to code in the first place throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s. BASIC, for the unfamiliar, stands for Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and is a programming language that was typically built in to early home computers (including the PET, VIC-20 and C64) as a user’s primary means of interacting with the system.Īs its full name suggests, it was designed to be easy to learn and enormously flexible - though its main drawback was its relatively slow speed of execution compared to other means of programming. Sword of Fargoal originated as a previous project by McCord named Gammaquest II, which he had programmed in BASIC for an early computer called the PET. It also had an excellent complete remake for mobile phones in 2009, though this is now only available via a subscription service rather than a separate download. Its C64 incarnation followed in 1983, and this is arguably the more well-known version of the game. Sword of Fargoal was developed by Jeff McCord and initially released for the C64’s predecessor, the VIC-20, in 1982. So today we’re going to take a closer look at the game and its history, and get you all up to speed with this classic C64 dungeoneering adventure! That said, once you get the basics sorted, Sword of Fargoal is pretty straightforward to play, and while the list of button commands in the manual might initially look daunting, there’s only a couple that you will need to use for the majority of your time with the game. ![]() ![]() As such, don’t expect some of the modern conveniences that we’ve come to expect from today’s games! That means that a lot of people who were there “back in the day” have plenty of fondness and nostalgia for it - and if you’re coming from a more modern perspective, it’s worth remembering that this was a time where new genres of game and the best means of implementing them were still being experimented with by a variety of developers. Sword of Fargoal on TheC64 Collection 2 is a great example of this in modern terms, we’d probably describe a game like this as an “action RPG” or a “roguelike”, but at the time of its original release, there wasn’t a lot like it around. Since many of them were developed in the earliest days of the video game medium - and often by individuals rather than teams - a lot of them have quite an “experimental” feel to them, like they’re feeling out the best way to implement game mechanics and structural elements that we take for granted today. Home computer games, such as those found on the two volumes of TheC64 Collection that we’ve published for Evercade to date, are a rather different beast to home console games. Sword of fargoal, THEC64, TheC64 Collection 2
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