Let's Play... Pool of Radiance

Pool of Radiance

SSI, 1988

originally played on Commodore 64, Amiga

I hesitated before starting this one again. Just look at the simultaneously beautiful and hideously atrocious box cover art and you’ll quickly understand what I mean. The beauty is perhaps less obvious: a classic Clyde Caldwell fantasy painting, an artist well-known to all Dungeons & Dragons tabletop fans, depicting a standard male power aesthetic found all over the best and worst of fantasy art and culture. Metal and man-hair shine with equal precision. The sword half-poised like a cock. The dragon oddly feminised. Taken as a whole, these elements betray both a nerdy powerlessness and a strangely appealing masculine power trip fantasy, one which fully grabbed hold of me as a precociously impressionable twelve-year old. Of course, like all infantile compulsions the negative connotations specifically associated with ‘heroic fantasy’ iconography fully outweigh any sense of aesthetic pleasure derived from what is at best a skilled technical ability which readily evokes a sense of perpetual nostalgia within a certain kind of game consumer and a certain kind of revulsion from most normally everyone else.

an early-game encounter

Interestingly enough, my own experience with this box cover art was not enabled by consumption, at least not in its official capacity. My father brought Pool of Radiance (1988) home one day, copied from a physician friend at work on the basis of the game program being the largest ever released for the Commodore 64: four double-sided 5 ¼” floppy disks. Game piracy was of course not exceptional behaviour in the 1980s. Games were passed around with friends at school on a nearly weekly basis. At this point in the computers-as-pedagogical-tools debate, school computers were entirely misunderstood by teaching staff who had obviously never been trained to use them, so any use by students was viewed by teachers as an appropriate display of computer science aptitude. Friends and I would sit at the back of the classroom copying and playing games and receiving straight A’s.

The more official procedure for our family (i.e.: condoned by parents) to acquire games was to go through ‘The List’, a document dozens of dot matrix computer-printed pages long. My brother and I would select from The List the games we would want to play. My dad’s physician friend would then charge according to how many disks were used, not how many games were copied. I’m not sure whether he actually owned all of the games that were on his list, but he had a whole lot of them. Marriage and kids had not stopped this workaholic emergency room doctor from acquiring a large library full of games. My father brought me over there a few times, and I was instantly amazed by the bookshelves which housed games to the ceiling in nice-smelling oak with brass and silver accent lighting. Treated like a fine library, the doctor’s game collection was my projected masculine fantasy. He must have been buying fifteen games a week for the three different computers set up in his study. On each of the few times I was there, I was allowed to rifle through the boxes and play some of the games released only for IBM and Apple ][, systems far too expensive in the 1980s for my family. Distinct from game consoles, home computers allowed full access to media production technologies such as disk creation. In fact, the early history of home computing was almost entirely informed by a culture of software sharing and copying, as many of the computer clubs functioned essentially as game swap meets. Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the industry had to educate consumers to convince them not to copy their floppies. As a barrier to piracy, a lot of the games employed off-disk copy protection in the form of manuals, maps, charts, printed graphics, and code wheels which were often creatively integrated into gameplay. With the doctor, of course, these materials involved additional fees. Ancillaries, he called them. In addition to using four double-sided disks, Pool of Radiance required two large manuals full of expository text and information about the gameworld, and a code wheel. Needless to say, the game was quite expensive to copy.

educating the masses about the dangers of software piracy

The SSI gold box games were particularly important to my formative videogame habits: extended play sessions, meticulous procedures for backing up save files, attention to detail with a forensic and autistic focus, a logical strategization of progress, and meticulous documentation – admittedly a skill developed playing other RPGs which habitually required players to create their own maps and log narrative and quest information. Ultimately, as a result of the cost of pirating complex games such as CRPGs, and the fact that by the age of twelve I was in receipt of a fairly regular income stream, I purchased a copy of every other gold box game I played. From age seven I had been delivering newspapers, and by twelve I had begun to make a profit buying and selling comic books, a bedroom industry in which I thrived until adults started paying attention to comics as investments and by 1992 had priced me out of even trying. Before Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989) and the other gold box games, however, it was Pool of Radiance which captured everything I could call my attention. My father brought the game home, showing off the disks and wondering in amazement about “where it will all end”. Of course, he meant computer technology and wasn't challenging me to complete the game before he did. As a kid I didn’t think my parents played games, maybe due to the fact that they would sometimes get mad when my brother and I played games instead of doing “something outside”. My mom certainly never bothered with them, and it wasn’t until I was older that my father admitted to having enjoyed Douglas Adams games Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) and Bureaucracy (1987) and strategy games such as Ocean Trader (1983), Trader Trilogy (1982), Starflight (1986), and Elite (1986). So he came home from work and was immediately excited that I was immediately excited by the game. In retrospect, this enthusiasm made sense. A few months prior, my religiously-inclined mother and I had gotten into a huge fight after she had found my first-edition copies of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide and Deities and Demigods. Fuelled by a trend in religious hatred against D&D quite popular at the time, my mother had decided to destroy an admittedly satanic-looking book and one which quantified the gods of world religion along with their occult rituals, which I had recently acquired from a friend’s older brother as part of my transition, along with every other D&D player my age, from Dungeons & Dragons to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I never forgot the look on my father’s face as he watched my mom tear the pages out of the books, and it was this look which later made me think that he knew what he was doing when he brought home Pool of Radiance, the first official adaptation of D&D for home computers.

glorious tactical, turn-based combat

Having recently completed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988), another game I had purchased on my own with four-and-a-half weeks of paper route money, I learned Pool's interface very quickly. Enraptured by the character generation screen, among the more advanced for CRPGs at the time, my brother and I spent the entire first night with the game making characters and printing them off in case we wanted to use them in tabletop D&D adventures. Admittedly, I think these characters were only used once in an actual D&D session, but as every RPG player knows that is entirely beside the point. Affect in role-playing games involves fetishising a numerical matrix which qualifies a character within the game world. The numbers tell the whole story of what can be accomplished in the game; the actual narrative or plot is entirely secondary.

perhaps the first game which allowed LGBT characters 

role-playing options add narrative complexity

This being said, Pool of Radiance deploys a rather complicated narrative form for its time. While not exhibiting the narrative depth or complexity of text adventures, Pool utilised a fair number of narrative text passages which guided an admittedly wholly pedestrian and routine fantasy RPG plot. But as with many media texts from the early days in a medium’s history, we must properly contextualise what the game actually accomplishes rather than dismiss it for the many things it does not. At several points in the game, players can make choices which branch the narrative slightly or bestow useful items. While certainly not demonstrating the narrative significance or complexity of Balder’s Gate (1998) or The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings (2011), Pool of Radiance does experiment with the hack and slash mechanics which characterise a significant portion of gameplay. And what mechanics these are. The game presents a complex tactical combat system modelled on actual D&D rules and with elements not only from SSI’s previous RPGs such as Wizard’s Crown (1986) and the Phantasie (1985 – 1987) series, but also from the company’s many legendary war and strategy game series. Almost anything that you could think of doing could be accomplished in the Pool of Radiance game engine, or so it seemed to us at the time.

encounter with the end boss

While slow, the advanced, turn-based combat presented players with (at the time) a rather extensive amount of tactical possibilities. Unlike most of my friends, I was a dedicated computer game player who didn’t have a console at home except an old Atari VCS and an entirely ignored Odyssey 2. For the entire height of the Nintendo boom in the late 80s, most people I knew made fun of me and my family for not having a NES at home. My brother rectified this situation in 1990, but before that my NES time was limited (admitted not quite the right term in this context, as this was the time of extended weekend sleepovers) to time spent at friends’ houses. I took their abuse in stride because I knew that there were things that computers could do in games that consoles simply could not do. Because of piracy, computer gamers always had access to far more games than even rich kids with consoles. The much greater memory capacity of most home computers allowed a far greater complexity to programming code and resultant game design while allowing greater graphical prowess. Most importantly, computers had floppy disks and cassette drives used to save information. As a result, many computer games were designed around gameplay ideas necessitating the tracking and deployment of player data, be it as a record of gameplay behaviour or outcomes or to save a player’s progress. They often presented a different framework for gameplay and presented entirely different ideas to players than did the infinitely more popular console games, extending over weeks or months instead of single sessions, and adjusting themselves to player activity and altering their worlds as a result of player behaviour. Additionally, computer games could utilize highly advanced control interfaces and control interactions allowed by keyboards in addition to console-standard joysticks and trackballs. As fewer people had access to computers in the home, these games tailored themselves to niche rather than mass markets. Some genres such as strategy and flight simulation didn't even appear on console games until very recently.

Accordingly, I used to love showing off to my friends aspects of computer games that console games simply couldn’t do – the personalization and content creation functions, the extensive graphics and gameplay options. Many of these differences existed with Pool of Radiance. Players have control over the appearance of their characters throughout the game. Hundreds of different inventory items are available, allowing for extensive customization. One of my friends was absolutely amazed that enemies could be killed to the point where they were cleared out of an area in the game, and then the game machine could be switched off and the game resumed later with these same areas still clear of enemies. Two months later, he convinced his mom to buy him an Amiga; although Pool of Radiance had not yet been released for that system, rumours were that the best version of the game would be for Amiga but he would have to wait and in the meantime he had Hillsfar (1989), Heroes of the Lance (1988), Defender of the Crown (1986), Blood Money (1989), Dungeon Master (1988) and every other game that was completely amazing on Amiga. Indeed, this minor procedural detail of housekeeping enabled by player data save technologies is the entirety of Pool's plot: clear an area of the city before moving on to the next one and ultimately defeating the end boss, who in this case is a rather fearsome dragon not unlike the one which graces the cover art. Essentially, players are the city's cleaning service; gameplay is precisely a record of this process of 'cleaning'. Despite a few superficial RPG aspects, there was simply no way for console games such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) or Dragon Warrior (1986) to operate in a similar manner. Code passwords weren't the same. No matter what you did on the consoles, the monsters always came back.

exploring the city, Amiga version

obviously

More to the point, however, this style of gaming was not only appealing to math-heavy, idiot-savant youth such as me and my friends, it was also very practical in terms of being a group gaming activity. Playing the game in a large group of people, individuals can make their own choices about a character, and the visual presentation makes everyone feel as though they are hovering around a digital boardgame instead of a computer monitor. Strategic decisions are complex and variable, allowing numerous opportunities for partnership and disagreement with other players as they think through their party’s situation. While I did end up finishing Pool of Radiance alone at home after several months, I also played a significant portion of the game with five friends at school as well as each other’s houses. As the game allowed six characters in the party, everyone got to create and play their own guy (please note that no girls were included in this group of twelve-year old CRPG fans, either in real life or in the game). Everyone had a copy of the save disk, and disagreements would break out when someone would play alone at home without input from other players, thus disrupting our collective progress. Complex social interactions emerged from our play, but I'll leave such observations to researchers more qualified than I in anthropological study.

sweet tactical combat on the Amiga

We didn’t finish the game together, but we did manage about half of it before everyone got distracted by other things in their lives, or maybe other games, I choose not to remember.