Akalabeth: World of Doom - Gameplay and Technology

Gameplay and Technology

Essentially, the game attempts to bring the gameplay of pen-and-paper role-playing games to the computer platform. The player receives quests from Lord British (Garriott's alter-ego and nickname since High School) to kill a succession of ten increasingly difficult monsters.

The majority of gameplay takes place in an underground dungeon, but there were also a simple above-ground world map and text descriptions to fill out the rest of the adventure. The player could visit the Adventure Shop to purchase food, weapons, a shield and a magic amulet; the player's statistics can also be viewed here.

The game used concepts that would later become standard in the Ultima series, including:

• First-person gameplay in dungeons
• Requiring food to survive
• A top-down overhead world view
• Hotkeys used for commands
• The use of Elizabethan English

Garriott's earlier versions before D&D28b used an overhead view with ASCII characters representing items and monsters. However, after playing Escape, an early maze game for the Apple II, he instead decided to switch to a wire-frame, first-person view for the underground dungeon portions of the game.

While crude by modern standards, in 1980 Akalabeth's graphics and dungeon crawl gameplay mechanics were considered quite advanced, and the game attracted a large amount of attention. And, since Akalabeth was written in Applesoft BASIC, an interpreted language, it was a simple matter for users to modify the source code to suit their needs or desires. For example, the game's magic amulet, which occasionally did unpredictable things like turn a player into a high-powered Lizard Man, could be set to do so with every use, progressively increasing the player's strength to the point of virtual indestructibility. One could also set the player's statistics (normally randomly generated and fairly weak to start) to any level desired.