The Bard's Tale

The Bard's Tale expanded the dungeon-crawl formula established by Wizardry on the Atari 800, adding more colorful graphics, a more elaborate open city of Skara Brae, and friendlier, though still demanding, combat mechanics. The player builds a party of up to six adventurers, walks the city streets full of hidden entrances to towers, sewers, and temples, as well as multi-level dungeons beneath the surface, and in turn-based battles against gangs of undead, cultists, or dragons combines fighters, wizards, thieves, and specialized classes such as the minstrel, whose songs could sway the course of battle by rallying allies or intimidating enemies. Progressing through the game also required solving a number of puzzles right in the streets, where players had to notice small hints in the surrounding descriptions.

On the eight-bit Atari, the game offered a colorful, though still schematic, first-person view of the corridors and a fairly rich palette of sound effects and short melodies that fleshed out the atmosphere of a dark fantasy city full of hidden secrets. Compared to Wizardry, it was more accessible in that it offered a larger map to freely explore right from the start, players could recruit higher-level characters at the tavern for a faster start, and many puzzles were tied directly to the topography of the city itself and its individual districts, which had to be walked through repeatedly while noting the details.

The Bard's Tale was among the most successful CRPGs on personal computers in the mid-1980s, and together with its sequels helped popularize the genre beyond the narrow circle of Wizardry and Ultima fans, partly thanks to its more accessible entry point for new players. Even today it's easy to see why the game captivated players back then – the combination of atmosphere, textual humor, and honest tactical challenge still works surprisingly well, though you should expect the era's typical demands for manual mapping and patience when pushing deeper into the dungeons.

Why play it: For players who want to experience why this game once popularized CRPGs beyond the circle of Wizardry and Ultima fans – the atmosphere, textual humor, and honest tactical challenge still hold up well today.