Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Step into a dark forest where danger lurks behind every tree and where your goal is to gather the pieces of a magical crown before winged monsters catch up with you. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for the Intellivision brought an unexpected dose of adventure and strategic thinking to the home console of the early eighties.

The game, often known as Cloudy Mountain, combines action with elements of exploration and planning. You move across a map made up of mountains and labyrinths, collect arrows for your bow, search for a path through caves and avoid dangerous creatures. The key to success is resource management and cautious progress, because a single mistake in the dark of a cave can cost you your life. This combination of tension and deliberation was remarkably well thought out for its time.

The title was created thanks to a license for the famous Dungeons & Dragons brand, the tabletop role-playing game that unleashed a worldwide wave of fantasy fandom in the seventies and eighties. Mattel used this license to lend its Intellivision prestige and to appeal to players craving a deeper experience than pure arcade conversions offered.

Culturally, it's one of the first attempts to bring the atmosphere of a fantasy adventure into the form of a video game for the mass market. Although the game mechanics are far from the complexity of the board-game original, it managed to evoke that feeling of exploring the unknown and the fear of the dark that forms the core of the whole genre.

For today's player this game represents a valuable testament to how early consoles experimented with the adventure genre and how, even with minimal means, they could conjure up a suspenseful quest.

Why play: An early adventure with the D&D license that conjures surprisingly suspenseful cave exploration full of strategy on primitive hardware.