The History Of the Sword of Fargoal

A brief history of Faragoal

History

Sword of Fargoal by Jeff McCord was a dungeon adventure game published in 1983 through a game company called Epyx who were famous for other adventure games like “Temple of Apshai.” Epyx pioneered writing games for a newly released computer called the Commodore 64, which had a whopping 64K of RAM to boast about! WOW!!

Based on a game called Gammaquest II that the author had written in Lexington, Kentucky, in his Henry Clay High School computer science class. Personal computers had just come out and were being introduced into some schools for the first time.

There were two main choices at the time: the Apple II and the PET Commodore, which had 4K of RAM.


Gammaquest II had the concept of creating randomly generated dungeon levels which, when generated in the memory of the computer, could be revealed onto the screen piece by piece as the character walked around exploring. It could be likened to a person carrying a torch which showed the area immediately around them, and then stayed “lit” as if being mapped behind them.

Mccord Reflects on his High School Career writing video games that were revolutionary for their time and skipping classes to do so...

"I noticed that my friends enjoyed playing this fledgling game, and kids actually began staying after school and ‘playtesting’ the game, suggesting improvements, and inspiring Jeff to come up with ways to add new spells, traps, and other features. The graphics were crude because the PET only had one ‘character set’ with a limited number of characters that could represent the dungeon pieces, objects, and living creatures.

After having skipped one too many chemistry classes that I got an ‘F,’ I managed to complete the game before going off to college. During my first year in college I learned that an acquaintance from another high school in Lexington had successfully sold a computer game for what seemed like a lot of money. So I decided to submit the game to about three or four game companies to see if they would be interested in publishing it."

Moving to California

Two game companies responded with interest, and one, Epyx, based in Sunnyvale, California, offered a $2000.00 advance on royalties if Jeff moved to California and publish the game on a new computer called the VIC-20, also by Commodore.

VIC-20 And the ultimate Game!

The game was completed and released on the VIC-20 and game Producer, Susan Lee-Merrow (who eventually went on to become the well-known Producer of the “Living Books” series for Brøderbund), guided through the writing of the manual and naming the new game. Jeff wanted to call it “Sword of Fargaol,” where “gaol” was the Old English spelling of “jail.” Susan suggested, rather wisely, that it should be changed to the much more understandable “Sword of Fargoal.”

The goal was far indeed, because Epyx playtesters played it exhaustively and always found the eventual goal of rescuing the Sword to be very difficult. It is said that they were able to do it once or twice.

The box illustration and the illustrations inside the manual were done by a famous book cover illustrator named Terry Barr. Terry was known for illustrating many As Quickly after the VIC-20 game was released Epyx asked me to translate it to the Commodore 64, a newly release 64K machine which had double the pixels on the screen, over three times the RAM, and a special sound chip and graphics tool called “Sprites” which would be useful in game designs! It was the Ultimate Game Machine!!

In the new design, monsters and fighters abounded in the dungeon. Also, there were treasures and gold that could be found, including magic spells, healing potions, and other tools useful to survive in the dungeon. When the character had finished a dungeon level they could then go down stairs to the next level, and so on until they reached the ‘Sword Level.’ At that point, the challenge of the game was to ‘run like heck’ and get out of the dungeon before a timer ran out.

The game was written in BASIC, so it could be easily ported to that machine, which was a massive 20K of RAM. In addition, it had the ability to design a custom character set which could be made to form dungeon walls and the shapes of characters and object. It also had the ability to do some simple sound and music.

When SOF was released Commodore 64 the timing was just right. There were tens of thousands of the machines being sold for about $200-250.00 apiece, and in some places you could even get an additional $100.00 rebate for a short time. There was a demand for games for this new machine.

Epyx released SOF in 1983 and there were over 30,000 units sold within about a year. Jeff McCord, being only 19 or 20 years old at the time, made about $1 in royalties per unit, and survived for about two years on the proceeds.

inside stories

The game had some flaws which required problem-solving. First of all, the Commodore 64 hadn’t any protected memory, so copy protection was difficult to achieve. Jeff designed an innovative copy protection system which could detect when someone was trying to launch the program without going through the launching utility.

Since SOF was written in BASIC, and the transitions between dungeon levels was slow, Scott Carter (now Corsaire), was tasked to write some supporting assembly language code to speed up the screen redraw, etc.

The game remained primarily in BASIC and was an efficient 14K in size, smaller than most modern word processing files.

Epyx released SOF in 1983 and there were over 30,000 units sold within about a year. I, being only 19 or 20 years old at the time, made about $1 in royalties per unit, and survived for about two years on the proceeds.

Because of the continued interest in Commodore 64 games, Sword of Fargoal is enjoying somewhat of a ‘Classic Game’ status. Recently, Manuel Polik, creator of the “Epyx Shrine,” did an interview with me and created a “Sword of Fargoal” page! (IT IS SADLY DEFUNCT) CAN SOMEONE MAKE A NEW ONE???

Former owners of a C64 certainly will remember Sword of Fargoal. It was created by Jeff McCord and released for the C64 by Epyx in 1983. It is a simple rogue-like game (preceding the first official release of Rogue
though). And according to http://www.cdaccess.com/html/pc/150best.htm, it is one of the best 150 games ever. A summary of its description could read like this:

You are on a quest to retrieve the Sword of Fargoal, which lies between levels 15 and 20 of a dungeon. The dungeon levels are populated by an ever-regrowing number of different monsters, the deeper the dungeon level, the stronger the monsters. By retrieving experience points and collecting treasures, your own strength will increase as well, while finding your way down through randomly generated dungeons. With the help of different items and all sorts of spells, and by escaping various kinds of traps, you finally can find the Sword of Fargoal in the middle of a labyrinth - which doesn't mean your done, no way, now the game only really begins. A timer is started, and you have to get back up to the dungeon entrance again before time runs out. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because dungeon levels are newly created and look different every time you climb up or down, and are now full of monsters waiting to steal the sword from you - in which case you have to climb down and find it again - but the timer isn't reset.

For more informations and the complete story, visits these sites:

http://home.arcor.de/cybergoth/epyx/swordoffargoal.html
http://fargoal.home.comcast.net/

[hrock86]

Very cool, thank you for posting this.

[Nax_o]

This guide is like fine wine. I enjoyed this game immensely when i was a kid. It was scary also. Dimension spiders jumping on you was rough.