This weekend, I got it into my head to play a game I wasted many hours in high school on: Might & Magic 1. (Or, to go by its full title: Might & Magic Book 1: Secret of the Inner Sanctum) I recall that this one of the very first games I saved up my allowance for and bussed across town to go pick up at the game store in town that had it in stock. (The late 80s were a different time...)
What is Might & Magic?
Don't confuse M&M with Heroes of Might & Magic, a series of strategy games that were a spin-off and I think much more popular.
Might & Magic is a computer RPG in dungeon crawl subgenre popularized by Wizardry and Bard's Tale. The gist is: you have a vaguely defined quest and need to a assemble a party of more or less D&D-esque characters to go fight monsters. Combat is usually just text-based (instead of top-down strategic combat found in the Ultima or D&D Gold Box games). Wizardry and Bard's Tale 1 give you the flimsiest quest and M&M 1 gives you even less: it doesn't tell you why you should be exploring the world. I don't remember what the ultimate quest or story is but I gather from reading a few blog posts, as you explore you eventually get kind of a quest. But in that era, it was simply understood that you were going to create a party and then go seek the dopamine hit of leveling up and finding neat magic items.
State of the art graphics/dungeon exploration in 1986
What passed for fun in the 80s
Now, the ancient hardware these old games ran on didn't give the developers much to work with in terms of processor power for features. There was no automap and so the intrepid adventurer needed to map out the game's levels by hand. On paper.
But! I really enjoyed this! You had a sense of accomplishment as you filled in more and more of your current dungeon and accumulated this stack of completed maps. Your quests often became things like: finish mapping this level, find the stairs to the next level, figure out how to get to the block of squares you haven't been able to reach. And, when you finish the game, you have a souvenier of your playthrough.
I can't remember if Might & Magic did this, but Bard's Tale definitely had a lot of things designed specifically to make mapping harder. Teleporters where the game might not tell you that you'd been teleported, squares that spin you around, magic darkness forcing you to feel your way around (M&M has dark squares, at least I've discovered). And sometimes combos of those things.
No really, I find this fun!
Might & Magic 1 has a wilderness divided into mapable chunks, 5 towns and many dungeon levels, and some castles. 55 levels in total so I'm going to have quite the stack of paper by the end. I recall that the game actually came with a pad of gridded paper for you to use.
You know what's less fun though?
Good god this game is hard! Like, punishingly difficult. I don't mean the puzzles are hard or that the game is presenting strategically difficult situations. The game just constantly throws fights at you that wipe your party out before you even really have a chance to do anything. Fleeing from battles almost never works so the play loop is mostly: leave the safety of the inn, find 1 or 2 random encounters that you hopefully survive and then you run back to the inn to save. Oh yeah, you can only save at a town's inn so if you find a particularly good magic item you have to flee back to save your characters, desperately hoping you don't hit a total party kill before you get back.
I think I'm lucky if for every 30 minutes I play, I manage 5 or 10 minutes of saved progress. At least the maps I draw before my party is wiped out don't, like, burst into flames. I get to keep that progress...
I remember Bard's Tale being that difficult in the very early stages of the game and you'd have the occasional tpk. But I've leveled up my gang a few times, found some better gear, and even then I still get completely wiped out ever other fight. I might have turned a corner though because my sorcerer just got high enough level to cast fireball, which might be a game changer. At least until I have to move on to an even more dangerous area of the game...
I'd completely forgotten this was considered fairly normal for computer RPGs. I haven't played any of the Wizardry games, but the early ones have a reputation for brutal difficulty and I wonder how Might & Magic compared. Reviewers at the time mentioned its difficulty but that was just considered part of the gameplay and not, say, poor game design. If nothing else, it certainly extends play time and I guess in that sense provides for entertainment for your dollar?
M&M Two? Three?? FOUR???
I did finish Might & Magic 1 back in my Commodore 64 days and I also bought its sequel but I don't think I got far into it. I think performance was a bit poor on the aged C64 platform. Slow load times and spinning floppy discs are extra painful in a game when you are restarting ever 10 or 15 minutes...
I never played any of the other main Might & Magic games, and the 10 installment came out in 2014!
If I don't abandon the first game and don't hate it or myself by the end, I think I'd like to try Two and Three at the very least. I bought a bundle of the first six games for a pittance on GoG.com ages ago. They're still there for just $10, if you have a lot of time on your hands, enjoy drawing maps by hand, and don't might a little dose of immense frustration.