An ancient quest, one the bards will sing of in every tavern this side of Cloudy Mountain. A heroic ranger, travelling mountain passes, fjording rivers and hacking her way through cursed forests, protected only by her wiles and the taught string of her trusty bow. Her arrows, enchanted by the witch queen, bounce off cavern walls, apt at slaying all manner of rat, bat, snake, and conniving spider. She tracks them through the mazes encountered on her journey, using scat and skull alike to stave off their advance – and that of the tunnels’ vicious demons and dragons whose attacks land close enough to shave the very fibres of her cloak, but just can’t seem to bring her down.
And so she hunts, careful to avoid the shambling pink blobs that are said to be indestructible even to the magic weapons of the brave adventurers who set out for Cloudy Mountain, never to return. By hook and crook and skin of teeth, she rides there and confronts the legendary winged dragons that guard the two lost halves of the Crown of Kings. The crown shards sport the midnight sigil of the ancients. Three arrows notched and flown straight through the creatures’ hearts are the only way to take them down. The ranger recovers one shard, then the other. A fuzzy, computerised blast of sound greets her in her triumph. You return to the map screen, relinquishing control. You’ve done something I’ve never done. You’ve beaten Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on the Intellivision.
It was once the most technologically advanced piece of Dungeons & Dragons media known to humankind. Its mountain mazes, made up entirely of green and yellow pixels, held wonders and horrors for those with courage enough to brave their depths. Its enemies scaled in difficulty, from one-shot KO rats, to two-shot minibosses, all the way up to the winged dragons in the fabled Cloudy Mountain that took three arrows to vanquish. The game’s sound design was enthralling, the back of the box quick to assure players – and rightfully so – that “exciting sound effects highlight game play.” You were alerted to the presence of nearby monsters in the maze by the sound of their wings or the slithering of their bodies through the mud before seeing them at all. To find them, you had to uncover the rest of a tunnel by walking through it, and by that point it could be too late.
