Game 170: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin Cartridge (1983)

Despite the copyright date, all evidence points to the game having been released in 1983. This is one of the few times I'm going to go against the opening screen for the game's official title. The manual has the title as listed as in this post title, and word from some sites is that TSR's contract mandated "ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS" in capitals, the word "cartridge" as part of the title, and the copyright dates, leaving no room for the subtitle.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin Cartridge

APh Consulting (developer), Mattel Electronics (publisher)

Tom Loughry (programmer)

Released 1983 for Intellivision and Mattel Aquarius

Date Started: 13 December 2014

Date Ended: 14 December 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Variable (player choice)
Final Rating: 19
Ranking at Time of Posting: 33/166 (20%)

Treasure of Tarmin seems to be the first RPG ported from a console to a PC. It is, admittedly, a fairly lame example of the conversion process, having been ported from Mattel's Intellivision console, a platform that might charitably be called "second rate," to Mattel's own Aquarius personal computer, a 1983 platform whose own developers called "the system for the 70s." For gaming, the Aquarius had the same clumsy dial-below-keypad controller as the Intellivision, so it's not like the port was a lot of legwork. Nonetheless, it is technically a "first."

Tarmin is also the first Dungeons & Dragons-licensed game of any platform that can reasonably be considered an RPG. Its predecessor, later called Cloudy Mountain (link to my review) to avoid confusion with this one, is best described as an action game with some RPG elements. After this, Mattel lost its license to produce Dungeons & Dragons products, and we didn't see another D&D computer title until 1988, when Pool of Radiance finally did it right. That said, just like Cloudy Mountain, Tarmin has absolutely no connection with D&D other than the title. It uses no D&D rules, no D&D-specific monsters, and no D&D mechanics. Other RPGs of the time, like Wizardry and Ultima, had more in common with D&D than either of Mattel's officially-licensed titles.

The setup for Tarmin is basic: a single unnamed player descends into a system of mazes beneath the Island of Tarmin, defeats the minotaur, and recovers the Great Treasure. (The original title for the game was Minotaur.) On the way, you fight monsters and find items that improve your hit points, defense statistics, and weapon ratings. Eventually, you come up against the minotaur, defeat him, and collect his treasure to end the game. There are no frills like NPCs, stores, or even character creation, but the game is fast-paced and continually rewarding, and I was surprised to find myself having fun with it despite its primitive nature.

A typical Treasure of Tarmin screen. My backpack, to the left, contains a knife, a key, two bows (of two different levels), a spell scroll, and a locked pack. I'm carrying that around hoping to find the next level key to open it. The bottom of the screen shows that I'm on Level 6 and I have a shield in my left hand and a "Fireball" spell in my right. The numbers on the right indicate that my war strength (hit points) is 27, my spiritual strength is 9, my physical defense is 19, and my spiritual defense is 17. Because I have a "spiritual weapon" equipped, my physical attack rating is currently 0, but my spiritual attack rating is 17.

As the player begins the game, he selects from four difficulty levels, which affects the starting health, starting food, starting arrows, "vulnerability," and the number of levels before you first encounter the minotaur (from 2 to 12) and therefore the length of the game, which can be as short as a few minutes on easy difficulty to many hours on the hardest difficulty. With no way to save the game, harder levels must have been difficult on the bladders and time-management abilities of 1983 players. I can just envision 10-year-old me arguing with my mother that if she makes me shut off the game now and go to bed, go outside, come have dinner, etc., I'll lose three hours of playing time. (The argument would have gone nowhere because mothers just don't get it.)

The castle map on "Easy" mode. Two tiers of Level 1/2 funnel to one tier each of Levels 3 and 4. The minotaur and treasure is guaranteed on Level 4. I can keep descending after Level 4, but I won't appear on the map.

The castle map on "Hard" level.

Each maze level is 12 x 12, and on harder level there might be multiple tiers (up to six) of them funneling down to Level 12. You can move down via ladders (there are no up ladders) and between tiers via teleportation gates that scramble your war and spiritual strength scores. No matter what setting, it is possible to descend lower than the lowest level on the map--the game supports up to 255 levels, after which you return to a new Level 1--and even face multiple minotaurs. Regardless, you win when you first pick up the treasure after a successful minotaur kill, whether it's on the level designated by the map or a lower one. Players who are really enjoying themselves may want to delay picking up the treasure indefinitely.

Facing the minotaur.

Neither sound nor graphics are fantastic in the game, but both play a significant role, just like with Cloudy Mountain. Sound is important because it's the only way to tell how many arrows and how much food you have remaining. Pressing a button returns a series of clicks that you have to count.

As you traverse the exterior corridors of levels, "eyeball murals" of various colors mark the entrances to the interior mazes, with the eyeballs color-coded to indicate whether the player is likely to find a physical challenge (dark green), a spiritual challenge (blue), or a mixed challenge (tan). Equipment and treasure are color-coded to indicate their quality, and monsters are color-coded to indicate their difficulty. Potions and some spellbooks are color-coded to indicate their effects. To someone with multiple types of color blindness, of course, the system is a disaster. I do okay with the silver/gold/platinum system used by treasures, but some of the monster color ramps (yellow/tan/orange) I can't distinguish at all, and the blue/pink/purple system used by spellbooks and portions also cause me no end of trouble. I basically figured it out through trial and error.

The "eyeball mural" indicates more magic-oriented encounters and items down that corridor.

 
Of each level's 144 squares, probably 12-15 hold some bit of equipment and 12-15 hold some monster. Nothing respawns, so once you clear a level the only way to proceed is down (though as before, you can do that essentially indefinitely). Equipment consists of:

• War weapons, of which curiously all are missile weapons. Bows and crossbows fire arrows, of which you have a limited supply, and bows can break randomly. Other weapons--axes, spears, darts, and knives--are one-use only. Every weapon exists at one of six levels of power, indicated by color, from tan ("regular") to white ("super").

• Spiritual weapons, consisting of one-shot fireball and lightning bolt spells, or multi-shot scrolls (I think they're unlimited but they can break), and unlimited-use spellbooks at six levels of power.

• Armor, including hauberks, helmets, gauntlets, and shields, which exist at six levels of power. You hold shields in your left hand, but other armor items you simply "use," and if the item you used is better than the last one you used of the same time, your physical defense rating increases.

Encountering my first hauberk on the ninth level.

• Rings, which increase spiritual defense power. You "use" them the same way as armor items.

• Keys, which allow you to unlock...

• Containers, including money belts, boxes, and bags, some of which must be unlocked by keys. They can contain bombs (which damage you) but usually contain...

Putting a key in the active slot so I can unlock a box.

• Treasures, including coins, ingots, chalices, and crowns. These simply contribute to your final score.

• War books and spiritual books, which are one-use items that increase your maximum war strength (physical hit points) and spiritual strength (spiritual hit points) accordingly.

• Potions that restore your max strength value or raise your maximum strength values.

• Special permanent spell books that aid in navigation by allowing you to see or move through walls. These never go away.

• Re-stocks of arrows.

• Bags of food. When you have at least one bag, you can rest, which recovers 5 "strength" points, including increasing your maximum strength if you've defeated some enemies since the last time you rested.

With so many different options, you receive some kind of upgrade every few minutes at the most. It's addictive to keep pressing forward and seeing your strength and defense values increase.

An equipment drop in this corridor. A pair of gauntlets followed by a money belt. The manual shows what icons represent what items of equipment.

Every square in the 12 x 12 grid is visitable. Every level has an outer ring of squares in which there are no enemies or items. The various sub-mazes branch off this circumference corridor. There are a lot of secret doors--found by simply pressing "Open" while standing in front of them. Since doors close behind you (and secret doors vanish behind you), it's often tough to figure out where you've already been without mapping. Things get very easy, however, once you find a spell book with the "Teleport" spell, which moves you forward one square, wall or no wall, and never runs out. Once you have this, you can basically just lawn-mow each level as if the entire thing was open. "Vision" books are also handy navigation aids that let you see through nearby walls, allowing you to easily scope for enemies and treasure.

With the "Vision" spell active, I can see a wraith hiding behind a nearby wall. That's a pair of gauntlets on the floor in front of me.

Tarmin features a small selection of monsters, each at three different color-coded levels: giant ants, dwarfs, giant scorpions, giant snakes, alligators, dragons, skeletons, cloaked skeletons, giants, ghouls, wraiths, and minotaurs. Some of these are distinguished between shield-bearing and non-shield-bearing varieties. Each monster does either war damage or spiritual damage, so it's important to keep both types of strength up. As you defeat them with war weapons or spiritual weapons, your maximum strength values in the respective areas increase.

A giant scorpion attacks while a dwarf-with-shield waits nearby. I must have just thrown my active weapon, so I have to select one of the scrolls or bows from my inventory (to the left) to continue. When combat is over, I'll pick up that bag of food.

The one huge advantage to the player is that monsters don't roam--they stand in fixed squares--so you can often see them in the distance and either attack or avoid depending on whether you feel you have enough equipment. Even if you walk right up to one, there's a chance of using "retreat" successfully to get one square away, if he turns out to be too hard.

Trading axe attacks with a cloaked skeleton with a shield.

Combat proceeds in turn-based fashion. You act, the enemy acts, and so forth. Only actual attacks count as "actions," so you can bumble your way through cycling inventory, picking up and dropping things, and swapping things without penalty, which is good for someone trying to get used to the controls. When you first face the enemy, the number at the bottom of the screen which normally shows the dungeon level changes to show the enemy's strength. You assess this number against your own strength and weapon skill before deciding whether to stand your ground or retreat. I've rarely had to retreat. If you die in combat, there's a chance of being reincarnated with no equipment on the same level.

Tarmin has one thing I've never seen: "evil doors." These are like mimics, but for doors instead of chests. You turn to face what looks like a regular door, but it suddenly changes color and starts shooting magic damage at you. They're very difficult to kill, but there's always some major treasure behind them.

Trading fireballs with an "evil door." It currently has 23 hit points.

I spent a long time bumbling around getting used to the game and the way the Intellivision controller maps to the PC keyboard in the Nostalgia emulator. The original controller had a movement disk for navigation (mapped to the arrows on the keyboard), 12 buttons in the upper keypad (mapped to the PC keypad), and two buttons on each side (mapped to HOME, DELETE, PAGE DOWN, and ENTER). I guess every game came with some kind of overlay that you slid over the controller so that the game could put specific words on top of the corresponding buttons. I'm curious if these overlays made gameplay clumsier, or if players actually used them.

The Treasure of Tarmin "overlay" for the Intellivision controller.

The Intellivision controller, for all its clumsiness, does address one of my common complaints about early console RPGs: there aren't enough controls to offer the same depth of gameplay as the keyboard. With 16 buttons plus the dial, it has almost as many options as modern controllers, and Tarmin uses most of them. A lot of them have to do with inventory management; there are separate buttons for picking up items, swapping the left and right hand, swapping the right-hand item with the right-most item in the pack, and rotating the items in the pack. I was constantly getting confused and accidentally dropping things I wanted to store or accidentally moving my shield to my right hand, where it can do nothing. Fortunately, the game is forgiving about such mistakes by not counting such actions against your turn.

One slight innovation involves separate buttons for "look left" and "look right" which allow you a quick glance in adjacent squares without making a full turn in either direction.

After I had the controls down, I started a game at "Easy" level to see if I could win it quickly. On "easy" level, the minotaur appears at dungeon Level 4, but when I got to that level and faced him, my character hadn't developed enough in strength or equipment to defeat him. With no other recourse, I continued moving downwards, slowly improving as I went. Various sites I consulted indicated that the minotaur can appear on any level after the "official" one, but I suspect he doesn't appear again until after the maximum official one, or Level 12. In any event, I didn't find him until Level 16.

The down ladder from Level 5 to Level 6. A spell scroll waits beyond.

For all the build-up, he's not much more difficult than most other monsters at that level. I had plenty of hit points by then, and he died in a few hits. Once he dies, the Treasure of Tarmin appears behind him. You take it and are rewarded with a shot of the castle map, this time with the sun shining brightly in the background instead of the dark of night.

The winning screen.

In a quick GIMLET, I give it:

• 1 point for a bare-bones game world.

• 2 points for character creation and development. There's no "creation" but development is quick and satisfying, and the game has an intriguing idea with the dual war/spirit path. I suppose some players could focus entirely on one or the other (my winning game was almost all "war"-based) or try to achieve a balance.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 3 points for its small list of foes, split between physical types and spirit types. I give some credit for lots of grinding opportunities plus the original "evil doors." Several sites also said that there's a way to distract enemies by "throwing treasure." This doesn't make sense to me because a) treasure never appears in your inventory; it just gets added to your score when you pick it up; and b) there's no command to throw things. Nonetheless, if it's true it adds some more credit to this score.

Encountering a giant on the other side of a stairway. During this attempt, I found an awful lot of bows.

• 2 points for magic and combat, again with the war/spirit dichotomy. There isn't that much strategy, though.

• 3 points for equipment, probably the game's best feature, including some effects we rarely see in RPGs--in particular seeing through walls and a spell that improves the quality of equipment.

• 1 point for the economy, which unfortunately just increases the score.

• 1 point for an adequate main quest.

The fabled Treasure of Tarmin appears after slaying the minotaur. Picking it up ends the game.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I didn't like any of them, but at least the game made graphics and sound an integral part of the mechanics.

• 4 points for gameplay, a high score that recognizes its replayability (on different difficulty levels), its challenging-but-fair difficulty at the medium level, and its quick pacing. This is one game (ahem) that understands it's not a 40-hour epic.

The final score of 19 isn't a great one--it is still a console RPG, after all--but it reflects how far things had come in the one year since Cloudy Mountain, which I gave a 9.

The box cover is notable for not featuring a minotaur.

Both Advanced Dungeons & Dragons titles were the work of the same programmer, Tom Loughry, famous among Intellivision aficionados for Sub Hunt (1981), Worm Whomper (1983), The Dreadnaught Factor (1983), and these two cartridges. After the heyday of the Intellivision, he moved to Accolade and developed a number of vehicle simulation games for the Commodore 64 and DOS, including Steel Thunder (1988), Gunboat (1990), and Grand Prix Unlimited (1992). The last credit I can find for him is in 1998, on Electronic Arts' Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit.

I haven't been able to track him down, but the hosts of the "Intellivisionaries Podcast" (every platform is someone's favorite) interviewed him in conjunction with Treasure of Tarmin just this past June. (The podcast is very long, but highly recommended if you're really into the game.) In the interview, Loughry says he was inspired in part by a game called something like Krozair that he played on "a university computer somewhere" (no one can seem to be able to identify it) and felt he could improve. He programmed the game in just a few months. The original subtitle was Minotaur, but there was some concern about a conflict with a Parker Brothers game called Minotaur Maze, so "Tarmin" was an alliterative compromise using two of the three syllables from the original. Like many developers of the period, Loughry highly prized the ability to randomize the mazes and placement of monsters and treasure, to ensure that every new game would be unique for the player, and even the developer could enjoy playing it. (This is something I also heard from Randall Masteller in conjunction with his Warrior of Ras titles.)

While he seems satisfied with his creation, calling it "extraordinarily complex" for an early 1980s Intellivision game, he was still disappointed with features that he couldn't offer, including saving, more complex combat, and an overland exploration ability. He planned to offer such features in a third Advanced Dungeons & Dragons title, but the project died during development. (He says it would have been "kind of like Zelda.") Later, other Mattel developers began working on a third AD&D game, but they lost the license in the meantime, so the game was ultimately published as Tower of Doom (1987) without the AD&D connection.

Me, I think I'm done with the Intellivision. I know of two other RPGs developed for it, Tower of Doom and Swords & Serpents (1982), but neither had a PC port, and I've got to draw the line somewhere. This was an interesting diversion, though, and I'm glad someone insisted it belonged on my list because of the Aquarius conversion. Onward we go to MegaTraveller!