AD&D With a Side Order of Pixels: An Ode to the Gold Box Series

I'm going to be honest, this was originally supposed to be a post about Dungeons and Dragons video games made in the Infinity Engine, such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. However, as I was researching background information for the piece, I was reminded of a series of D&D video games that not only predated the Infinity games by a decade but was also part of many fond memories during my teenage years. I'm referring to the Gold Box series of games published by Strategic Simulations (or SSI) in the late 80s and early 90s. Since everybody and their cousin has blogged their opinions on the Infinity Engine games, I decided that I was going to go further back in time and explore my experiences with the first officially licensed D&D video games.

 For the uninitiated, the Gold Box series incorporated the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ruleset into a group of CRPGs set primarily in the Forgotten Realms world of Faerun (there were also a few set in Krynn, the world of Dragonlance). They were given the "Gold Box" moniker due to their uniquely colored packaging. TSR used the series not just as a way to make a few quick licensing bucks but also as a way to expand the D&D brand by releasing module and novel tie-ins to many of the Gold Box games. It was actually a pretty smart business move for a company that wasn't known for making good decisions.

The games used a unique combination of several different user interfaces to approximate a tabletop experience. For combat, the games would use a top-down tactical map, not unlike the table-top maps and minis employed by many gamers for the pen and paper game. The combat system operated much like a regular game of D&D, except that all of the dice rolls took place behind the scenes. For travelling, the games used a pair of different interfaces. In a city or a dungeon, players would navigate using a primitive grid-based first-person view. For traveling cross-country, the player would be treated to a overland map of the local region and would have to move a blinking dot to indicate where they wanted to go. In addition, as a way to save space, much of the stories were told in journal entries found in the games' rather bulky manuals.

The first game published in the series was Pool of Radiance in 1988, which was a pretty basic and stripped down version that really only included combat and dungeon crawling. As the series progressed however, it began to implement a number of improvements including character romances, expanded maps and deeper story-lines. It's also a little known fact that the series also developed the first ever graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights (sound familiar), which ran on AOL from 1991 to 1997. Unfortunately, that game was a bit ahead of its time and the MMO genre didn't really take off until few years later with Ultima Online. The series was also a trailblazer in the area of player-created content and in 1993, as a way to boost flagging sales, SSI released Unlimited Adventures, which provided players with the toolset to create their own Gold Box games.

As for me, I'll always have fond memories of the series dating back to my first exposure to it playing Curse of the Azure Bonds with my friend Shaun. Both of us at the time had rather strict parents who didn't want us to have anything to do with D&D (you know, because of the evil) so we were forced to only play it when the folks weren't around and to carefully hide it when not in use. Man those were the days. Anyhoo, thanks for journeying with me down memory lane again. It's always fun to look back at some of the forgotten relics of video games' past.

For those interested in giving the games a try, most of them are available for sale on Great Old Games here, here and here