Interplay - The Bard's Tale

Kieron Gillen replays The Bard's Tale (the 1985 one) and scribes up his thoughts at RPS.

It’s an odd experience. After a worryingly short period of time, Skara Brae gets beneath my fingertips. I had most of the city memorised, and the muscle memory is still there. Soon I’m running from the guild to the central temples to the magical recharge-shop to the Review Board with barely a glance at the screen. Stepping into the Catacombs (The Mad God’s Name is “Tarjan”, twenty-years out of date Spoiler fans) I effortlessly locate the room featuring 9 Wights which I used as an early grinding run, relying on my bard blowing his area-effect Fire Horn before they tore us to pieces, for about 1500XP a pop. How can I remember all this when I don’t remember the name of any 95% of my classmates? But since it’s a fledgling prototype of the modern RPG, there’s little which hasn’t been seen in more advanced games. While an interesting historical exercise, it fails on the ultimate test: which is “Is there a reason to play it now”?

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This was fun to read. Bards Tale was my first CRPG, and one of the first games I played for any amount of time. That was back in my Amiga days. The greatest mapping experience though was the fairy tale adventure. I had a HUGE map of the land, altough I never got close to finishing that game (just like Bards Tale - those games were hard!).

I never played it. I think I need to!

I played Bards Tale 2 for 3 month - mapping, fighting and solving teleporter puzzles for hours - a great experience.
One of the best features of Bards Tale: Charming monsters into your own party - Father Kringle rules.

Somone is doing a bards tale remake with the devil whiskey engine. Its the only project I know that tries to remake all three of them. I never played bards tale but they are all so dated that Id rather play remake than the originals.

There's a new NWN1 mod for Bard's Tale. I've downloaded it, but not played it yet. Perhaps in a Team Corwin outing later this year.

Ahh… Interplay… that brings back good memories.

BT2 was my first crpg. So many graph pages with maps, notes and clues. And it all fell apart when it turned out I'd missed a password in Dargoth's Tower and was far too pissed of to scour the area again looking for it. Had most of the other wand pieces already too