Back in My Day: Gateway to Apshai

As I sit and eagerly wait the arrival of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, I try to think back to where my love for swords, sorcery, and the greatness of the RPG genre began. I've played a massive amount of medieval, fantasy, and futuristic role playing games, but where did it all begin? There has to be a reason why I like the aspects of a role playing game more than other games, such as first person shooters or strategy games. Each time I flip over a game, I can still remember further back to another game. As I whittled my list down, I came across one game that stumped me. There was no game before it. That game was titled Gateway to Apshai.

I enjoy role playing themed games so much because I'm allowed choices. That's not to say first person shooters or strategy games don't allow the player to pick and choose what to do. Role playing games, however, seem to allow for more options in what to do and how to do it. It allows me to create a character to my liking, not giving me a default character who finds more and more powerful weapons as he goes. The whole RPG genre, for the most part, allows me to interact with others, whether it be a non-playing character or an actual person online. Perhaps I'm talking to an old wizard or a prison guard. It's all these things combined that allow my imagination to flow freely, and that is what really counts when you're young and into gaming. Your imagination expands the world, making it ten times larger and more fascinating than what it really is. With games such as Gateway to Apshai, you really need an imagination to get through the game.

Gateway to Apshai was released in 1983 for the Commodore 64 and published by Epyx – one of the more well-known C64 publishers back in the day. As you can expect, there were no fancy visualizations or mind blowing storylines for the game. It was the early 80's, and we were still toying around with Atari style graphics and sound effects. While Gateway to Apshai was released in '83, I didn't begin playing it until '87 or so. Granted, I had no clue what I was really doing in the game as I moved room to room; it was my imagination that lead the way and told me what I was doing.

(At six years old this picture showed so much more than it does.)

The game is very basic. It's a black background covered up by what we call today the Fog of War or unexplored areas. The player takes control of an adventurer who must travel into the bowels of the Earth (or just a dungeon for the unimaginative) and discover the Gateway to Apshai. As the story goes, you are the son or daughter of the greatest fighter of Apshai. Your prophecy can only be reclaimed after you have vanquished the land of its evil and its curses. The game is actually nothing more than moving a man around on a black screen, picking up items, and fighting monsters. How epic is that?

Right off the bat, we know we're an adventurer. We start off with a dagger and leather armor, which means we're bound to get some better gear somewhere in the game. Perhaps we want a short sword. Maybe we're more in tune with shooting arrows at enemies. It's up to us. With that child-like imagination, we are no longer playing on a field of plain black with a blurry brown for uncovered territory. Now we're playing in dungeon with cave-like features. To us, it could have been created by some ancient evil or a tribe of some sort or scary monster. It is that type of attitude that made the game so great! After going back to this game, I tried to find the source where my imagination pulled from. While I can't speak for others, I know of a few movies that kept me glued to the television that helped create my imagination.

(There is a slight resemblance to Conan, no?)

Conan the Barbarian, The Neverending Story, and Dragonslayer are just a few movies that I watched over and over again. After I was done watching them, I often pretended I was them. Seriously, who didn't want to be a massive giant man with a big honking sword that cut through people like butter. These movies created worlds outside of what I knew. There were no cars, no guns, no shopping malls or policemen. There were no fancy clothes, no working environments, and no awkward dating rituals. Instead there was nothing but big weapons and bad people that ended up on the end of them. There were dangerous magics to be fought and princesses or relics to be saved. These fantasy movies weren't your normal movies as a child, and it only made me want to see more. When I finally got my chance to play my own hero or adventurer in a game, someone that I told to use this or that, I could hardly believe it. Suddenly I wasn't that white pixilated man on the screen anymore. I was some big tough guy with a spiky ball for a weapon that crushed monster's skulls.

Gateway to Apshai was a very difficult game. It was ten times more difficult at my age because I didn't really understand what I was supposed to be doing. I was happy enough fighting monsters and collecting more weapons, but that wasn't the specific goal of the game. Gateway to Apshai was quite a large game for its time, with 7680 rooms to explore in total. The game was broken down into eight levels, each consisting of 16 dungeons to explore. Those 16 dungeons usually had about 60 rooms each. If memory serves correctly, there were no exits or entrances to these dungeons. Instead the game used a time limit. Adventurers were to explore as much of the dungeon as possible in a given amount of time and would instantly warp to the next area after the time had ran out.

(Treasure! Is it a dress? Maybe a wizard robe?)

In each of these dungeons, treasure could be found. Monsters, of course, were around to guard these treasures. Gateway of Apshai was filled with rats, bats, bandits, and dragons. All of these monsters were quite lame looking on the screen, but that is where the imagination kicks in. Players could attack these monsters by melee battles, ranged attacks, or magical spells, all of which had their own neat little animation. The game generally becomes more and more difficult the further an adventurer travels into the dungeons. They won't want to linger very long if they want to find better equipment to aid them along the way if they wish to survive.

Sadly, the game has no real end. I've never even really made it close to the end, as the game takes too long itself, but my sources tell me the game just constantly repeats. Eventually, the adventurer will become either too bored or too swarmed in monsters to survive. While this would definitely be a problem today, I didn't mind so much back in the day. I could probably say that most early gamers didn't mind as much either. The real goal was to have fun and rack up as many points as possible for bragging rights. The game was great in small dosages of half an hour at a time.

To state the obvious, gaming back then was so much more different than what we have today. At times, we played adventurous video games and then played them in some other fashion. I can remember creating a small notebook filled with monsters, weapons, and magical spells. Each of these monsters or weapons had different stats. Somewhere in the book was a map that I could actually play with my friends. Each square represented some part of the dungeon and a dice roll would determine the loot. If a player landed on a square with a monster, they would have to fight that monster using the dice once again. This was all based off of video games that I played. They fostered an enormous imagination in my mind that got me away from the real world.

(The Atari version seemed a bit better than the Commodore 64 version. Maybe it was the green.)

While my imagination may not be what it once was, I still daydream from time to time about certain gaming elements. I know a lot of people who have given up completely on their imagination, and I can't help but think life must be a bit boring for them. Whether it be through movies, books, or video games, you have to have some sort of imagination to break the shackles of the every day world. I can proudly say that I still use all three, video games being the most frequently used. So when The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim does actually get released, I know that for a short bit of time I'll be leaving the real world behind to get lost in a totally new world.