Here’s another bit of dusty videogame history: Datestones of Ryn (1979). It was a follow-up to Temple of Apshai, but was chronologically a prequel. Temple of Apshai is kinda sorta the story of Brian Hammerhand’s days as a veteran adventurer (though any narrative in that game is paper thin and fleshed out more by the booklet than anything on the screen), where in Datestones he is a young soldier sent into a cave to retrieve the stolen stones. The cave is small and full of bandits and critters, heads of which can be brought out for additional rewards. But that takes time, which you don’t have a lot of — just twenty minutes to snag your objective.

That time limit, the speed of play and the complexity of the combat system all come together to form a very different experience than the methodical dungeon crawl of Temple of Apshai — this is probably the first example of what we now call an “action RPG,” a genre that would grow into games like the Witcher or the Souls games. It’s a pretty hard game, made harder by the strict weight limit that sees you tramping back to the entrance pretty regularly at the expense of precious minutes. Two sequels/expansions used the same template: Morloc’s Tower (1980) and Sorcerer of Siva (1981), but I never played them (and don’t own them, alas!).  

Interesting thing, too: This, the Apshai games and a handful of others made by Epyx are all part of a series called Dunjonquest, but that series name is used pretty sparingly in the marketing — it’s on the spine, but not the cover? Imagine if all the Assassin’s Creed games weren’t clearly called Assassin’s Creed! That would be strange, but I think the idea was actually to downplay the connection for fear of making consumers think they had to play everything in a certain order or some similar barrier to entry.