The Making Of: Pool Of Radiance
Much like the tabletop experience itself, the creation of the first ever D&D computer game was a truly epic quest against amazing odds. We chat with some of the former key members of the team at SSI to learn just how they achieved such an impressive feat
YYou wouldn’t think it today, but there was once a time when D&D was considered far too complex to fit on a disk or run on a computer. The concept of a Dungeon Master was just too much for any programmed AI. Even if someone could have wrangled a computer into running a game, things like dialogue with NPCS, maps, notes, and the many classes and spells were all just too much for the hardware of the Eighties. It’s for this reason that we’ll always be in awe of Strategic Simulations Inc’s Pool Of Radiance. While it wasn’t the first D&D game, it was the first to capture the D&D rules properly, paving the way for classics like Baldur’s Gate and
Neverwinter Nights, not to mention introducing a swarm of gamers to the Forgotten Realms.
Speaking to Chuck Kroegel, director of that now-legendary game, it seems the first hurdle to making a D&D game was out-flexing EA. “We learnt that a few weeks before we showed up, an Electronic Arts representative had come to TSR [creator of Dungeons & Dragons] and greatly swayed the management towards granting them the licence,” he explains. “When we visited, we brought about five people and four computers to show and demonstrate how we would approach the D&D licence.
They chose SSI because of our obvious enthusiasm for D&D.”
It’s difficult to imagine a world in which the behemoth that is EA was somehow beaten out by a company that specialises in strategy games, but the late Eighties were a totally different world to the one we inhabit. EA was the fresh-faced new guy on the scene. True to the company’s title, its employees considered themselves artists, releasing their games in trendy record-style sleeves to exemplify their belief that this was, indeed, electronic art. SSI, however, had been churning out an average of six or seven games a year, consistently, since 1981, and its developers were widely regarded as experts in the arena of RPGS and complex war/combat simulations.
And really, this is what needs to be understood about why D&D was considered such a mountain to climb for PC games, and consequently why Pool Of Radiance was so impressive in its day. Simulating combat in a game wasn’t uncommon at the time. There were simulators for air combat, medieval conquest, modern warfare – you name it, it existed. Furthermore, if it existed, it was likely that SSI had the best version of it out there. Story, on the other hand, was a serious challenge. Stories were resourcehungry. They required a lot of words, which in turn required a lot of disk space. There had been a few recent games that had managed it. Text-based adventures like Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (1985) eschewed imagery in favour of an entertaining narrative, doing away with graphics altogether. Earlier graphical adventure titles, such as the King’s Quest series, had impressive visuals for the time, and they certainly had a plot, but most of the story was printed on the box or in the manual.
Dungeons & Dragons, however, required both of these. D&D was always centred on a narrative, with a group of distinct adventurers going on some epic quest, meeting villains, chatting with tavern-talkers and haggling with blacksmiths. But D&D was also an extremely complex combat simulation, with a variety of classes, weapons, spells and an absolute trove of rules. To make a D&D videogame, you needed to be able to have the best of both worlds.
And that’s exactly what SSI achieved. Firing up the game today, it’s still amazing to see the kind of depth it retains, even after all these years. Character creation allows you to choose from six races and four classes, gives you a choice of gender, allows you to name your character, roll up their stats and then prompts you to customise the appearance of each one. Combat is a complex and nuanced tactical experience, accurately reproducing the need to manage everything from the positioning
“WE LEARNT THAT A FEW WEEKS BEFORE WE SHOWED UP, AN ELECTRONIC ARTS REPRESENTATIVE HAD COME TO TSR AND GREATLY SWAYED THE MANAGEMENT TOWARDS GRANTING THEM THE LICENCE” CHUCK KROEGEL
of your party members on the battle map, to the area of effect and chance to hit that your spells have. It’s just as easy to wipe out your own party with a poorly placed sleep spell as it is to utterly turn the tide of battle by hitting a swathe of enemy orcs.
The mechanics, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. Upon starting the actual campaign, a local herald gives you an in-engine, three-dimensional, walking tour of New Phlan, the city in which Pool Of Radiance takes place. From this point, you’re free to pretty much do whatever you like. The world is huge, encompassing the city itself, which contains a dozen distinct districts, as well as the surrounding wilderness and a sizable keep off the coast of the Bay Of Phlan. It truly is a beefy adventure which rivals anything that came afterwards, at least in terms of scale.
However, it isn’t until you first enter a tavern or check the proclamations board that the charms of this game really begin to show. You’ll be prompted to open the manual and read ‘tavern tale seven’ or ‘proclamation XII’. You’ll then get a bit of hot gossip, overheard from some inebriated dockworker, or a haughty announcement, pinned to the board outside the town hall, about some poor mercenary band that has disappeared in the local cemetery. It’s an absolutely genius way of saving that precious disk space, and really adds to the pulpy vibe which gives the ‘Gold Box’ games such an endearing charm.
SSI’S founder and president, Joel Billings, attributes a large part of this genius to the game’s lead programmer, Keith Brors. “He had tons of experience playing D&D and many other role-playing games, and experience designing and developing computer role-playing games with detailed tactical combat engines,” he explains. Indeed, Keith started playing D&D back in 1977, during the hobby’s salad days. Speaking to him, years later, it’s immediately clear that he has a solid understanding of what makes a fun fantasy adventure. “The booklet was definitely a big innovation for Pool Of Radiance,” he explains. “There usually wasn’t anywhere near as much fluff in our books, but TSR wanted the game to have that epic, D&D campaign feel.”
In fact, it was Keith’s love of pen-and-paper RPGS that scored him a job at SSI in the early Eighties. “Back in the old days you could just go into a company’s office and demo a game, to see if you wanted to buy it,” he explains. “I met a programmer there, Paul Murray, who was working away on some title, and I mentioned how much I loved RPGS, so they told me there was a job opening.” It’s
“YOU LITERALLY HAD 32KB TO WORK WITH. BUT A COMPILER WOULD HAVE MADE THE CODE FIVE OR TEN TIMES LARGER THAN EFFICIENTLY WRITTEN ASSEMBLY CODE WOULD EVER BE” KEITH BRORS
unsurprising that, almost a decade later, Keith was chosen to head up the programming effort for Pool Of Radiance.
Creating a D&D adventure on late Eighties machines was no simple task. The hardware of the era would need to be squeezed for every drop of juice, and that’s exactly what the team at SSI set about doing, going to extreme lengths to save space on the disk. They even hand-coded the entire thing in assembly language. “It was a challenge,” explains Keith. “You literally had 32KB to work with. But a compiler would have made the code five or ten times larger than efficiently written assembly code would ever be.”
Even more amazing, however, is the fact that SSI was able to port Pool Of Radiance to the Commodore 64. The much-loved microcomputer was, by 1988, beginning to show its age. The team got around this by coding the game specifically with the C64 in mind, and then writing a compiler that converted everything from the Apple II, which the title was being developed on, to the various other systems it was to be ported to, including the C64. In another show of extreme efficiency, this was done in a way that absolutely would not get past health and safety regulations in 2020. “We took an Apple II joystick and one from a C64, took them apart, and soldered them together. We then used them to pipe the code from the Apple to the Commodore, using the joystick as an interface. Today, with the existence of Bluetooth and wireless capabilities, you’d never have to even think of employing such crazy shenanigans to interface between two devices!”
But it wasn’t just efficient programming that made Pool Of Radiance (and the subsequent Gold Box series of titles that it spawned) such a compelling experience. “It really felt like you were playing D&D,” Keith is quick to point out. “When you got into a tactical battle, moving your pieces around, throwing your spells at monsters, it felt authentic. When combined with the game’s great story, it created an experience that has endured.” And endure it has. With over a quarter of a million copies of the game sold in North America alone, it is, to this day, SSI’S most successful title.
The Gold Box D&D series would grow to number 12 titles, all produced between
1988 and 1992. In a somewhat sad twist, it was actually the ingenuity of that first game which would eventually spell the end of SSI and its work on the D&D licence. By 1993, the ageing engine, which was designed to cater to the limitations of the C64, was becoming increasingly unattractive, resulting in declining sales, eventually leading to financial losses. In 1994 the company was sold to Mindscape, losing the D&D licence and ending any chance of further work with TSR. Still, the legacy of Pool Of Radiance and the Gold Box games lives on in the many great D&D games that followed. Without Pool Of Radiance there would certainly be no Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or any of the modern isometric RPGS like Pillars Of Eternity. It truly was, and still is, a testament to what can be achieved with a little ingenuity and a lot of love for the hobby.