Developed/Published by: Interplay Productions / EA (original), Krome Studios / InXile Entertainment (remaster)
Released: 12/1985
Completed: 05/02/2025
Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been itching to play an old school western RPG recently–really want to see some numbers go up–and got really excited when I discovered The Gold Box Companion, a companion app for SSI’s legendary Dungeons and Dragons RPGs that–because I was too young for them at the time–completely passed me by.

However… I couldn’t help but feel I’d be skipping a bit too far forward on my (personally imposed) chronology if I jumped to playing Pools of Radiance–I wasn’t satisfied when I played Pirates! that I had the historical context I wanted–that I nosed around a bit to see if there was something I’d previously skipped that might fit the bill.

Hence: The Bard’s Tale.

Now, I’d previously skipped this because I’d heard that it was, frankly, a bit boring. Actually, I was basing that entirely on The Digital Antiquarian saying “long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious” which probably isn’t entirely fair. But what drew me back was that The Bard’s Tale is one of those games that I think many who grew up in the “video game magazine” generation have–a game that I read about two sentences about but was always longing for.

It’s funny the things that lodge in your mind, isn’t it? Here’s the reader’s letter from Amstrad Action that’s stuck with me since literally 1991:

What’s funny is that in the intervening, uh, thirty years [“lies. The 90s are ten years ago”–Ed.] I managed to forget, I guess, that Amstrad Action’s “Balrog” ran an entire “The Bard’s Tale Club” section culminating with a short walkthrough just a few issues earlier. 

Interestingly, I think this is one of those things where I can see myself maturing in real time–in the matter of months I went from a wean who skipped the Balrog section because it wasn’t about, like, arcade games, to a wee guy who was at least interested in them. That or a guy pretending to be a gnome caught my eye.

All I remember is that I’d missed my chance to get The Bard’s Tale. So, here I am, thirty [“ten… I’ll go as far as fifteen”–Ed.] years later, finally living my childish dreams.

First: if I’d got this in 1991 I’d have been completely baffled by it. Within a few short years I’d be playing Ultima Underworld, but I didn’t really even play that properly, and The Bard’s Tale requires, like Wizardry, a deep understanding of RPG character creation and party management. And also like Wizardry, it’s about as brutal as an RPG can get, killing your party or giving them debilitating, expensive-to-cure status effects that require you shlep all the way back to a temple to solve, in maps that wrap (no! Not again!!!) and are absolutely louping with spinners, traps and dark zones.

In some respects, I’m lucky that I mostly relied on luck and parental largesse to get computer games.

I’m also lucky that there’s a remake of The Bard’s Tale in the form of Krome Studios’ The Bards Tale Trilogy: Remastered, which rights-holder InXile Entertainment had them make (after, interestingly, a remaster from the team of one of the original developers, Rebecca Heineman unfortunately fell through). I’ll be honest, I was originally not planning on playing it, because it has genuinely awful Super2xSal-quality upscaled art. The game looks like this:

When in its best contemporary ports, it looked like this:

I know which I’d rather look at, though in some respects I thank god that the remake came out before they could us AI to upscale it all and make something that looked even worse. The benefit of playing this (nasty) looking versions outweigh the pain of looking at it though, because not only does it make a lot of quality of life improvements such as a shared inventory and doubled experience, it plays perfectly with a controller–so you can even play it with a Steam Deck comfortably.

If you’re a purist, however (and I don’t actually blame you) I have to admit that the version I played isn’t exactly The Bard’s Tale, as the “trilogy” version aligns all three games design, so in this version there are distance mechanics in the combat (enemies can start some distance from you and you have to advance on them) and bows and arrows are added, which I suspect changes the feel of the combat quite a bit. But to be honest, I can live with it. And I never used bows and arrows anyway.

Enough personal history. For the real history, you can of course go to someone like the aforementioned Digital Antiquarian, but it’s worth noting that even though The Bard’s Tale entered my own personal history in 1991, it was released in 1985 and is, I think surprisingly to modern eyes, the best selling computer RPG of the 1980s, selling a reported 407,000 copies.

I say surprisingly because The Bard’s Tale hasn’t lingered in the cultural imagination the way that RPGs such as Wizardry or Ultima have. It wasn’t first; it didn’t inspire much (Japanese RPGs were already divergent by 1985) and the series didn’t evolve any better than Wizardry did. By 1991, the year I discovered it, a cash-in construction set was released for anyone who hadn’t already moved on to the more active style of dungeon crawler begat by Dungeon Master, and it wouldn’t be seen again until The Bard’s Tale in 2004, which is a Bard’s Tale game in name only.

If you’re wondering what made The Bard’s Tale so successful, but then so irrelevant, it comes down to the fact that it is, ultimately, just a Wizardry clone that happened to come out on the popular C64 with nicer graphics than Wizardry years before Wizardry would reach the system, and be pushed by the already mature (and not yet fully soulless) EA.

Designed by Michael Cranford, it was his second attempt to directly make a Wizardry killer after HesWare’s apparently flawed Maze Master. For some reason, The Bard’s Tale is particularly known for the development team all sniping at each other publicly for years after the game’s launch (it even makes the Wikipedia) but it’s all so “he said, she said” and feels kind of… un-illuminating about the game. At least, it doesn’t add anything. The only part I find particularly interesting is that this game is officially called “Tales Of The Unknown: Volume I: The Bard’s Tale” because (and there is some argument over this) the series was supposed to be called “Tales Of The Unknown” but–and this might be a sign of EA’s encroaching soullessness–it was felt “The Bard’s Tale” was better known, so it got dropped.

(And if you’re wondering why I find that interesting, it’s because it would happen again with The Legend of Kyrandia, which was actually supposed to be the “Fables & Fiends” series. I’m not sure how many more examples of this there are.)

Anyway. As I said above, writing about the experience of playing The Bard’s Tale feels almost exactly like writing about Wizardry, bar for a few twists (I like to believe if they’d kept to “Tales Of The Unknown” maybe the sequels would have diverged more.) The main twist people get excited about is that you navigate the town in the same way that you navigate the dungeons (step-by-step 3D movement) but let me tell you this–it just means you have to do an annoying amount of schlepping about and fighting piddly enemies when you want to heal or level up, and I’d honestly rather a menu. The thing I felt like I felt I did the most in The Bard’s Tale was stand around outside the “Review Board” save scumming to try and make sure my level up rolls were good…

The rest of the game, despite featuring several dungeons, ultimately boils down to what you’ll do in Wizardry–try and find the best way to grind so you can kill the final boss. In the original game, this was a particular repeatable battle, which led to one of my best ever “this is too specific, that’s not how memes work” memes, clattering out to complete silence:

But in the remake, which has a smoother curve (and only lets you do this battle once) you can get away with just ordinary grinding (thankfully). Now, the game does actually feature some puzzle solving–you do have to find and collect certain items–but moreso than Wizardry, I realised how much I miss a “proper” quest and side-quest system. Here you have to notice text prompts when you step in certain squares (which zoom off the screen immediately in the remake which means you’ll never see them–a big mistake) and piece them together, but getting deeper into dungeons is grimly unrewarding when that’s all you get. I started my game mapping this properly, but the maps get worse than Wizardry even faster! So much of the dungeons in this game are made up of “dark” squares that you feel like you’re navigating almost the entire game blind, to the point where I almost can’t imagine trying to complete this without having another map at hand and the in-game automap (I can hear the hardcore crusty RPG types rolling their eyes here…) 

It could be alleviated, perhaps, if you could enjoy the combat, but there is almost no strategy to it. While it may partially be a flaw of the remake (where the updates fly off the screen at a hundred miles an hour) The Bard’s Tale has a bizarre difficulty scaling where you start by having your entire team killed by a single mouse holding a feather duster and about an hour later are fighting a squad of forty vampires at once. While it’s extremely funny to imagine them trying to all squeeze into a corridor, the problem is that your melee characters are just meat shields for your magic users. I made myself up the kind of squad that gets recommended for The Bard’s Tale and as much effort as I put into my critical-hit focused “Hunter” character (usually my favourite kind of RPG character! I love them crits!) I barely noticed them doing anything at all with their piddly single hit on one enemy compared to my magic users, who by mid-game have a spell that can wipe out every enemy you’re facing in a battle at once.

The game’s focus on the magic users makes it seem even odder that the series ended up going under The Bard’s Tale moniker. While your melee types are stuck in their starting class, your magic users are expected to change class each time they fill their classes’ spellbook, and they start again from level one keeping all their stats (quite unlike Wizardry…) meaning that by the end of the game you have spellcasters who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime hiding behind a flesh wall. The only reason you can’t ignore melee completely is that your magic users’ armour class is so bad–and that matters when you’re facing off against four squads of sixty enemies at least some of whom might get an individual hit off each before you’re able to hit them with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

(This magic user focus is symbolic of author intent, however. As Michael Cranford would explain in his GDC post-mortem of The Bard’s Tale and its sequel, he was “bored” by melee combat and was interested in making a game with seven different spell-casting classes that your characters would learn until they were able to become archmages, with melee combat your fallback when you ran out of mana. Although this was cut back to four classes with the archmage showing up in the sequel, this original idea explains everything about why The Bard’s Tale plays the way it does.)

But let’s be real here: the majority of The Bard’s Tale you spend not save-scumming level ups to make sure your spell-casters can mow down enemies like they’ve got a gatling gun is spend stumbling around in the dark or in battles you barely notice happening. The only real moments of tension are when you get given one of the many annoying status effects (reload–it’s not worth the hassle) or when you have to get out of the dungeon, because the game (sort of interestingly?) gives you absolutely no way to regenerate mana unless you’re outside¹, so your grinding sessions are always limited by how long your mana lasts. But because you get so many level-ups with your magic users, it’s not much of a problem (by the middle of the game, I was staying down collecting three or four level ups before bothering to climb back out of a dungeon.)

The problem, sometimes, with playing a game like this is that devoid of the context–an old home computer, months of free time, it being the fucking 1980s–you play it as the object it is, rather than the experience it represented. Everything I’ve said is all true, but if you were loading this up on your C64 (or Amstrad!) with a bundle of paper maps in front of you and the latest “Bard’s Tale Club” tips, nursing your RPG party across months, slowly getting deeper into each dungeon, finding and writing down all the clues, I can see The Bard’s Tale as the evolution–a small evolution, but an evolution–of the Wizardry design it is.

You could recreate this if you really wanted! But the problem is that there are simply more fun, deeper, more interesting, less punishing ways to spend your time not even now–even then. Playing the first The Bard’s Tale, the same as playing the first Wizardry, you understand why they died out so quickly for not adapting. When they aren’t all you’ve got, they aren’t what you want.

The funny thing is, that I’ll still remember The Bard’s Tale fondly. Not for when I played it–but when I imagined it.

Will I ever play it again? You can continue the series seamlessly in The Bard’s Tale Trilogy, but the dungeons in the first game are so horrible I would never do this to myself.

Final Thought: Alright, you’ve read everything I’ve written and you still want to play this. You want to say you’ve played the most important RPGs! I get it. So next time, for supporters only: How to beat The Bard’s Tale!

1. You can find magic items that let you regenerate mana in dungeons but I never found any. And there’s the occasional regen spot in a dungeon, but I only found a couple. So the point stands, largely. ↩︎