Wrath of Denethenor Development
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Game Development
This is a fantasy adventure game I designed and wrote for the Apple II in 1984-85.
I began writing the game in my last year of high school and finished it up during my first year of college. A friend from high school, Kevin Christiansen, helped out by building the graphics routines and tools for the Apple II version. At Sierra On-Line’s request, I ported the game to the Commodore 64 — which was only possible since it shared the same processor family — but which required redoing all of the graphics routines.
Game Design Document
Manual Unavailable
Concept Art
Design Notes
Developer Notes
The whole thing was written in 6502 assembly instructions, compiled with Merlin and hand-linked! (Yeah, crazy!) It was large enough that I couldn’t fit all the code plus the current map and data in memory at once (even with a 64K requirement) so I had to fashion a system of loadable segments with known jump points — no dynamic linker available.
When I designed Wrath of Denethenor, I wasn’t much interested in creating a stats-heavy RPG or rolling characters with predefined roles. It was my intention that your character started out generic and you played it as you wished: heavy on magic or fighting or thievery, etc. I suppose you might say it was more of a hack-and-slash adventure game. What I wanted to focus on and what I enjoyed the most out of games at the time like Ultima was the exploration aspect. I also spent a lot of time to try to create effects and events and traps that were very specific and visual and not just “you’ve encountered a trap and lost 10 hit points”.
Game Transcript
- Wrath of Denethenor Game Transcript
References
Related Links
