#Eye of the dragon game manual

It benefits from far better formatting and illustration than the typical game manual of the era (a characteristic of Epyx they also did a good job with Dunjonquest). I linked to the manual above because it's worth checking out. The idea, I guess, is that the good wizard managed to 'freeze,' at the cost of his own life, a three-week window of time in which adventurers could repeatedly try to find the Dragon's Eye and thus forfend the coming invasion. Something about the Seven Provinces, ruled by a good magician, being threatened by the Evil Necromancer of the Warring Lands, whose amulet, the Dragon's Eye, gives him power over time itself. It's only a single page, but I read it three times and I still don't understand. I was a bit lost anyway as to the incomprehensible back story. Once again I have to give credit to the fantastic Museum of Computer Adventure Game History for collecting and scanning the 17-page manual for this game, without which I would have been utterly lost.

You must return to your origin point in Fel City within 21 days to voluntarily end the game and receive your final score from 0 to 6,000 points, organized on a scale from 'Terrible' to 'Grand Master.' 'Winning' the game is about returning with the titular Dragon's Eye as one of the treasures, but you can theoretically achieve a high score without it. Its basic mechanic-visiting discrete areas, searching for items and encounters-would reappear in Wizard Wars in 1987.Д®ach treasure acquired and each combat won contributes to the player's overall points. The player starts in Fel City and moves from area to area seeking randomly-distributed treasures and fighting monsters. The game takes place on a single map of 40 areas, separated into seven regions: Fel City, Dark Forest, Lofty Mountains, East Plain, Deep Chasm, Ley Land, and West Plain. Nonetheless, it's worth preserving their memories for some of the innovations they offered, few of which made it into the CRPG mainstream.

I've played a bunch of them since downloading my first non-DOS emulator about a year ago, and while I've held some to a certain level of fondness (e.g., Wilderness Campaign, Dragon Fire), it's not much of a secret why most of them are are ill-remembered today. The Dragon's Eye is one of a group of proto-RPGs made for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore PET, and other platforms in the early 1980s.

Eye of the dragon game