The Bard's Tale

1985

dungeon crawl, role-playing video game, urban crawl

Developer

Electronic Arts

Publisher

Electronic Arts

Platforms

Various

Game modes

single-player video game

Released

1985-01-01

The Bard's Tale is a 1985 fantasy role-playing video game designed and programmed by Michael Cranford for Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts for the Apple II. Set in the fictional city of Skara Brae, which has been engulfed in eternal winter and overrun by monsters due to a spell cast by the evil wizard Mangar the Dark, the game tasks players with assembling and leading a party of up to six adventurers to navigate the city's streets, sewers, and multi-level dungeons to confront and defeat him. The game was ported to the Commodore 64, Apple IIGS, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Mac, and NES. It spawned The Bard's Tale series of games and books. The earliest editions of the game used a series title of Tales of the Unknown, but this title was dropped for later ports of The Bard's Tale and subsequent games in the series.

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