Most adventure games of 1984 showed the player a picture and a paragraph of text and waited for a typed command. The Lords of Midnight showed a landscape instead: the plains, forests, towers and mountains in front of whichever character you were controlling, drawn afresh each time you turned or took a step. Beyond claimed there were 32,000 different views. Sinclair User’s reviewer found the “response time is excellent, with pictures generated almost instantaneously”, and the game was voted into CRASH‘s readers’ charts for the next four years.
Fast facts
- Author: Mike Singleton. Publisher: Beyond. £9.95, 48K Spectrum; also released for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC.
- Scale: “a possible 32,000 views on the screen from 4,000 locations”, in Sinclair User’s 1985 profile of Singleton.
- Two games in one: a quest (get Luxor’s son Morkin to the Ice Crown and destroy it) and a wargame (raise armies and stop Doomdark taking the citadel of Xajorkith).
- CRASH: ten out of ten in its Adventure Trail pages, issue 7, August 1984.
- Sinclair User: Gilbert Factor 9 (out of 10), September 1984.
- Award: Best Strategy Game in Computer and Video Games’ Golden Joysticks for 1984.
How the views were made
Singleton told Sinclair User how it worked. Each view was assembled from “standard pictures for various parts of the landscape”, as the magazine’s review put it, placed according to where the character stood on the map. The code that controlled the drawing took “less than 1K”, and “a further 17K” held the individual objects. “Different-sized images are stored in advance, which is why the pictures come up so fast,” he said. Scaling a picture up or down as it was needed would have been awkward, and “when they get very small they look bad.” Distant features were drawn small and grew as you walked towards them.
Memory was the hardest part. The manual and the keyboard overlay had to be sent to the printer early, so the game’s design was fixed before Singleton had solved the problems of programming it. “With one or two K extra it could have been finished earlier,” he said. “Believe it or not, it was streamlined three times. I squeezed the extra out of it by compression.” The game took six months to write, all on a single Spectrum, without even Microdrives, which “hadn’t arrived”.
He also explained why there was almost no text. Every command is a single key, marked on a keyboard overlay; CRASH’s review describes THINK, which reports on a character and his army, and CHOOSE, which offers searching, hiding, attacking or repairing defences as the situation allows. “It would be inappropriate for the game to have text,” Singleton said. “There is such a lot going on the written commands would slow the game down.” The pictures did the work that text did in other adventures. Sinclair User noted that “the information contained in them is vital to the game”.
Singleton called the method landscaping. Its descendants are covered in procedural generation.
A quest and a war
The story was Singleton’s own. He wrote the first chapter, setting out Luxor the Moonprince, his son Morkin and the Witchking Doomdark, and then drew a map more detailed than the one in the box. The player starts with Luxor, Morkin, Corleth the Fey and Rothron the Wise, and can recruit more lords and their armies along the way.
Sinclair User explained how the two games pulled on each other. Morkin’s quest for the Ice Crown draws Doomdark’s attention, and “the closer Morkin gets to success, the less Doomdark can direct his ice-fear against Luxor’s armies”. The characters have moods as well as armies: “if a commander is very frightened, he will be less likely to consider joining a battle.” The reviewer thought it would “provide as authentic a taste of Tolkien or Donaldson as any game yet produced”.
CRASH reviewed it in its Adventure Trail pages, which scored out of ten rather than in percentages. It called the game one “of immense complexity” that “transcends the simple word-matching of the mainstream adventure and in many respects more resembles a strategy war game”. Four years later the magazine recalled that it “earned an unbeatable ten out of ten in Issue 7’s Adventure Trail”. In June 1985 Computer and Video Games announced that its readers had voted it Best Strategy Game of 1984 in the Golden Joystick Awards.
In the charts
CRASH printed several readers’ charts side by side, and a game could be in more than one (see Reading the charts). Lords of Midnight usually was. In November 1984 it was at 2 in the Hotline Top 50 and at 1 in the Adventure chart on the same page. In July 1986 it was at 25 in the Hotline and 4 in the Adventure chart. When CRASH added a Strategy chart in 1987, the game went into that as well: in September 1987 it was at 7 in the Strategy Top 10, and in December 1987 it was at 2 in the Adventure Top 20 and 7 in the Strategy Top 10. In December 1988 CRASH noted that “four years later its classic gameplay keeps it in the CRASH Adventure Chart, along with the sequel Doomdark’s Revenge”.
Later history
The sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, also took ten out of ten in CRASH’s Adventure Trail, in issue 13. A third part, Eye of the Moon, was announced but never released; by the end of 1988 CRASH described it as “almost permanently shelved”.
Singleton died on 10 October 2012. A new version of The Lords of Midnight by Chris Wild, who had earlier adapted the original games for the PC and worked with Singleton on the new one, came out for iPhone and iPad later that month, followed by versions for Windows and Android in 2013 (secondary sources). Chris Wild’s company Chilli Hugger publishes the code and data for its versions of the games on GitHub.
Sources
- CRASH, issue 5, June 1984: preview of The Lords of Midnight (Beyond’s claim of 32,000 views; the 32-page booklet).
- CRASH, issue 7, August 1984, p. 72: Adventure Trail review (Beyond, 48K, £9.95, author M. Singleton).
- Sinclair User, issue 30, September 1984: Chris Bourne, “Dark side of Midnight”, Spectrum Software Scene review (Gilbert Factor 9).
- Sinclair User Annual 1985: profile of Mike Singleton (Terry Pratt and Beyond; the graphics routines, 32,000 views from 4,000 locations, memory, six months on one Spectrum, the absence of text; the story and map).
- CRASH, issue 10, November 1984, p. 127: Hotline Top 50 and Adventure Chart.
- Computer and Video Games, issue 44, June 1985: Golden Joystick Awards results (Best Strategy Game).
- CRASH, issue 30, July 1986, pp. 50–51: Hotline Top 30 and Adventure Top 30.
- CRASH, issue 44, September 1987, p. 88: Strategy Top 10.
- CRASH, issue 47, December 1987, pp. 112–113: Strategy Top 10 and Adventure Top 20.
- CRASH, issue 59, December 1988: readers’ programmer awards, entry on Mike Singleton (“an unbeatable ten out of ten”; still in the Adventure Chart; Eye of the Moon shelved).
- “The Lords of Midnight”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Singleton’s death, Chris Wild’s PC adaptations and the 2012–2013 versions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lords_of_Midnight
- Chilli Hugger, “The-Lords-Of-Midnight” repository, GitHub (web, secondary). https://github.com/ChilliHugger/The-Lords-Of-Midnight