Dunjonquest
By risseless 4 Comments
Today's tackling of the "Catch and Release" quest (#7 to finish!) uncovered some old dusty memories of my earliest gaming days. I knew everyone would be scrambling to create releases for their favorite games to finish the quest, so there was no way I was going to bother with newer games. For my experience, the best way to get points -- and now quests -- on the site is to fill out old games. Those are shamefully neglected on this site, but I've done what I can for the old time classics like Bard's Tale and the Ultimas. And when I looked, it was indeed true that many of the old games from my youth did not have releases. So after adding them for games like Wizard's Crown and Adventure Construction Set, I thought of my very first RPG experience -- Temple of Apshai.
I still remember back in the day, sitting at my friend's Commodore 64 waiting for Temple of Apshai to load off tape (yes I'm that old) just so I could play it. It took around a half hour, and sometimes wouldn't even load and you' have to start over. But that was it, my very first RPG experience. That was what hooked me. I think it used to annoy my friend at how much I wanted to play, and when I finally got my own C64, I borrowed it religiously.
And today, in doing this release quest, I discovered that Temple of Apshai -- or rather Dunjonquest -- is an entire franchise of games. Temple of Apshai was repackaged at least once, and had two different "expansion modules". Who knew that games in 1982 had expansions? As I was researching these and filling in their release dates, I saw references to a game called Hellfire Warrior. Giant Bomb didn't have mention of it, and surprisingly neither did Moby Games. Digging around a little more, not only did I find that it was a sequel to Temple of Apshai that had two of its own expansion modules, but I found box covers for all of them. Score!
So there it is, my first time actually adding a game to the site -- three of them in fact. I've expanded the Giant Bomb universe just a little bit. Shame there's not a quest for it.