The games also share an innkeeper dialog that asks if you want to buy weapons and armor before the quest, and both use the same order for the different types of equipment.īut Dragon Lair is a much simpler game than Temple of Apshai. Their output was fairly unique at the time, but Dragon Lair seems at least partly inspired by Automated Simulations’ Temple of Apshai, with its room-by-room progression and semi real time combat. House of Usherfrom 1980, loosely based on the classic short story by Edgar Allan Poe, most closely resembles Dragon Lair, but features slightly different mechanics and a completely different map.Įqually unknown is John and Patty Bell’s relationship with Dungeons & Dragons or any earlier computer role-playing games.
DRAGONS LAIR 3 HARDCORE GAMING 101 MANUAL
The Japanese manual for Dragon Lair proudly introduces it as “Fugen Original Soft” and none of the known Crystalware games quite match up with it, but the company’s catalog is not entirely preserved, so it’s impossible to be sure if it was really made exclusively for the Japanese market. John Bell was the founder and president of the California based software house Crystalware and published a variety of games for North American home computers between 19, including several primitive action/adventure/RPG hybrids. The PC-8001 version cryptically credits “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon”, but on Fujitsu FM-7 computers it is revealed that the game was actually written by the couple John and Patty Bell. This gives it a much stronger claim to being the first, while its status as a Japanese game is even more debatable than Roger’s work. Dragon Lair by Fugen Electronics was covered in the December 1982 issue of the monthly magazine Technopolis. That narrative is not entirely false, but this article is not about Henk Rogers’ The Black Onyx. If you’re interested in the early history of RPGs, you may have read the story about the Westerner who introduced the Japanese to the genre.
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