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Gold Boxes for a Golden Age of RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Strategic Simulations Inc.'s "Gold Box" series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games were one of the biggest franchises of the Western RPG's heyday, during the late 1980s and early 1990s. SSI broke into the top tier of computer role-playing game publishers by making effective use of their AD&D license with Pool of Radiance (1988) and its sequel, Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989). Their "Gold Box" game engine became one of the most prevalent within the genre, with around a dozen games in the series being released between 1988 and 1993.All of the Gold Box games look and play in essentially the same fashion. You roll a party of six characters. Most of the games have overland maps, on which the party is merely a square traveling between cities and dungeons, but the bulk of the game's exploration takes place in dungeons in a first-person perspective. The bulk of a Gold Box game takes place in combat, on a tactical grid. More than most other RPGs of the era, the Gold Box games focus on the details of their tactical combat. A single battle can be quick, or larger battles can take up to an hour. Space and movement are important considerations in combat, unlike Wizardry or Might & Magic. For example, if your character is standing next to an enemy and then moves away, the enemy gets a free opportunity attack.
The Game Archaeologist: Dark Sun Online
Computer RPG players in the late '80s and early '90s were surely familiar with Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) and its now-infamous Gold Box series. The series, so named because of their distinctive gold packaging, ran on a solid engine that helped the company churn out over a dozen titles within a five-year span. From Dungeons & Dragons' Pool of Radiance to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, these titles quickly became revered among the gaming community. I personally have very fond memories of playing both Buck Rogers titles, despite not having ever watched the show. While the Gold Box series has not become as timeless or replayable as late '90s classics like Baldur's Gate and Fallout, they definitely had a huge impact on the PC scene and helped elevate the CRPG genre. Following the Gold Box engine, SSI went on to produce another engine that it used for a completely new series set in the D&D campaign setting of Dark Sun. Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993) and Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager (1994) were both modest hits, and when it came time for a third game in the series, SSI decided to make the leap to the then-untested realm of online gaming. What followed was a wild two-year experiment in MMOs that happened prior to the Ultima Online and EverQuest generation. While ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its potential or gaining a large audience, Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands made a valiant attempt at achieving the inevitable future of gaming.
