The Bard's Tale (1985 video game)

The Bard's Tale, a fantasy role-playing video game from 1985, was designed and programmed by Michael Cranford for Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts for the Apple II. Players lead a party of up to six adventurers through the fictional city of Skara Brae, which has been trapped in an eternal winter and infested with monsters by the evil wizard Mangar the Dark. The goal is to navigate the city’s streets, sewers, and multi-level dungeons to defeat him. The game was ported to the Commodore 64, Apple IIGS, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Mac, and NES, and it launched a series of games and books. Early editions used the series title *Tales of the Unknown*, but this was dropped for later ports and subsequent games. A remastered version was released for Windows in August 2018, followed by an Xbox One release in 2019.

Gameplay is a straightforward dungeon crawl focused on gaining experience and improving character skills through mostly random combat with enemies. Players explore maze-like dungeons, solve occasional puzzles and riddles, and find or buy better equipment. At the start, the player can create up to six characters from classes including bard, hunter, monk, paladin, rogue, warrior, magician, and conjurer. Sorcerer and wizard classes become available to experienced conjurers and magicians. On some platforms, characters from *Wizardry* or *Ultima III* could be imported, which was innovative for its time.

The bard class was a notable innovation: its magical songs acted like long-lasting spells, affecting the party in ways such as strengthening armor or increasing attack speed. Some puzzles could only be solved using bard songs, and each song triggered corresponding music (some classical, some original). Magic users could permanently change classes. The game manual describes a magic user who masters all spells from all four classes as "an Archmage, the most powerful being in the world of *The Bard's Tale*," though this status only granted access to all spells with no other gameplay effect. Casting one of the 85 magic user spells required typing a four-letter code from the printed manual, but in mouse-supported versions (DOS, Amiga, Macintosh), spell names appeared in a selectable list. Combat is turn-based and described in text, with no character movement on a map during fights.