D&D’s Most Dangerous Game: Pool Of Radiance – Prime
When you die in this game, you won’t die in real life–but your computer might. Come on a journey back to the time a D&D game was destroying OSes.
In 2006, director William Brent Bell released a movie about playing House of the Dead starring Malcolm in the Middle, that gave us the immortal line: don’t you get it? If you die in the game, you die for real.
While 2006’s Stay Alive certainly isn’t the first story to play around with that premise–indeed, it’s a storyline that goes back to the early days of video games and the mid-seasons of the X-Files featuring episodes where if you die in the game, you die for real:
One day we’ll have VR that makes us look this cool
…and that’s an episode written by cyberpunk originator William Gibson. But if sunglasses and tanktop Fox Mulder and sci-fi badass Scully aren’t enough to convince you of the trope, everyone from Star Trek the Next Generation to Sword Art Online have messed around with the idea that somehow, some way, a video game is going to end up killing you for real.
Why they built holodecks with safety protocols that you can disable with little more than a voice command is a mind-boggling question. Even more mind-boggling is why build a holodeck with safety protocols that you can disable in the first place? After all, you can’t just shout X-Box KILL MODE activate! and suddenly the game becomes deadly serious, at least not since they stopped supporting the Kinect. But whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the idea that a video game will do real harm is one that exists in our collective mythology. And it turns out that there’s a reason for that. Because sometimes video games can be dangerous.
And one of the most dangerous games was created under the Dungeons & Dragons license. The first game to attempt to adapt the 3rd Edition rules also had a dangerous secret that tanked its original release and earned it a place in the pantheon of games whose effects went beyond just gameplay. While not “destroy an industry” bad like E.T. for the Atari, which is still out in a landfill somewhere, the D&D Game Pool of Radiance, Ruins of Myth Drannor came with a bug that could basically take out your Windows Partition. The publisher’s response was to direct retailers to put up signs, but by then it was too little, too late. Let’s take a look back into the latter days of TSR and the dawn of 3rd Edition with the creation of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.
Though the game was released in 2001, our story begins more than a decade prior, when the early days of computer RPGs were spreading their wings and trying to find an audience that developers knew was out there. Titles like Wizardry and Ultima drew on the themes, genre, and even rules of D&D (we’ve talked before about how D&D introduced many of the elements we take for granted in video games) and would eventually pollinate across continents, inspiring what we know now as the JRPG, as well as bringing the idea of roleplaying to a larger market. But there wasn’t a game for D&D–at least not until SSI came along and convinced the biggest name in tabletop gaming that computers were the next logical frontier for D&D. And so they created the original Pool of Radiance.
Pool of Radiance was the first official Dungeons and Dragons video game, released back in 1988. It’s noteworthy for a few reasons, it was the first part of a bold new venture that would provide a shot in the arm to a financially troubled TSR (though, ironically it would be one of the things that leads to their downfall in the end), and secondly: while the game was coded by Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI), the plot was written by the tabletop game’s designers Jim Ward, David “Zeb” Cook, Steve Winter, and Mike Breault. This made it the first time gamers could sit down at their computer and play a game of AD&D, for better and for worse.
The game itself is focused on combat–battles are turn based and eerily reminiscent of Fire Emblem–the game felt sharp and intuitive and at the time it was the best rendition of D&D’s concepts in video game form. It had all the major players: dwarf, elf, half-elf, gnome, halfling, and human, and cleric, fighter, magic-user, and thief respectively.
And when it was released it was an almost overnight success, going on to sell more than 264,000 copies, outselling Ultima V and Bard’s Tale III and changing the gaming landscape. Critics loved the game’s combination of roleplay and combat, calling it an essential part of any role player or adventurer’s collection.
Pool of Radiance went on to have a 1989 novelization by James Ward and Jane Cooper Hong, a 1992 NES release, and 2015 re-release, as well as three sequels, Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990), and Pools of Darkness (1991), proving that the game not only had legs, but true staying power.
And while the game had its flaws, it was enough to jump-start the Gold Box initiative for SSI, launching game after game from 1988 to 1992, but when the 90s hit, they hit hard.
It is no small irony that Magic the Gathering would be the greatest threat to TSR and the ultimate salvation of D&D. The game caught TSR completely off guard, who at first tried to crush the game, with a CCG of their own, called Spellfire, then tried their hand at Dragon Dice a collectible dice game. But as 1996 rolled around, the RPG industry shrank and distributors were adapting to a changing market, leaving TSR deep in debt with no way out.
As Ryan Dancey, one of the minds behind the OGL put it:
In all my research into TSR’s business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found — one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.
No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No ‘voice of the customer.’ TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. he management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR led, everyone else followed.
I know now what killed TSR. It wasn’t trading card games. It wasn’t Dragon Dice. It wasn’t the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.
TSR might have been sputtering, but D&D had lit a spark in player’s imaginations, including Pete Adkison, the founder of Wizards of the Coast, who would eventually purchase TSR and save D&D.
But in that transition time, before the company was bought by WotC, SSI and TSR attempted to team up once more for one last outing–a sequel to the beloved Pool of Radiance–the new game, Ruins of Myth Drannor.
So, those are the waters that this game is born into. It’s the last gasp of SSI and TSR teaming up (though SSI had found plenty of success with other simulations in the meantime), and the game was reportedly already under way by the time that WotC swooped in and saved TSR, which brings us to one of our first hurdles. WotC made big waves after they bought TSR, and as the year 2000 was approaching, they announced a new edition of D&D.
And while 3rd Edition would go on to earn its place in gaming history, at the time the team at SSI, Stormfront, and publisher Ubisoft, had to switch over to 3rd Edition rules midway through it. The announcement came in 1999:
Now, over a decade later, SSI and TSR have teamed up again to attempt to recreate the magic of the original series while at the same time introducing an all-new set of tabletop rules. In Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, SSI will continue the tale it began so long ago but this time with the very latest in graphics, sound and interface design as well as the all new Third Edition AD&D Rules due out later this year from Wizards of the Coast (who recently gobbled up TSR). After listening to us whine for a few months, the developers finally decided to give us a quick peek at what they’ve got up their sleeves. While the game is still shrouded in secrecy, we were able to see enough to convince us that this is what RPG fans have been waiting for a long time.
With rumors of undead and drow everywhere, this game was already building up a ton of hype. And it’s not hard to see why, this is the next in line of a beloved cRPG series, one that, a decade prior had won over the hearts and minds of gamers. And the fact that, right now, we’re about to see another sequel to another beloved cRPG title with a new version from new developers is just a reminder that time is a flat circle.
And IGN is still reviewing it as it all goes down
But Stormfront Studio wanted to hit the ground running. With both Baldur’s Gates 1 & 2 in the background, along with the action-oriented Diablo, Pool of Radiance was going to need to do a lot to stand out. Stormfront Studios developed a better UI, letting people push tables around, climb on stairs for height advantage, fight in formations–but they had to do it all with the experimental new 3rd Edition rules, which hadn’t even been released to the public by the time this game was in development.
And here we should mention just how much of a departure the rules are from 2nd Edition. While 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition have the same general sort of mechanics, roll a d20 and add some numbers, everything from Armor Class to the way you calculate hit points, to the bonuses derived from your attributes to core features like to-hit and saving throws was overhauled. 3rd Edition was a game for a whole new generation.
That’s before we even get to challenges that the team had to face, like implementing more than 100 different spells from 3rd Edition, or adapting 30 new monsters, while also trying to push the boundaries of what graphics in these kinds of games could do. The team understood that art sells–as one reviewer put it:
n fact, Stormfront has gone all out to make this game as beautiful as they possibly can. The aforementioned Skeletal Dragon took up nearly a quarter of the screen and moved with the grace and smoothness of a cat. Where there we holes in its putrid wings, you could see the ground or other body parts where they belonged. Best of all, this all held up during animation. The player characters have also been rendered with exceptional skill, each one featuring a load of different motions far outside the walk/run/swing standards we’ve gotten so used to. All of the creatures in the game are huge in comparison to Baldur’s Gate, a fact that really comes through in the attention to detail that the team is already known for.
While I sat looking at one particular model and his animations, I noticed that I could actually see him breathing. In addition to incredibly smooth monster and character animations, the team has really focused on architectural design trying to figure out the way buildings should look before they set about modeling them. The results are already quite impressive.
Add on to that multiplayer that would allow people to control multiple characters in the same party–and built in from the ground up–the game had a lot on its shoulders. But by the time they were demoing at E3s in the leadup, the game showed a ton of promise.
For Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, the devil was always in the details. Whether it was building tables and chairs and other objects that you could manipulate or pick up, to letting your armor determine your character’s audio footprint, to things like weapon length and elevation into account, they went a step beyond what 3rd Edition had to offer. Still, in the leadup to the game’s launch, spirits were up.
While the game does feature full voice acting for key scenes, it also features an actual working DM. Occasionally, you’ll see a message from the DM when you want to do something but you can’t such as attempting to take one more action per round than you are allowed to. Also, the DM will give descriptive dialog for various objects and events, which is easily differentiated from other text simply because it’s colored blue while regular text is white.
Graphically, the game has almost completely come together. Since the engine uses 3D characters on 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, the characters have a much wider and more fluid series of animations.
Everything is coming together very well in Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. The gameplay is solid, the graphics are great, and the story is your classic D&D tale.
But as we’ve seen, the hype often fails to match the reality. With such promise in the works, and a very eager publishing studio and WotC hoping to see the game release in a timely fashion to accompany 3rd Edition’s release, many of those features fell by the wayside. In spite of the rush, the game still released a year late, in 2001. And most of the promises that had been made by early previews seemed to vanish.
When the game published, the tables and chairs that characters could push around to reach otherwise inaccessible areas had been done away with in favor of simply making most of those objects destructible–though rarely would you find any treasure hidden inside. And it’s an interesting prospect for Myth Drannor as well, since the game wants you to find treasure, presumably, given that you’ll find loads of it over the course of the gameplay–but there’s almost no chance to actually spend your wealth in the ruined city of Myth Drannor.
The sprawling plot was replaced with combat encounter after combat encounter, and from early user-reviews, these encounters made use of 3rd Edition’s “encounter level” rules–but those rules were often unforgiving and would become unbalanced if you tried to fight more than three or four things at a time. Suffice it to say, the game had difficulties when it was released.
There are few tactical challenges we had a chance to see in similar games; everything comes down to hacking and slashing. If you want to kill a mage just put your fighter next to him; he won’t be able to run, nor cast! The only tactics that make sense in this game are to push your “John Rambo” characters in the front lines and make them eliminate any spell-casters, or what few stronger enemies appear in the game, and have the rest of the party support them. The next frustrating gameplay issue is the Windows-like interface with pop-up menus containing commands. Fortunately, all remotely useful commands can also be issued with hot-keys, which makes playing this game a lot easier.
But it’s more than just failed promises that helped sink the Pool of Radiance sequel into infamy. After all, Fable is one of the most beloved game series, and it’s practically built on broken promises. But Ruins of Myth Drannor was released crawling with bugs.
The main problems that flawed Pool of Radiance are its countless bugs. I only had the chance to experience several of them; apart from the setup program which refuses to install the game to any drive other than c:, I had a lot of trouble with virtual memory under Windows 2000/XP. It seems that the game devours immense quantities of virtual memory, which can eventually make the game or even the whole machine freeze. There are many other bugs (especially in the gameplay).
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor could simply be defined as disk full of bugs, striving to be a slow Diablo based on AD&D third edition rules.
And these bugs could range from inconvenient, like crashing when trying to save your game, having abilities like Attacks of Opportunities freeze your game, save files routinely becoming corrupt–to downright deadly to your computer. When the game released, it had a bug that would absolutely trash your Windows partition.
If you tried to uninstall the game, the game would in turn delete your system files. Now, UbiSoft released a patch that fixed this–but this was in the days of 2001, before the internet followed you everywhere you went. People weren’t used to the idea of patching their game for four hours before waiting in line for an hour to log in to your game so a 12-year-old can scream profanities into your headset.
It was a simpler time. And so the developers tried warning retailers to warn people about their game. But, by then it was too late:
Well, at least it doesn’t blow up.
That must be what Ubi Soft executives are thinking about their new role-playing game, “Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.”
“Unlikely to erase your hard drive” isn’t usually a big selling point. But publisher Ubi Soft is proud to announce that, statistically speaking, its new game is almost certain not to wipe out your system files — in fact, it’s only happened in a few dozen cases.
But in spite of all of this, the game sold well enough to top the charts until people realized what it could do to their hard drives if they didn’t download a patch–and download a patch in 2001, no less. Once it made it past its first few weeks, the game all but faded into obscurity, leaving little more than a legacy of buggy gameplay, publisher overreach, and broken system files.
And while it’s not quite deadly to the people that played it, as the folks from Stay Alive might put it:
When you uninstall the game, it uninstalls you right back.
