[Coco] Paladin's Legacy

wdg3rd at comcast.net wdg3rd at comcast.net
Sun Sep 14 09:55:16 EDT 2008


Actually, there are two major source streams in fantasy fiction which have merged and diverged regularly.  JRRT didn't publish LoTR until the late 50s (_The Hobbit_ was in 1939), but but back in the early 30s Robert Ervin Howard wrote the Conan stories (and a whole lot of other stuff that inspired Gary Gygax among others to build games before there were affordable computers to play them on).  ("Dungeons and Dragons" started as an expansion to "Chainmail").  Barbarians vs wizards were around a long time before friendly (they're not nice if you read the sources JRRT used) elves.  My late friend Poul Anderson did the first merging, so far as I can remember, he read many of JRRT's sources plus stuff from Denmark and Finland that JRRT missed.  But he'd also read REH as a kid.  He was also a more prolific writer, since during his early years he was paid by the word, not by a socialist government.  At least ten times as much has been published by JRRT's kids and grandkids (from his 
 notes)
 since he died than he was willing to submit to print.  (He had to deal with the assholes who ran the college he taught at, his descendants don't).

There weren't any computer games when I was a kid (well, except at MIT and Bell Labs but I was across the continent in Los Angeles) so I had no leisure activity except reading the literature the games would later be inspired by.  That and a lot of other books.  I never became much of a gamer.  (Although I could regularly achieve franchise in Klendathu in the 2nd half of my 20s because Heinlein was much more important to me than any fantasy stuff when I was a kid and still is).

I'm still looking for a copy of the advertised "School Edition" of Klendathu.  The company must of made at least one that didn't go into the dumpster behind Tandy Center.
-- 
-- Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

"What I know [about the art of the sword] boils down to this:  If you see a guy running at you with a sword, put two rounds in his chest to slow him down, then one into his brain to finish him off".  Aaron Allston, _Sidhe Devil_

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Allan Chaney" <chaneya at acwoodworksinc.com>
> George,
> 
> I've never heard of that TV show.
> 
> The game was my own unique creation however the design was heavily
> influenced by the Ultima series of games on the Apple computer.  Ultima came
> out in the early 1980s programmed by Richard Garriott founder of of Origin
> Systems and was followed with Ultima II, III, IV etc. etc.  The story in
> Paladin's Legacy is completely unique but again heavily influenced by
> everything J.R.R. Tolkien (As is just about all Fantasy).  This style of
> game is basically Pen and paper D&D on computer.  Ultima and Wizardy were a
> couple of the first attempts to graphically represent a D&D style game on
> computer.  To this day, I vividly remember playing Ultima I for the first
> time on an Apple computer at a friend's house while I was in High School.
> We stayed up all night and played.  I received my Color Computer for
> Christmas around that time and was horrified to find that there were no
> games like Ultima available for it.  So I started programming.  4 years
> later, during my junior year in college, I sent the game off and the third
> company who reviewed it wanted to publish it.  A conversion to COCO 3, many
> many bug fixes, and a year later and by Christmas 1989 it was finally done.
> Unfortunately the COCO market was collapsing at that point.  So it sold for
> about 4 months and then that was it.
> 
> Allan
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
> Behalf Of George Ramsower
> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2008 10:24 PM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Paladin's Legacy
> 
>  I'm curious.
> 
>  Is this game based on the TV show "Have Gun, Will Travel" ?
> 
> George
> 
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