Akalabeth: The Birth of a Legend

In the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, when the art of making machines calculate was still in its infancy, and computers in homes were rarer than dragons in a bard's tale, a certain young man began a most unusual undertaking.

His name was Richard Garriott, and he lived in the land called Texas, on the outskirts of the city of Houston. There, beneath his parents' roof and while still a high school student, he began creating a game that later generations would remember as Akalabeth: World of Doom.

It was no royal commission nor the work of some great guild of craftsmen, but rather a youthful pursuit, born of curiosity and a love of fantastical adventures. Garriott cast his spells and enchantments in a language known as BASIC, using an Apple II machine. The beginning of it all was a school project, which he developed both on his school's mainframe computer and on the Apple II his father had bought for the family home.


In those days, the game bore the working title D&D, and Garriott refined it over many months, aided by his friends — companions in tabletop adventures — who tested his creation and pointed out where monsters were too powerful or dungeons too barren. Every week they gathered at his parents' house to weave tales of heroes and dragons, like chroniclers of legends yet to be born.

When the summer of 1979 arrived and the young creator became more deeply acquainted with Apple computers, work on the game accelerated. Soon there emerged a version known as D&D28b, the number marking successive revisions and improvements to the work.


Then Garriott, wishing to show the fruit of his labor, brought the game to a place called ComputerLand near Clear Lake City, where he demonstrated it to his employer.

And his employer, seeing great promise in this digital world of dungeons and monsters, urged him to try selling the game to the store's customers.

So it came to pass.

Garriott packaged the program in ordinary Ziploc bags, while the cover art was drawn by his own mother. Thus was born one of the most unusual commercial releases in gaming history — sold in plastic bags like small magical artifacts at a village market.

At first, only a handful of copies were sold — fewer than a dozen.

Yet fate is often capricious.

The young man's boss secretly sent the sixteenth copy to a publisher called California Pacific Computer Company. There, they recognized the game's immense potential and contacted the young creator.

Garriott traveled to California with his parents and signed a publishing agreement, granting the company the rights to distribute his work. For every copy sold, he would receive five dollars.

Though that may have seemed a modest sum, fortune smiled upon him once more: Akalabeth sold around thirty thousand copies, earning the young developer some one hundred and fifty thousand dollars — no small fortune for a game created in a teenager's bedroom.

The world of Akalabeth was inspired chiefly by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns Garriott ran at his parents' house, as well as by fantasy books given to him by a relative of his brother. Among these, the works of J. R. R. Tolkien held a special place.

Indeed, the game's title derives from Akallabêth, a section of The Silmarillion, though the game's story was not a direct adaptation of Tolkien's legendarium.

In later years, historians of computer games came to regard Akalabeth as one of the earliest examples of the role-playing game genre. More than that, many consider it the true beginning of the famous Ultima saga, which would bring Garriott worldwide acclaim.

In 1998, when the Ultima Collection was released, the game was included under the title Ultima 0. This updated version featured CGA graphics and MIDI sound and ran on DOS systems.

There is also an intriguing curiosity concerning the final monster on the list of beasts to slay.

In the original version of the game, it was called a Balrog, sharing its name with the demonic creatures of Tolkien's Middle-earth. In later entries of the series, the name was changed to Balron, but the original designation remains a testament to the game's strong roots in fantasy literature.

Thus, from youthful passion, a school project, and a few plastic bags, a legend was born.

And Akalabeth — though simple and austere by today's standards — became one of the cornerstones of the entire computer role-playing genre.

And so the chronicle records:

That from a teenager's bedroom, from code written in BASIC, and from dreams of dungeons and dragons, there arose a world that would give birth to one of the most important sagas in the history of electronic adventures.