Chances are, you've never heard of Dragonstone. Released only on a dying computer platform whose parent company had just folded, it never became available anywhere else. So is this the undiscovered gem we've all been hoping to unearth in all these years? To be honest, I wouldn't have been able to tell you until now. It's been sitting on my shelf forever, but my memories of it could only have been described as vague at best. Maybe not the best sign, indicating it may not have been all that memorable, but then, let's give it a fair chance.
This one is going to be unusual for our website, because normally it revolves around games in a digital form. Today we are going to talk about a ‘gamebook’. And, as might have been expected, we did not just pick one at random, but the gamebook itself: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Yet I have to tone down a bit: Actually it is already our second gamebook on the site. The other one has been hidden for about 14 years in the comics section.
In the history of CRPGs, the Wizardry series should give every old school gamer a chill of ecstasy. The series began already in the early 80s and ended only in 2001 with Wizardry 8: Destination Dominus, but under licence, it has multiple further spin-offs. like Wizardry Online, primarily in Japan until the year 2012. An icon of game design called D. W. Bradley created the huge worlds of Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstorm (1988), Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990) and finally Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992) for the company Sir-Tech before jumping ship and founding his own software company. D. W. Bradley even surpassed himself and created the (in my view) only legitimate successor to Wizardry 7, namely Wizards and Warriors, already one year before Wizardry 8.