The Scepter of Kzirgla

Okay, folks, this is one primitive, obscure Rogue-like title I'm dragging out of the deep memory banks.

The Scepter of Kzirgla was a simple dungeon crawler that I played on the TRS-80 Color Computer back in the early 1980's. It was written by Paul Penrose for Rainbow Connection Software, and sold the old-fashioned way, via mail order on a cassette tape in a poly bag with photocopied instructions. There was a sequel, Conquest of Kzirgla, which I never played, and apparently also a version released for the TI-99/4A, something I only learned today via a Google search. Neither of these systems was tremendously successful, so whatever your retro platform of choice, chances are you have NOT played this one. I can pretty safely bet it will not be showing up on the Virtual Console or XBLA, either.

I have not played or seen the game in a couple of decades, so I am going from vaguest memory here. The game featured randomly generated dungeon mazes and played a bit like Epyx's "Apshai" series, although the CoCo version had very simple single-screen, character-mode block graphics rather than the animated monsters and scrolling dungeons of the Epyx games. Basically, the player entered the map at one point on the screen and had to fight his or her way through, RPG-style, to find another point on the screen, representing an exit to the next, deeper level of the dungeon. There were some rudimentary stats and economics, if I recall correctly, and the monsters got tougher as you progressed. I don't remember what happened if the player character died, though I'm pretty sure there was an ending of some sort -- a drawing of a treasure chest, or something like that. I really don't remember.

What I do remember is that the game was written in Extended BASIC, which meant the source code was completely accessible after loading and so could be experimented with. My brother and I noticed that weapons would eventually break with use, which would result in a tremendously ugly "THUUUNNNNGGG" sound effect and the message, "THE [WEAPON] BROKE!" The player could be reduced to fighting with bare hands, so naturally we were anticipating silly computer hilarity -- but there was a logic check in the code to prevent the obvious from happening, until I disabled it.

And then...

(THUNNNNNNGGG)

THE HANDS BROKE!

That was absolutely hilarious!

For a few minutes.

I guess.

Sigh. Like so much of retro gaming, you really DID have to be there.