You couldn't really play any games from the 80's without graph paper. To get anywhere beyond the house in Zork you needed to map out where all the paths in the game were. Same thing for Bard's Tale II (one of my favs). Generations of kids sat in front of their old Commodores making maps (and I guess some of us with art talents made them better).
> You couldn't really play any games from the 80's without graph paper.
In high school (~1985/86) a friend and his brothers mapped the Ultima IV world by commandeering the family ping pong table covering it with several sheets of graph paper.
I had several games back then that where "copies" from other people. But many of these games where unplayable because without the manual you had a really hard time to figure out what to do. It was common for complex games to have thick manuals and virtually no in game help or tutorials.
And there where no internet to search for answers.
I remember the Wizardry series was especially punishing in this regard. It would have constructs like hidden teleporters, and in sone cases your “view” looked the same on the other side so it’d be unclear you weren’t where you thought you were
There was an NES port but it was watered down a bit IIRC.
Wizardry I was a pretty standard D&D style dungeon crawl game. 6 chars, your basic classes (fighter, thief, cleric, mage) with a few prestige classes. Wander around the dungeon and occasionally, well, frequently, run into groups of monsters. A few dynamics I remember being particularly pains in the ass:
1) You could not save while in the dungeon, and if you wiped your party was stuck there, dead. You could go rescue them by going to that space and picking them up *BUT* that meant you had to go down there with fewer than 6 people in your party & thus underpowered and you couldn't mix good & evil alignments in a party. So in the early game it was often easier to just reroll new chars, and at the end of the game it could be almost impossible to go fetch them
2) Your characters aged over time, and stats started getting worse. So in a sense you're on a timer.
Wizardry II & III were more of the same IIRC. Wizardry IV was notorious for being the most difficult game ever made at the time. I pointed one of my hardcore gamer coworkers at Wiz IV not too long ago, he's the sort of person that defeats every new game in a microsecond. He gave up after a day and said he couldn't take it.
The ones after that became more like standard CRPGs people might recognize in the 90s + beyond.
One of my best gaming memories is mapping out the megadungeon that is Alternate Reality: The Dungeon played on my C64. I never beat it, but mapping out the dungeon stuck with me as an immersive experience.
I love that the Etrian Odyssey games make mapping a centerpiece. I don’t see modern gamers going for graph paper ever again but having a map maker included really helps experience a bygone era.
I recently went through my old box of papers in the garage, and man did those maps bring back memories! So many hours spent painfully mapping things out on graph paper. Alternate Reality: The City was probably one of the biggest mapping projects I did, but I had a thick pile from many different games. The Bard's Tale series was especially noteworthy.
It's sad—if I were to attempt to play one of those today, I would give up immediately rather than deal with the insanely slow loading and glacially-paced gameplay. But at the time, I think the slowness contributed to the immersion. There was more than enough time to reflect and, well, map. It burned those experiences deep into my memory. Alternate Reality in particular was painfully, painfully slow on my computer, which was enormously frustrating at the time, and yet even though it was barely a game (you mostly wandered around exploring and getting annoyed at unimplemented buildings, with the occasional high-stakes combat) it is one of the more memorable experiences of my ill-spent youth.
The longish loading time for an encounter really did something interesting for immersion. It’s a little similar to a DM rolling dice to generate an encounter—that built in anticipation isn’t really possible in modern games without annoying gamers.
Yeah in fact if you try to use graph paper to map out the areas in Zork you'll get immensely frustrated at its non-Euclidean geometry. The game designers seemed to be quite fond of having your character change compass directions between locations, so heading south and then immediately north will often leave you in a different location than you started!
The better way to map Zork is to treat it like a non-planar graph and use graph paper to build an adjacency matrix [1]. Since Z-machine is a bytecode VM that often ran on 8-bit computers it's a pretty safe assumption that the game likely has 256 or fewer vertices in the graph. So if you give every area you visit a 2-digit hex ID you can make the matrix small enough to be manageable.
Just started playing a few days ago... I've been able to draw out most of it as planar 'areas' with curved arrows for paths. Even for some of the easier 'maze' type areas it works, but I'm about to cave in and build an adjacency matrix for one of the difficult areas. (pun not intended?)
No, but I'd imagine a lot of people were like myself. I already had a ton of graph paper and was used to using that to draw maps for D&D and more grid based games.
