Legend of the Sword - Memories

Legend of the Sword originally arrived at Rainbird's London offices in 1987 as an Amstrad CPC6128 game, but was eventually released (to some acclaim) for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and IBM PC a year or so later. The developer, Silicon Software, initially comprised of three people - Karl Buckingham, Colin Mongardi and Ted Lewis. The latter two worked at a recording studio in Eastbourne, and they set up Silicon Software specifically to create adventure games.

Although Colin wasn't a trained computer programmer, he was technical and created the electronic sequencers and samplers in the studio. Ted Lewis was one of the partners who owned the studio, and he recruited his friend, Karl Buckingham to create the storyline, the puzzles and some of the graphics. Ted became the company's Business Manager and main tester.

Silicon Software advertised for a second programmer, and this job was filled by Eugene Messina. Colin started writing the main game code using the 'C' programming language. His initial task was to write the parser that would interpret whatever the player typed into the game, whilst Eugene was left to create additional game graphics and the code to display them.

The game started out being written for the Amstrad CPC 464, but it grew to the point where a disk drive and 128k of memory was essential. However, at this stage in its development, the game was quite different from its final incarnation. It was still mainly a text-only adventure with the occasional graphic location (complete with colour cycling to give some rudimentary animation).

Once they had the bare bones of a game, Silicon Software began touting it round the main publishers and it found its way to Rainbird. The game was taken on, but big changes were required. The biggest was the change from 8-bit Amstrad CPC to 16-bit Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and IBM PC machines. A steep learning curve was ahead.

At the suggestion of Rainbird, a graphical self-mapping system was added along with a number of tweaks to the general gameplay. The graphics were improved and more were added in, to reflect actions performed by or on the characters in the game.

The Atari ST was chosen as the lead version, with locations being edited on a Amstrad PCW8512 Word Processing machine and then sent via a slow serial lead across to the Atari. The main program took 30 minutes to compile, with the gameplay logic and the programmed responses taking almost twice as long. Even the mouse and cursor drivers had to be written from scratch!

After much testing, tweaking and re-testing the lead version was eventually finished on the ST, although the Mono version still had to be tackled. This ended up being fairly straight-forward for Colin Mongardi, who found a way to convert each colour pixel into four black and white pixels, giving him half-a-dozen shades of grey to play with. The mono version was coded in less than a day.

However, the other conversions (to the Commodore Amiga and IBM PC) proved to be almost as big a challenge as writing the game itself! Fortunately, the game code was written in 'C', a programming language designed to be portable between different machines. The tough part was learning how to code the machine specific drivers for sound, graphics and input.

As far as the actual adventure was concerned, "Legend of the Sword" was an immense game that took quite a while to solve, even when you knew what you were doing! The official hints that Rainbird gave out to stuck adventurers can be found in the Downloads section.

Thanks to Colin Mongardi for most of the memories!