So I Sat Down to Play… Death Gate (1994)
I may have mentioned this in my post about Shannara, but Legend Entertainment is one of my favorite adventure companies ever. They were the masters of a text-adventure/graphic adventure hybrid that sadly never really caught on.
If there is one thing that needs to be said about games of this type (and RPGs like Planescape: Torment, or anything by Bioware and Black Isle/Obsidian really) is that they are kind of a hybrid style of game anyway. There is so much text in these games that they are honestly part game and part book. You could, of course, skip all the dialog and incidental text if you really wanted to, but… why would you? The point of such games is to get involved in their stories and characters, much more than the game’s mechanics themselves. That’s part of why these games started dying out once games with (debatably) more engaging mechanics started having a story, too.
Anyway, enough history for today, on with the game.
So Death Gate had a lot of hype coming out, at least that’s what 14 year old George remembers. At the time, Legend was on a roll of releasing games based on books by famous fantasy authors, and 14-year-old George didn’t really have a standard of what makes a good fantasy book or not.
However, when 32-year old George finally got his hands on the game and saw that it was based on books by Hickman and Weiss, well… I wasn’t quite as thrilled as when they were just “famous authors who RULE”.
But they don’t rule, they wrote a few cool Dragonlance books back in the day when this was new to everyone, and that was it. This realization, combined with a rather slow start to the game really put me off playing this game when I first got my hands on it.
I have this rule, you see, that old games are already old, and they will still be old if you play them 5–10 years down the line. So I tend to play newer games first, or at least games that I can get into immediately.
Still, this time I got into it really quickly. Maybe the timing was right, or maybe I wanted to relive the experience of playing a Legend game for the first time (I replay Companions of Xanth every decade or so, but that’s not the same).
As soon as I started this playthrough, it clicked. The puzzles weren’t too cryptic, the graphics were fabulous and the story… well, the story is there, mostly. It is loosely based on the Death Gate Cycle series of books, which interestingly enough, wasn’t yet finished at the time that the game came out. A curious decision, given that Hickman and Weiss were closely following their release schedule, but I don’t think it does the game a disservice anyway.
As a side note, 1994 is so long ago that George R. R. Martin hadn’t released A Game of Thrones yet. Of course, the Death Gate Cycle finished in 1995, so yeah. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, something about numbers and dates, and begging George to finish the next book, most likely.
Having said all that, why did I keep coming back to this game, wanting to finish a playthrough even though it wasn’t clicking with me? As with most things relating to 90s adventures, it has to do with the review of the game I read back in 1994, in the Greek magazine PC Master, written by none other than the master himself, Andreas Paraskevas Tsourinakis. Seriously, looking back now, this guy was such an influence on us PC geeks at the time, and his review of the game was gushing with praise. I remember how much he enjoyed the game, Hell, I still have a pretty strong visual image of a huge fucking spoiler he printed about the very end of the game, literally its last five minutes, lmao. We still love ya, APT.
So despite everything else, I still had to play the game for myself, and see how I felt about it.
And I like it, a lot. I really do. The music is stellar, some of the best MIDI music from that era that I’ve ever heard, really memorable themes that I find myself humming, even after finishing the game. This is refreshing after playing Shannara a couple of years ago, which had abysmal music.
The puzzles were also really enjoyable, I have to say. With point & click adventure games from the 1990s, it’s difficult not to use a walkthrough these days, because some of their puzzles get obscure. Everybody was making adventure games back then, so you had to stand out somehow, and since puzzles were the meat of such games (alongside their story), everybody tried to one-up each other in complexity. It… didn’t work out all that great for the genre in general.
However, the puzzles in Death Gate are rarely stupid. Most of the time they’re hinted at clearly beforehand, especially in dialog options and area descriptions, therefore rewarding the players that are paying attention to what’s happening. I’m willing to bet that most people who played the game back in the day found it easy because of this, but hey, it’s almost 30 years later and standards change.
The graphics are also beautiful. One concession that Legend games always made is that animation was sparse, but that allowed them to use a higher resolution than most other games of the time (640x400 instead of 320x200, if you speak Nerdish) and have more detail. The environments in particular look especially great, if you take a step back and consider that this is a 2D game from 1994. But I find that 2D games from the early 1990s and onward tend to age quite gracefully.
The writing in this game would probably be its weakest aspect, surprisingly enough for a Legend game. The trademark humor is there and it’s great, the story is alright too, I guess… You start off as a young man who doesn’t know much and you learn a lot about the world and your place in it while realizing who you need to trust and who not to trust but… Even for a 1994 videogame, it feels very vanilla and somewhat unoriginal. The world-building is cool, but before long it’s all elves and dwarves and true evil and true good all over again. It may not have a Dungeons and Dragons license, but you can tell that the people who created this world had a D&D background.
The most egregious of these examples would be the character of Zifnab, which is an anagram of another ridiculous name, Fizban, a Dragonlance character created by Hickman and Weiss. He breaks the 4th wall constantly in a very erratic way, and in the books he even likes to refer to Dragonlance characters. It’s not cute, in fact it is rather cringy. And even with that being said, he’s probably the most memorable of the game’s characters.
This isn’t Legend’s fault, I think. You can only do so much with what you’re given, and for what it’s worth, the game’s writing is still decent. The story has some twists and turns if that’s what you’re into, and the game’s five worlds really are unique and have a lot of history to them that you can explore at your own pace.
That is what I love most about point & click adventure games, I think. The ability to play the game at your own pace. I miss that in most games.
I should also mention the game’s magic system. It should be telling that in the first draft of this post, I completely forgot about it.
Seriously, this was heavily advertised back in the day as something ground-breaking, but it’s just a gimmick. You get a myriad of spells, you use most of them like once in the game, twice if they’re actually useful, and there’s one spell that you will use like three or four times.
The game’s age has nothing to do with this, by the way, there were RPGs with more elaborate magic systems back in the 1990s, here it was only used as another gimmick so that this didn’t feel like another Adventure game.
It wouldn’t be for another 8 years until Eternal Darkness came out and implemented a robust magic system in a non-RPG. If memory serves, that was also the year that Arx Fatalis came out and that one probably has the best magic system ever. But that’s a subject for another post.
So that is Death Gate. Not a life-changing game by any means, but a fun clickathon that will take you through some very interesting places.
Getting to actually play the game will be more difficult than finishing the game, however. To the best of my knowledge it’s not available digitally anywhere (trademarks, I guess) and tracking down a boxed version would probably require a time machine.
This is one of those games that you should consider playing anyway you can.