Krondor Confidential - Part XI

Release the Kraken!

I have to admit I don’t remember the events of the actual day that Betrayal at Krondor hit stores. Today major game releases are accompanied with signing events, and Twitter storms, and all kinds of pomp and circumstance, but we simply didn’t do that sort of thing in 1993. A publicity blitz back then meant hustling for magazine covers for months in advance, and making sure you had a big presence at E3. Maybe you could get a TV news program to cover you if you had some kind of exploitable current event connection. For our team though, release day was simply time off after a year and seven months of extraordinarily hard work. Though we were pleased with what we’d done, we had no idea how it would be received. We’d broken a lot of the “rules” for making RPGs along the way, and the game was crazily ambitious for the time. The one thing about doing anything creative is that the creator is aware of the gap between what they had in mind at the start and the thing they ultimately produce. All of us had things we would have liked to have done better, or to have expanded further. We could have iterated until Doomsday, but the time came to push it over the wall and call it done and start work on the sequel. All we could do is sit back and wait to see how the world would react.  

From the beginning, we knew our first and most important critic was going to be Raymond E. Feist. His name was, after all, sitting above the title of the game, and he’d forever be tied to its success or failure despite having only minimal input on its actual development. It had been important to me in particular to get it right because Dynamix had handed me the keys to his universe without his knowing who I was or what I would do with Midkemia. I owed it to Ray and I owed it to his fans, but more than any of that, I owed it to the company to make sure Ray would be on board with whatever we did. If he loved it, he could make a very big difference in our efforts to promote the game. If he hated it, however, the many risks that we had taken during development could end up being disastrous for everyone. 

Although we’d kept Ray up to date about what we were doing throughout production, he only saw it for the first time at a trade show shortly before launch. In the author’s afterward of his hardback novel adaptation Krondor the Betrayal, Ray recounts seeing the game for the first time. “When I finally got a look at the finished game, it was at the Drake Hotel in Chicago before my first press interview on the game at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1993. It was a revelation. It was my world, but it wasn’t. These were my characters, but they weren’t. They came alive and ran around and fought and died and started over and fought again. When it came time to give the interview, I didn’t want to stop playing.”

Ray continues, “The rest, as they say, is history. Betrayal at Krondor won awards, sat atop the Entertainment Weekly CD game best-seller list for six months, and is considered by many to be the best computer fantasy role-playing game ever created. And most of the credit goes to John, Neal, and the team at Dynamix.”

Knowing that Ray was good with the game was a gigantic weight off my shoulders, but I also knew he wouldn’t be an entirely objective observer. It was in his best interest for the game to do well since he’d get a significant chunk of the profits. The real test would come from releasing the game into the wild and seeing what reviewers and gamers had to say for themselves. 

In the wild west days before Facebook or MySpace, fans flocked to sites like Compuserve, and Genie, and AOL to provide their reviews and input on games-in-progress or just shipped titles. Dynamix kept a careful eye on the Computer RPG sections of Compuserve shortly after BAK’s release. Their comments were highly encouraging from the very beginning:

BigBad MaMa: “Krondor is spectacular in every way. The best combat interface I have ever used, terrific story, virtual reality graphics, tons of things to do and places to go...been playing for weeks and have barely scratched the surface...A much steeper learning curve than MM but well worth the effort. A close second to Crusaders in my book, and much better than the Underworlds.”

Eeyore/ModemGames to a fellow forum poster: “I heard from a *very* reliable source {Matilda, whose judgement I trust implicitly) that KRONDOR is the game to play this summer! :-) That recommendation got me totally hyped to buy it YESTERDAY! Trouble is, when Matilda and mama told me, the game wasn’t out yet! <grin> So, I’m waitin’.......”

AR Schleicher: “I got the game today (standing in the first store in my area to get it as they opened the box with only three copies.) It’s great!  I’ve been playing for about 7 hours now, ( a 1 hr break in the middle), and I’ve gotten into the sewers of Krondor...The combat system is wonderful, and the mapping/view system is great too! The music sounds great as well (on my Roland MT-32).”

Dave Land: “Dear Dynamix Inc. - just invested 16 hours or so into Betrayal...I think you guys have a winner on your hands. Looks great, feels great. If it makes any difference to you guys, I’ve played most all the current RPGs...some good, some bad, but I like this one.”

Doug Luke: “Here’s one vote for Krondor. This is turning into one of my favorite games of the year, and I haven’t even finished Chapter 1 yet!...Krondor is a unique design set in a brand new RPG world. It seems obvious to me that Krondor should be the Hot Topic.” 

Lawrence Maggitti: “Let me add my voice to the chorus - great game! Is a sequel in the cards?”

Johnathan Edwards: “Here is yet another vote for Krondor. The best RPG I have ever played. Dynamix and Raymond Feist should continue teaming. I love the books, and I love the game.”

Charles Besecker: “I’m addicted to this game, it’s fantastic. Really a quantum leap forward in CRPGs. Fantastic job. The combat is especially realistic and the character development is outstanding. Must have been a labor of love.”

Jeff Kunkel: “This game has shot right to the top of my list of favorite CRPGs, and possibly to the top of my favorite computer games in general. All of this, and NO BUGS! <g>”

One fan comment in particular jumps out now in hindsight, knowing that it came from someone who would later becoming one of the leading game journalists in the years to come: 

Geoff M Keighley: “I’m really impressed with Krondor, simply because it has a good story, and is fun to play. That is really important in an RPG, since players will be spending up to 100 hours in front of the screen playing the game. Congratulate the entire team on a fantastic job, and I’m ready to place my order for the sequel.”

Another two endorsements knocked my socks off because they came not from gamers or from professional reviewers, but from two high-profile sci-fi and fantasy writers:

Roger Zelazny (author of the Chronicles of Amber series): “A riveting and engaging game where the well-honed edge cuts well - Betrayal at Krondor.”

Andre Norton (author of the Witch World Saga): “The idea of combining your game with a book seems to me to be enriching and I must heartily endorse it.”

ENDORSED BY FANTASY STORYTELLING LEGENDS - It was one thing to be endorsed by gamers and game viewers, but it knocked my socks off for Betrayal at Krondor to be recommended by two of the most prestigious fantasy authors (in addition to Ray Feist) of the time: Roger Zelazny and Andre Norton.

For pages and pages and pages, the fan commentary was overwhelmingly positive, and game reviewers proved to be equally complementary in their praise in the months and years to come. 

GOT IT COVERED - Months before release, Betrayal at Krondor received a lot of attention from the traditional computer gaming media. This was the cover of Computer Gaming World from February 1993, four months before it actually hit the shelves.

Computer Gaming World would be one of the first gaming publications to print a review, with Johnny L. Wilson saying, “Much of the Dynamix visualization of Midkemia is stunning, but Cutter’s team has established a solid corridor between the technological interpretation of the world and the literary interpretation of the world via a lavish use of text.” About our magic systems he said, “In a real sense, the magic system for the computer game seems very much in tune with the spirit of the magic system at which Feist hinted in the books, but did not detail.”

Ed Dille would would give it an overall rating of 97% in the June 1993 issue of Electronic Games, calling it “a grand adventure in every sense of the phrase. Players will swoon at the specter of Midkemia as Mr. Cutter has recreated it and appreciate the reverence attributed to the original work. Betrayal at Krondor shows some of the best work Dynamix has done to date.”

James Trunzo would write one of the most unreserved reviews of it, writing in White Wolf Magazine #38, “Betrayal at Krondor employs one of the easiest and most intuitive interfaces encountered, one that consistently handles all aspects of the game, from trading to casting magic spells to combat. Graphics and sound are top-notch, character development is logical and fair, combat is beautifully animated, and I have yet to find anything about the game that I don’t like. There simply isn’t any facet of the game that isn’t outstanding. If I had to buy only one adventure game this year, Betrayal at Krondor would be it.”

AWARD-WINNING FANTASY - Although I didn’t get into the computer gaming industry for the trophies, I’m not ashamed that we racked up a few for Betrayal at Krondor.

As the reviews continued to roll in, John Cutter, and I, and the rest of the team were utterly flabbergasted by the overwhelming positive tone of reviewers. It didn’t seem possible that people could love it as much as it appeared. That notion would be shattered one morning when I walked into my office to discover an award from Compute Magazine sitting on my desk, declaring Betrayal at Krondor the Best Fantasy Role-playing / Adventure Game of the year. (And it still sits on my desk to this day as a reminder that I’m not always the best judge of my own work.)

Before the end of 1993, Computer Gaming World would up the award stakes, declaring us not just the best RPG of the year, but naming us the Game of the Year period. Three years later they would list us as one of the top 50 games ever made, as would PC Gamer magazine the following year. In 2001, Computer Gaming World would tap Betrayal at Krondor with its greatest honor, inducting it into their Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame.

ELVES ON THE SHELVES - Two years after release, Betrayal at Krondor was still selling well at computer gaming stores around the country. This one was in a Software Etc. store in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

With so much love out in the world for Betrayal at Krondor, a sequel seemed absolutely assured. By the time we shipped I’d already begun to lay the foundations for a game that could easily have surpassed all we’d achieved with BAK, and had begun early conversations with Ray and the team about the project that we’d dub Thief of Dreams. 

I had no idea at the time how prophetic that title would prove to be. 

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