Ace of Aces (1980, Nova Game Designs)

Gather 'round, Gen-Yers, and I'll spin you a tale, of a time long ago when the personal computer was not the ubiquitous and indispensable tool found in every home, office and school across America.

(Puffs pipe, leans back in chair)
They called it "1980", dontcha know. I was in grade school in those ancient times, and my school owned exactly one personal computer. It was kept in a special room as if it were some rare piece of science equipment borrowed from NASA. To get access to it, you had to be enrolled in an advanced placement class, and even then, your actual hands-on time with the precious device was carefully metered.

Here's a picture of the old girl... TWO disc drives. Whew! There goes the school's budget!

Of course that little joystick to the right is for display purposes only. You won't be playing any games in The Computer Room, as this is a serious education tool, not a video arcade.

BUT... you were allowed to type BASIC code into the computer to make games, transcribing them from books like this one...

...or this one, "Basic Computer Games", featuring page after page of code, just waiting for you to key in a line at a time. Yes, I actually used to sit down for hours at a time to do this. Can you smell the fun?

Here's just a sample page of code, one of many required to create a text-based "Star Trek" inspired statistics game. Better hope you don't make a typo!

This particular book is interesting because it contains a wide range of gaming experiences, including this one that would surely be considered inappropriate (if not outright criminal) on a grade-school campus today: a "Russian Roulette" simulation!

Russian Roulette is the "game" where you take turns firing a revolver, loaded with only one bullet, to your head. The loser is the one unlucky enough to pull the trigger on the chamber with the bullet in it. Of course, being 1980, this electronic adaptation is all text-based and, well, rather dull. But what a devious concept! Sample gameplay text below.

Here's the actual program code (and looking it over, it appears this version of the game has you spinning the chamber before every trigger pull, instead of just working your way sequentially through the chambers, so this game could drag on for hours. Boo!)

What is the point of this autobiographical detour? Just setting the stage. You see, a lot of the casual entertainment afforded by today's powerful, networked PCs just wasn't available back in those early days of computing.

Of course the type-your-own games from the Basic primers were hardly representative of the state of the art. But even professionally produced software sold in stores was severely limited compared to today's fully rendered, three-dimensional virtual worlds just waiting to be explored and conquered at the nearest computer monitor, smart phone or I-pod. Back in 1980, computers just didn't have the horsepower to deliver those kinds of experiences. Games were crude, simple, and flat.

There were a few attempts at "first-person" type immersive graphics. But the limited computing power of the day meant you were reduced to exploring almost abstract grids and monochrome shapes.

From 1980, Akalabeth: World of Doom (home computer) and Battlezone (arcade):

So gamers who wanted a deeper, more immersive experience, still had to rely on their imagination, and innovative, genre-pushing games from the non-electronic realm... role-playing games, statistic-based wargaming simulations, Choose Your Own Adventure type interactive fiction, and ...Ace of Aces.

Ace of Aces, published by Nova Game Designs originally in 1980 (with a few later editions) is a one-on-one World War I bi-plane dogfighting game that did something videogames of the day couldn't yet achieve--provided a first-person perspective for each player.

The game is packed with two thick books, one for the German player, the other for his opponent.

Each book is filled with illustrations depicting a first-person point of view from your plane (the German's perspective from within a Fokker Dr I, the Allied seated in a Sopwith Camel). A virtual control panel of possible maneuvers to select from appears at the bottom of each page, as well as the page number for the other pilot to turn to in order to update their view.

Each player announces their desired maneuvers (and its corresponding page number) to the other, pages are flipped to orient the other player's plane correctly to yours, then flipped once again to complete your maneuvers and end the turn. The end result is a person-to-person dog fight game that kind of plays out like a series of decompression chart calculations.

But you can actually see your enemy's plane in the correct scale and perspective, and it changes realistically as you both maneuvers in and out of each other's airspace, something no personal computer of the day could yet accomplish.

The basic game assumes both planes stay at the same approximate altitude, but you can still lose sight of one another, which lands you on dreaded page 223, the "lost" page:

You have the option to either disengage and end the round, or pursue your opponent and battle on. Optional "advanced" rules force you to monitor altitude, speed, ammunition usage and plane damage. I was getting a headache just browsing this section.

Nova promised several expansion packs for Ace of Aces, as well as games in other genres using a similar play mechanic (how about a wild west shoot out?), but many of these went unrealised.

However, in 1989, in the middle of that Star Wars fandom desert between the opening of Star Tours in Disneyland and the relaunching of the canon with the Timothy Zahn novels, fans were thrown a bone... the Starfighter Battle Book (West End Games), an Ace of Aces style game pitting an X-Wing fighter against an Imperial TIE-Interceptor.



Official Ace of Aces website found here.

Vampyre, Game of the Hunt for Dracula (TSR Mini-games, 1980)

In the early 1980s, TSR Hobbies, Inc., the folks that brought you Dungeons & Dragons, published several "mini-games", dice-driven board games packaged in plastic blister-packs, with gameplay occurring on small paper maps with cardboard tokens.

In Vampyre, Game of the Hunt for Dracula (1980), up to six players, each assuming the role of a character from Bram Stoker's book, race across the Transylvanian countryside, through gloomy forests and craggy mountains, to locate and destroy three of Count Dracula's hidden coffins.

Along the way, they'll encounter swarms of rats, werewolves, murderous gypsies, and even the undead Count himself.

Players can uncover helpful items like a gun, a crucifix or holy water to give them an advantage in combat, which is resolved with dice rolls and charts. (Sometimes the player encounters nothing, so there are "nothing" tokens too).

A player can even be bitten by the Count and transform into a Nosferatu, at which point his goal in the game is no longer to find and destroy Dracula's coffins, but to attack his fellow players.

Once the coffins are found, the hunt for Dracula continues inside his castle (pictured on the reverse side of the map).

At this stage of the game, the passing of time is tracked on this monster-faced clock using the DAY and NIGHT tokens (all supernatural monsters fight at a disadvantage during the day).



Other titles in the TSR mini-games series were They've Invaded Pleasantville (a retro-50s game of alien invasion), Revolt on Antares (sort of a sci-fi version of the classic imperialist wargame Risk) and Saga: Age of Heroes (wargaming and adventuring in classic Rome).

Mazes and Monsters (1982)

I've name-dropped the 1982 made-for-TV turkey Mazes and Monsters a few times, and since the DVD seems to have quietly gone out of print recently, I thought I'd finally honor it with a proper post.

Based on Rona Jaffe's sensational novel of the same name, Mazes and Monsters is a thinly veiled fictionalization of the real-life disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a 16-year old child prodigy and Dungeons and Dragons player, who went missing for several weeks in 1979, allegedly after attempting to live out his fantasy role playing obsession in the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University. It was later learned the incident was a failed suicide attempt, and the significance of Egbert's gaming hobby on the emotionally disturbed teen's actions is questionable at best, but that didn't stop an alarmist media from stirring up suburbia with the Dungeons and Dragons connection.

The premier of Mazes and Monsters was a bit of an event in my circle of friends, as it gave us a chance to spend two hours of quality time in front of the TV with our parents so they could learn all about our strange new hobby with all the funny dice.

Meet Jay Jay Brockway (Chris Makepeace), a 16-year old genius attending Grant University, whose 190 IQ and young age make it difficult for him to fit in socially with his college-aged classmates. He deals with this by playing Mazes and Monsters, a fictional "fantasy role-playing game in which the players create imaginary characters...plunged into a fantasy world of invented terrors."

He also wears lots of stupid hats.

Jay Jay is one of four players in an ongoing Mazes and Monsters campaign, the other three being aspiring writer Kate Finch (Wendy Crewson), Daniel (David Wallace), a wanna-be game designer being pressured toward a career in computers by his parents, and a fourth player mentioned only in the past tense, who mysteriously "flipped out" last year and isn't returning this semester.

This leaves the group with an open slot that must be filled, and Jay Jay wastes no time posting an ad on the student union bulletin board, where he lurks throughout the day so he can accost any person who happens to read it.

Enter Tom Hanks as Robbie Wheeling, a new student to Grant (poor grades at his previous school forced him to transfer. Something about spending too much time playing a game of some kind...)

If you're wondering what a big star like Tom Hanks is doing within 100 feet of this production, you must remember that in 1982, Hanks was known merely as the slightly funnier guy on the cross-dressing sit-com Bosom Buddies (his turn as leading man in feature films Splash and Bachelor Party wouldn't happen for another two years). Believe it or not, the hottest name on the credits had to be Makepeace, having the summer camp screwball comedy Meatballs (1979), and high school drama My Bodyguard (1980) under his belt.

Robbie (Hanks) agrees to join the game after being assured it won't take up too much of his time, a decision no doubt influenced by his attraction to Kate.

Mazes and Monsters does make an admirable attempt to accurately portray the mechanics of the typical role playing game. One player, Daniel, is designated "Maze Master", who runs the campaign, keeps the maps, and controls the fate of other players, each of whom have their own hand-written character sheets and miniature figures. That said, how is anyone going to look up armor class tables in a dark room lit only by candles?



"Your fate is in my hands."

Kate is Glacia the Fighter, Jay Jay is Frelic, "the cleverest of all sprites", and Robbie is Pardue, a holy man, who uses a sword only when his magic fails him.

Robbie is quickly embraced by the group, and an outside-the-game romance soon develops between him and Kate.

But he's still haunted by recurring nightmares of his younger brother Hall. Several years ago, Hall (whose birthday happens to fall on Halloween... lucky boy!) left in the middle of a Halloween/birthday party to run away to New York. Robbie hasn't seen him since, and feels guilty for not keeping a better eye on him.

When Jay Jay learns of Robbie and Kate's relationship, he feels jealous and lonely. In an attempt to reassert his importance in their group, he conceives of an evolved version of the game Mazes and Monsters, to be played out in the nearby "mysterious, forbidden" Pequod Caverns, which have been boarded up and off-limits to visitors since some kids disappeared in them years earlier.

After borrowing a skeleton from the science department and some costumes from theater arts, the group embarks to the Caverns, lanterns in hand, for their new game, with Jay Jay serving as the Maze Master.

After a spooky encounter with some real cave-dwelling bats and Jay Jay's prop skeleton, the group splits up.

Robbie, still affected by his nightmares and having trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, hallucinates a terrifying encounter with a "Gorvil".

"The most frightening monsters are the ones that exist in our mind."

The game ends and the group leaves the caves behind, but Robbie, traumatized by the experience, continues to speak and act in-character, as Pardue the holy man. His nightmares about his brother Hall become more intense. He breaks up with Kate, stops attending classes, and shows up at Jay Jay's Halloween party in character as Purdue.

After Robbie isn't seen for several days, Kate, Jay Jay and Daniel search his room, but find only an elaborate hand-drawn game map, labeled "The Great Hall" and "The Two Towers", which they recognize as a reference to Robbie's brother Hall and the second book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.


The Mayor of Shark City, Murray Hamilton, shows up as a police detective investigating their missing friend. He knows about Robbie's involvement in Mazes and Monsters and wonders what part the game may have played in his disappearance.

They finally piece together that Robbie must have left for New York to find his brother ("the Great Hall"), the Two Towers on his map referring to the World Trade Center. This is the first instance I'm aware of in which Tolkien's The Two Towers is linked to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The second wouldn't occur for another twenty years, when an on-line petition was launched urging director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema to rename the second chapter in their Lord of the Rings film trilogy to avoid any perceived reference to the 9-11 attacks. (A counter-petition in favor of keeping the title "The Two Towers" also emerged.)

The trio follow Robbie to the top of one of the towers, and are only able to talk him out of jumping to his death when Jay Jay asserts his authority as Maze Master.

In an epilogue meant to be chilling (but had me giggling), they visit Robbie at his parents' house three months later. He's traded in his cleric's robes for a trendy Le Tigre polo shirt and white shorts, but he's otherwise living in-character, referring to his parents as "the innkeeper and his wife." He invites his old friends to embark on a new quest in the "great forest beyond the enchanted lake" (or perhaps that's just his way of asking for help looking for stray golf balls.)