Earlier in these pages, I discussed whether Dungeons and Dragons meets the technical definition of an old school retro video game. Tabletop RPGs, despite having a clear progression to video games, aren’t exactly video games themselves. Well, way back in 1989, the Japanese gaming magazine Marukatsu PC Engine found an intriguing way to bridge this gap, allowing readers to participate in a mail-in RPG. One might think this game Lord of the Crystal, would be quite impossible for modern gamers to play, given that it was not produced in the form of a computer file. Yet RndStranger (real name David Mathis), who I have previously interviewed in these pages, didn’t think that was a good enough excuse, and has produced an eighty-minute YouTube video wherein you can, indeed, play Lord of the Crystal over those eighty minutes yourself.
The very concept of a mail-in RPG might be a bit much to wrap your head around. Certainly, I didn’t really get it until about the twenty minute mark when RndStranger starts giving the instructions necessary to actually play it. To put it simply, you construct a character of three attributes- race, class, and God of worship. Over six rounds of gameplay, you select from ten possible options in each round. Whether or not you succeed at your chosen tasks depends on how well-suited your race, class, and God of worship are to the tasks in question. Mechanically speaking, Halfling Priest is the best combination by far. But even a Halfling Priest won’t be able to succeed in tasks poorly suited to either halflings or priests.
In terms of a gaming experience, Lord of the Crystal is quite unique in that you’re mainly thinking about your limitations, or to be more specific, the limitations of your character, since these attributes at character creation don’t change. In general, there’s always something you can do successfully in a round. But some tasks are harder than others. Literally impossible, in fact. And others might kill you outright. Too busy thinking about gaming the system, rather than the actual worldbuilding, I very foolishly “succeeded” in entering the shimmering zone which of course resulted in the death of my character.
I do intend to try and play the game again sometime, when I’m less likely to remember some of the specific mechanics. Although ideally, I would suggest playing Lord of the Crystal in a group context. Some two hundred subscribers to Marukatsu PC Engine played this game in the original run, and their characters do become very weakly integrated into the larger story in at least to as much of an extent that it’s possible to grasp what’s happening the mostly run-of-the-mill fantasy narrative. But being able to interact in that narrative, and make choices within that narrative, however limited…well, that’s the heart of retro gaming in my mind anyway.
Lord of the Crystal wasn’t entirely a one-off event either. Marukatsu did another couple of these correspondence games. The final one, Double Moon Densetsu, even saw a final release as an actual NES game. The story of these games, weirdly enough, is more interesting than the games themselves, though what makes the Lord of the Crystal truly sublime is the way it functions as a time warp, for the truly old school nerd experience.
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