developed by MicroProse (Hunt Valley, MD)
first published March 1994, for DOS (the fossil record on this is very scanty and I can’t find the price anywhere)
[totally anachronistic re-release trailer with sped-up animation, 2014]
GOG package ~90MB. Actual game ~70MB. Original non-talkie version ~13MB.
Played to completion in 5.5 hours, 5/3/15–5/4/15.
[video: complete 3-hour playthrough in three parts]Fifth of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue May 5, 2011. As far as I can tell, this is the first time anywhere that this game was offered for free. So unlike their prior free games, making this one a giveaway might actually have been GOG’s own business decision, though I’m not sure why. A few years later, the same game was re-released by another distributor for $6.99.
The day I started Dragonsphere, I found myself playing continuously for four hours, which is not usual. Why? Certainly not because it impressed me or won me over in any rational way. Not because it was “good.” Not because I was having “fun” with it. It had something seductive about it that was none of those things, the way that games sometimes do. It had some of that enveloping power, that implacable itself-ness, that draws me along. I was getting something out of it at the furthest reaches of irrationality.
I recently reread an M.R. James ghost story where one of the select details about the apparation — the descriptions are always sparing, for maximum spookiness — is that when it is spotted at a great distance, “there was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.” No more really need be said; we all know what kind of subtle horror he means by “something about its motion.” There are kinds of motion that can seem either too fast or too slow, too smooth or too choppy; somehow the sense of motion is very closely linked to the potential for nausea. Time and rhythm is deep stuff.
In Dragonsphere, all the animations are a little too slow and smooth, have a few too many frames. Time passes a little bit over-deliberately. Furthermore the characters don’t have discernible faces; those pixels have been put to other use. Even the inset portraits that appear in their dialogue boxes aren’t very clear and don’t really have eyes that can be looked into. And the voice-over is so completely talentless — it seems to have been done by the development team and not by real actors — that some hidden meaning, some other principle, seems to be driving it all. For the most part, the game seems to be taking place at not quite a comfortable distance, at not quite a comfortable speed, with not quite a coherent psychological underlayer. All of which is accompanied by the droning spaced-out sounds of the MIDI synthesizer, doing its alien impressions of fairytale fantasy music.
That kind of stuff hooks me like a ghost story. When James says that the ghost’s motion “made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters,” note that he does not say that it made Parkins very undesirous to see it. These are quite different things, especially for the reader. The purpose of the sentence is to instill us with dread that we will eventually have to see this ghost at close quarters — or so we hope, anyway! We relish the anticipation of being forced toward what unsettles us. That which is wrong is magnetic.
At least to me. It’s the same psychology as battered spouse syndrome: when things feel wrong, I feel a tickle of excitement at the possibility of righting them, conquering them, pursuing the evil to its heart and cleansing it. And that, after all, is the storyline of most of these fantasy games, so I know I’m not alone. Everyone’s ears prick up when they see a sorcerer’s forbidding black tower surrounded by lightning clouds: we’re gonna hafta go there, right?
So I guess I played for four hours straight because the effect of all that off-ness is that subliminally it felt like maybe an evil wizard had made this game.
“Evil wizards and the men who love them.”
Isn’t the deepest hook of The Lord of the Rings the fact that it has such ghastly evil in it? The plot is that you must go toward the evil, deeper and deeper into it. I’m not sure the morality in the book can come anywhere near explaining the morality that makes people like the book.
That’s the problem with heroic fantasy: it proposes an unhealthy framework for thinking about its own appeal. That’s why I was so dismissive of fantasy for so long: fantasy had told to me to be! Fantasy stories told me in no uncertain terms to make a heroic beeline toward whatever was most terrifying in the world, and leave childish things — like fantasy — behind. I was wary of fantasy exactly as a result of being so fundamentally an adherent of fantasy. This is a philosophical vicious circle that can only cause harm in the long run.
The other night I read (for the first time) “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which impressed me for recognizing this very thing. It’s a journey, like Frodo’s (or King Dragonsphere’s), of a character who is drawn inevitably toward the heart of all evil by the same nameless subrational forces that make us as readers want him to go there… but unlike most authors of fantasy, Hawthorne knows that the sword is double-edged, and ends up delivering a proper moral: beware of stories like this. Resisting the devil and giving in to the devil are more or less the same thing, and come to the same result: leading a devil-haunted life. Pretty profound, Hawthorne! And I know he’s right, because after reading too many tales of heroic resistance, I accordingly made a haunted life for myself.
But I have been cutting down. Nonetheless I still find myself drawn toward distant ghosts. At least the ones that breathe between the pixels of stilted computer games.
Beyond the hypnotic stiltsiness, what’s here is middlingly competent enough, with a few standout details on either side of the line. It has one long logic puzzle that I had to take a lot of notes on, which in retrospect could have been handled better, but at the time I was very pleasantly surprised to have such a thing lobbed at me. There’s also a lame gambling mini-game that you have to play over and over. Otherwise, it’s all basically unremarkable “use X with Y”/dialogue-tree stuff. To its credit, you can’t get stuck or die — or rather, there are lots of dead ends but they’re all single-error affairs and after showing you the animated death, the game automatically restores you to the moment before the error. It’s a pretty short game, which is always fine with me. If the character didn’t walk so slowly, I would surely have gotten through it all in a single sitting.
What’s most distinctive about the game design, I think, is the emphasis it places on the story and the writing, which are a couple micro-ticks more prominent, and more coherent, than in most games of this ilk. There’s an actual plot twist, one with some potential meat to it! Most of that potential is unrealized, of course. But under the circumstances of an adventure game, I can make a meal of potential meat. (Which could be the subtitle for this blog.)
The twist — to only half-spoil it — revolves around the game’s unusual conception of a race of “shapeshifters”: unlike any other shapeshifters I’ve ever read about, these shifters actually take on the mindset and nature of the thing they shift into, which means many of them make a shift and then lose their intention to ever revert. When you visit shapeshifter country, it’s covered with trees and rocks that have eyes or ears, shapeshifters who, by becoming trees and rocks, also became content to be trees and rocks, indefinitely. This is a neat and disturbing idea, and the script runs with it a little ways. But then it clouds the issue of what the rules are, and ultimately backs away from the deeper implications. What a waste of a premise that could have been genuinely interesting! But oh well. Whatever. It is what it is. Forget it, Jake: it’s Dragonsphere.
When I said I was playing Dragonsphere, Beth said, “You should know that in real life, there’s no such thing as a sphere of dragons.” To that I say: maybe.
The titular dragsonsphere in the game is not in fact a sphere of dragons; it’s a sort of crystal ball/palantir thing. Now you know.
This game was produced by a MicroProse sub-studio that was in the process of being dismantled following a merger, and it seems like its quiet, underadvertised release was a casualty of the moment. I wonder, in fact, whether it was actually finished to the developers’ satisfaction, or just got pushed out the door as-is while they were being laid off.
Doug Kaufman: design, writing
Matt Gruson: producer
Brian Reynolds: technical direction
Paul Lahaise: programming
Michael Bross, Don Barto: music
Mike Gibson: art
Plus eight more artists and animators, two more programmers, etc.