ULTIMATE GUIDE
THE LATE MIKE SINGLETON WAS PEERLESS WHEN IT CAME TO CREATING WHOLE WORLDS ON JUST A SPOOL OF TAPE, AND THE LORDS OF MIDNIGHT REMAINS ONE OF HIS BEST-LOVED WORKS. JOIN US AS WE BRAVE ETERNAL WINTER TO RECOUNT THE WAR OF THE SOLSTICE
Remember in the early Eighties when developers invented fantastic names for the technical advances that set their games apart? We had Sandy White’s Softsolid 3D, Ultimate’s Filmation and Melbourne House even coined the term ‘4D graphics’ around 25 years before Sony had the same silly idea. And then there was Mike Singleton’s The Lords Of Midnight, which was billed as “the world’s first Epic game”. Elsewhere, publisher Beyond described it as a “living fantasy novel”.
When the game was released for the ZX Spectrum in summer 1984, players quickly discovered that this was no case of hyperbole – The Lords Of Midnight was indeed epic. It featured a huge game map consisting of 3,904 locations, and at each location the player could turn in eight directions, resulting in almost 32,000 first-person views. The game also featured 32 controllable characters and 16 different terrain types, and Mike somehow crammed all this content into around 41KB of available memory.
As for the “living fantasy novel” claim, this too was borne out. Mike was heavily inspired by Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, of course, and the game featured a similar narrative structure. In Mike’s version, the once lush land of Midnight had been forever frozen by an evil sorcerer named Doomdark and it was up to the lords of the free people, led by Luxor The Moonprince and his son Morkin, to rally together and defeat the enemy. There were actually three ways to secure victory. The quickest way was to complete Morkin’s quest, where a small fellowship ventured north to the Tower Of Doom to destroy a powerful ring – sorry, a crown, a powerful crown that’s the source of Doomdark’s power. With some luck (rudimentary AI meant skirmishes with enemies varied on each attempt) it was possible to complete the quest in as little as nine game days.
Taking far longer was the war scenario. Here, as Luxor, you ignored the quest and instead plotted to overthrow Doomdark’s evil lair, the Citadel Of Ushg
