This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Milton Bradley’s legendary Dark Tower board game from 1981. One of the most powerful examples of fantasy’s moment in the mainstream limelight, the electronic game is actually pretty fun to play, too!
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Edited by the one and only R. Alex Murray.
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Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!
There’s something about the art that’s giving me serious Aquarian Tarot vibes. Which is weird, considering it came out 11 years previous.
A great waltz down memory lane. I played the heck out of it as a kid, until the turning mechanism in the tower finally wore out. I enjoyed your comment about the slowness of the game: As a kid I didn’t feel it was slow at all, it went by in a fevered dream. I wonder if there isn’t some kind of different consciousness in the 80s when play wasn’t infected by internet speed anxiety. Kudos to you for noticing the “realism” of graphic design these days and the limited palette, in contrast to Pepper’s art here. Early 80s fantasy seems to have had a phantasmagoric, counterculture edge to it before the satanic panic kicked in. Dark realism stepped in to fill the void I suppose. Super episode!
Thank you! I think the slowness was really a consequence of one player having the no keys glitch and not being able to progress their game; because of that, even when someone else won, it still sort of felt like we were also in the beginning. I think if that had not happened, it would have felt similarly dreamlike.