Audio hardware was no exception to this. It's hard to imagine today where every computer has built in highly capable audio hardware, but there used to be a vibrant and highly competitive market for add-on audio cards for home computers. One of the very earliest of these add-on cards was produced by a Canadian company, Ad Lib, Inc makers of a YM3812 powered FM audio card.
Originally built into the hardware chasis, the PC Speaker was basically designed to produce single tone error code beeps when the video hardware had a problem. Considered more reliable than most of the other early PC hardware, the Speaker was initialized first and would give a coded number of beeps depending on which piece of primitive hardware was going to cost you a small fortune because it died.
Later programmers learned to change the tone and play simple beeps during productivity operation, or simple single voice songs. Even later programmers learned to make more complicated sound effects (and even play back very scratchy digitized audio). But the hardware was horribly crippled and this was recognized pretty early. You can get an example of what playing an early PC game was like here:
While the graphics capability had improved a bit by 1991. The audio hadn't really changed much. By the late 1980s, Roland had stepped in to sell it's MT-32 MIDI synth hardware for PCs. It sounded (and still does) sound amazing - a quantum leap in PC audio. But at somewhere between $500-1000, with limited audio support outside of Sierra On-Line, was simply not an option for most PC owners.
Enter Ad Lib, Inc. A small Quebec company started by a former music professor named Martin Prevel, Ad Lib produced a simple, relatively cheap add in card. It didn't sound even close to as high quality of the MT-32, but by 1988 PC users were dying for just about anything better than the beeps and boops they were used to. Being inexpensive, it found a lot of buyers relatively quickly, and in the commercial games market embraced it with quite a few "AdLib Compatible" games (with Sierra's 1988 Kings Quest IV being the first game to support it). However, the shareware and freeware market lagged considerably.
Founded the same year as Ad Lib, Inc., Apogee Software Ltd., was one of the first companies to make a serious commercial effort at the shareware model. They introduced a novel "Apogee" model for game publishing: give the first 1/3rd of the game away for free and sell the 2nd and final chapters of the game. Some of the biggest games in history came out of this model: Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D. But before those games even had a line of code written, an entire library of great PC games were put out under this model by many talented game makers.
Todd Replogle was one of these game makers. He had designed a couple games that were published by Apogee -- each one making a significant graphical leap over the last. His first game, Caves of Thor, used glorified text characters to represent an adventure game (not too unlike today's Dwarf Fortress in appearance). His next jumped to 4-color CGA graphics. By 1991 he was working on his next great leap. Except this time it was to have two major leaps, 16-color graphics and Ad Lib music - a first in the shareware industry. The result was the Dark Ages trilogy.
While there had been plenty of 16-color games by 1991, there were still relatively few platformer games a la Super Mario Brothers. but one of those had been the wildly successful Commander Keen series, also published by Apogee and made by none other than John Carmack and John Romero of Doom and Quake fame. Apogee was ready for more. Carmack and Romero had taken Keen to be published by Softdisk so that left them without another major platformer. Replogle took on the task, along with Allen H. Blum III as artist and Keith Schuler as the composer.
So is Dark Ages a worthy follow up to Commander Keen (CK)? No is the simple answer, but the real answer is more complicated than that. Dark Ages showed that small software houses could technically do all the fancy hardware stuff the big boys like Sierra were doing. However, the execution is fantastically uneven.
Gameplay-wise, it's obvious that the Replogle was going for a Shadow of the Beast (SotB) style game. It's not a Mario-like exploration fest. You run left-to-right and shoot some kind of projectile at the various enemies you come across. There's not many jump puzzles or really much else to the game. You basically do your best to emulate an unstoppable juggernaut until you reach the end of the game. It's not poorly done at all, it's a solid play, but it's a less expressive game than CK or SotB.
However, level design is surprisingly thoughtful, requiring a good understanding of how the character moves and really being built around the character and what he can and cannot do -- in much the same way Castlevania is built around Simon Belmont's movement abilities. There's woefully few enemy types. But the game uses them in clever combination to keep your progression relatively interesting and challenging.
The graphics are not great. Despite having a dedicated artist. Characters lack personality or design, are poorly animated and lack the kind of polish you'd expect from a platform game on any platform by 1991. And it's probably this that really put this game in the bin of forgotten games. After a long play, the graphics start to feel impossibly jerky and constrained. It's as if you're playing a color upgraded Tiger LCD game and not a proper video game. There's lots of level variety, and each area feels different enough. But it's not enough to overcome these issues.
Audio is a fascinating example of a transition point in technology. The music is great, better than most games' use of the AdLib synth. Keith Schuler really tried to give each area a different feel, but provide thematically coherent music to the theme of the game. It pumps along and masks lots of the issues with the graphics. I personally kept playing just because I was enjoying running along killing bad guys to this music. It surprisingly holds up well.
Sound effects though do not use the AdLib card. I'm not sure why exactly, but it wasn't uncommon in the era. Perhaps programmer limitations, or development efficiency (since playing the game sans AdLib meant just not playing the music), it's still puzzling. While later games provided passable sound effects via the PC Speaker, in Dark Ages it's also slightly annoying. The main sound effect you hear as the near constant sound of your projectiles, playing the same few notes thousands upon thousands of times while you work your way through the game. And unlike whatever speakers you have plugged into your AdLib, the PC Speaker traditionally doesn't have any volume control. It's just on. Replogle of course, knew that the sound effects weren't great.
So where does this leave the Dark Ages trilogy? Should you ignore it or play it? I'm just on this side of playing it. I think it's a more important game than it gets credit for. After this game, it was no longer really acceptable to publish games without at least AdLib music. It's really a pivotal point in the PC games industry. It's the very beginning of the path of shedding careful observance of the traditional hardware you computer just happened to come with, and the start of people really customizing their computers. This trend would help kickstart the 3d graphics card revolution which we're still in the midst of today.Peter Bridger: It's June 1991, Apogee have just released Duke Nukem (the original side scroller), the sound effects made by Scott Miller. Should he write some PC speaker sounds effects for DNF?Replogle: HAHAHA! Speaker sound effects are only appropriate with computers lacking digital sound capabilities, something uncommon in all but the oldest tabletop PCs and laptops.
Replogle learned lots of lessons from this game. His next game was the original Duke Nukem platformer, which of course launched the now infamous Duke Nukem franchise. He followed this with the joyful Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, a fitting CK-like platformer. Another Duke platformer and finally Duke Nukem 3D.