Spellbinder (video game)

Spellbinder is an adventure game, released for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron in 1987.[1]

Spellbinder
Developer(s)Etan Shirron
Dan Shirron
Publisher(s)Superior Software, Acornsoft
Platform(s)Acorn Electron, BBC Micro
Release
Genre(s)Adventure
Mode(s)Single-player

Plot

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The player takes the role of a Magelord, named Eldon the Spellbinder. His task is to find the evil Magelord outcast Zorn, in the castle of Lorraine, and defeat him by use of the so-called Ultimate Spell.

Gameplay

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The game is pseudo-3D, allowing the player to move left, right, forwards and backwards in a room, though not up and down. It was presented in a monochrome format, with black and one other colour being used to draw the sprites and backdrops, although the colour varied from room to room, illustrating the environments. A large number of items could be examined for clues, or searched for possible items. The game was relatively open-ended for a game of the time, similar to Exile, allowing the player to move around a large section of the castle right from the start, and start to mix various spells. A few of these spells were listed in the manual, but most had to be discovered from in-game clues.

Unusually, for a BBC Micro game, it has continuous background music: a version of Midnight Summer Dream, the 1983 song from British rock group The Stranglers' album Feline.

Development

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The game was written by Dan and Etan Shirron, two teenagers from Israel. They were 14½ and 16 when they started coding the game in 1986. The equipment used to write it was a memory monitor chip, a monochrome 14" TV, a cassette tape recorder and their own BASIC-written graphic-design software. The game was originally named Magelords, later to be named Spellbinder by Superior Software marketing team.

References

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  1. ^ "Spellbinder". BBC Micro Games Archive.
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