Everything about Gold Box totally explained
Gold Box is the name for a series of
computer role-playing games produced by
SSI. The company won a license to produce games based on the
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from
TSR, Inc. These games shared a common engine that came to be known as the "Gold Box Engine" after the gold boxes in which most games of the series were sold.
History
In
1985 TSR after seeing the success of the
Ultima series, offered its license to game developers. Various companies including EA,
Sierra applied for the license. SSI President
Joel Billings acquired the
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) license from TSR in a major deal due primarily to their computerised wargaming experience in
1987. . The development of the Gold Box engine and the original games was managed by SSI's
Chuck Kroegel and George MacDonald. Later versions were led by Victor Penman and Ken Humphries.
The first game produced in the series was
Pool of Radiance, released in
1988. This was followed by
Curse of the Azure Bonds (
1989),
Secret of the Silver Blades (
1990), and
Pools of Darkness (1991), the games forming one continuous story rooted in the once-glorious city of Phlan and later encompassing the entire Moonsea Reaches and four outer planes. A series of TSR novels with identical titles paralleled the stories in the games, and also were best sellers. The original four titles were developed in-house at SSI, and were the best selling Gold Box games. Their success spurred an era of rapid growth at the company.
Earlier games in the series were playable on the
Apple IIe, the
Apple Macintosh, the
Commodore 64, the
Amiga and the
IBM PC. Later games in the series were released only for the Macintosh, Amiga, and PC.
When SSI began work on the
Dark Sun engine in
1990, development of the
Savage Frontier series was passed to developer
Stormfront Studios. Stormfront set their first
Forgotten Realms Gold Box title,
Gateway to the Savage Frontier (
1991), in
Neverwinter, far from the locale of the prior games in Myth Drannor.
Gateway became the fourth Gold Box game to go to the #1 position on industry sales charts.
All of the online RPGs of the
1980s were text-based
MUDs, describing the action in the style of
Rogue or
Will Crowther's original
Adventure game. Stormfront's
Don Daglow had been designing games for
AOL for several years, and the new alliance of SSI, TSR, America On-Line, and Stormfront led to the development of
Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, which ran on AOL from
1991 to
1997.
NWN was a multi-player implementation of the Gold Box engine, and was the most popular game on AOL for over five years. It paved the way for later hits such as
Ultima Online (
1997) and
Everquest (
1999).
Dark Sun was supposed to replace the aging Gold Box engine with its first game, in
1992. Unfortunately, the new engine was still shaky when
Shattered Lands appeared in
1994. With the Gold Box engine's sales finally fading after an incredible six-year run, the losses SSI absorbed during those two years of delays played a critical role in the sale of SSI to
Mindscape in 1994.
The memory of all these games is kept alive by
Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, or
FRUA for short, released in
1993, which was an editor that allowed players to create their own stories using a version of the Gold Box engine. An active community grew up around this game, including
hacks that expanded its powers and its graphics abilities.
However, interest in the series eventually waned, although the mantle of this
genre was later assumed by more recent role-playing games such as
Baldur's Gate, and more recently,
Neverwinter Nights.
Features
The "Gold Box Engine" had two main features. Outside of character creation, game play took place in a screen that displayed text interactions, the names and current status of your party of characters, and a window which displayed images of geography, and large or small pictures of characters or events. When combat occurred, which was often in these games, you switched to a full screen combat mode, in which player character icons could move about to cast spells or attack icons representing the enemies. All the games typically involved long
dungeon crawls, and were heavier on combat than on role-playing.
The Gold Box games formed a number of series in which you could move characters who had finished one game to the next one in the series. In addition, characters from
Pool of Radiance could be imported into, a game based on an entirely different engine, and then exported into
Curse of the Azure Bonds. The system was improved over time, adding better colors, graphics, more player-class levels, and new story lines.
List of Gold Box Titles
» Titles that reached #1 on the sales charts in bold.
The Savage Frontier Forgotten Realms series (developed by Stormfront Studios):
The Dragonlance series (developed internally at SSI):
The Buck Rogers series:
Additionally, (1992) used the Gold Box combat engine.
Game Reception
The first Gold Box game Pool of Radiance was given a score of 90% by Commodore User. The reviewer Tony Dillon was impressed with the features.
The next game in the series Curse of the Azure Bonds was also well received given a score of 90% on magazine, "The Games Machine" and 89% on CU Amiga-64.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Gold Box'.
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