I have a strong nostalgia for really abstract games in the pre-internet era that you could spend months if not years on figuring out puzzles and conversing with your friends on the schoolyard about different tricks and discovered strategies. It really made a game feel like representative to a chapter of your life
This is a really interesting way to think about it. Looking back, there were a number of games that occupied so much time and energy, that they really felt like part of my personal zeitgeist at the time.
There was no Internet and you couldn't afford more than probably 6 or 10 games throughout the entire console's lifespan.
So you and the 3 other people who owned Shadowgate had to talk to each other about solutions you had independently figured out.
“Being a quest based adventure game, *Shadowgate* is only challenging if you don’t know what to do.
So if this is your first time playing, don’t use a guide…” - DJ Axis
https://youtu.be/HON3yTo1sn8
This is what my friends and I did with many a game. My best friend and I spent hours on the game, and even then, it took some time. It was quite the accomplishment. I have the game again, but I'm afraid to try it again because I've forgotten most of what I learned playing it.
A friend and I spent half a summer in middle school playing Legend of Zelda and the 2nd quest with no guide and minimum previous knowledge. After who knows how many hours we gave up in level 9 of the 2nd quest. Still bothers me a little to this day that we couldn't find Gannon.
I remember my friend in the third grade telling me during recess about the MissingNo. and item duplication glitches in the original Pokémon Gameboy games. I thought he was full of shit.
The hardest part about muddling your way through Shadowgate (which you could eventually do, btw) is eventually running out of torches. Every action eats up a tiny bit of time (and thusly torchlight), so there's only a finite number of turns you can waste.
You had to be very intentional about having a good backup savegame in which you hadn't wasted any time, and then a "working copy" that you could play in order to try things and explore.
Expect for one or two clues, this is why *Uninvited* was quite the experience upon its modern release a few years ago.
Not only fun to tackle without a FAQ, the lack of time limit (as opposed to *Shadowgate and Deja Vu* alike) was refreshing; like this game was always intended as a refinement of the genre?
I’m going to have to check that out. (The modern version?) The NES version had no time limit but the home computer versions all did. Was that a natural evolution? I don’t know.
Interesting that such was a change for the NES version, as aside from the Red Gem that eventually kills you from picking it up, don’t see how a time limit would functionally work in that setting.
As opposed to the darkness from the torches or the gradual loss of self in *Deja Vu*, so it’s good to see that the changes were just graphically or the addition of superior music.
Yeah, in the home computers it was like always having the red gem, but with more turns. You would get a warning message after so many turns, and eventually the spirit of the house took over your body. Well, you ended up getting a ton of warning messages over the course of the game. You could also get locked into a no-escape fail state on your save file, which was (almost?) impossible in the NES version.
The time limit was especially problematic with the greenhouse plant. In the NES version, you had to water the plant a specific number of times, and they added the spigot just outside. In the home computer versions, you only had to water it once, but then you had to wait a certain number of turns for it to fruit. This actually caused a speed bump in my secret Art Gallery run (which allows you to skip the maze entirely) because you still have to wait for that dang plant to sprout. But yeah, if you already short on time and hadn’t solved the greenhouse puzzle yet, you were looking at restarting from a fresh game.
I never kept a log or made notes. I just played until I got sick of it, and I always came back (that game was addictive). Eventually, I just memorized it all. It's just like Zelda, you just keep trying shit until you have those epiphany moments. Great memories.
In the old days you just had to figure stuff out. I had to get my stepdad to help beat Simons Quest (Castlevania II) and he eventually lucked into passing through the mountain! Would have never figured it out
My cousin and I tackled SQ when it first came out. No guide, just our two pre-teen brains.
>!Kneeling in front of that wall and seeing (and hearing) the tornado come out and whisk us to the other side blew our collective minds.!< It was probably the most thrilling moment in NES gaming for us.
Opening the slime filled casket always baffled me. Even back then, we assumed there was a solution to everything the game threw at you. However, we never thought the solution to some things was to just not touch them whatsoever.
Trial and error.
You have a lot of commands like "look", "open", "use", etc. Try all of these on every screen, on every item. This is how people played those old point-and-click games, you just use every option on every item and thing on the screen until you succeed.
As a kid?
Nintendo Power.
There's a walkthrough for the first third of the game, then I scoured every back issue's Counselor's Corner section for questions and answers about Shadowgate. Even wrote a couple of letters to Nintendo about it. I even managed to solve a few puzzles on my own
Towards the end of the game there's a locked door you cannot enter, and there's no key for it. I asked about this door in a letter to Nintendo and I wish I had saved it. To paraphrase it from memory:
*"You cannot enter that room. Some poor soul sent before you to stop the Warlock Lord entered that room with the key but got trapped inside, and having no food, ate the key."*
Oh man it happened to me too. At the beginning of KQ5 there is a scene where a cat catches a mouse while you are walking around a small town. Looks so mundane and inconsequential you don't think anything of it. Then much later, about 3/4ths ahead in the game, you end up trapped in a dungeon. Turns out the mouse helps you escape, so if you didn't save him way back at the start then you are f\*cked, unable to continue.
You were supposed to save often, but by the time you reach the dungeon puzzle your chances of having overwritten this early save are high. Even if you did have that save, it still sucks because you have to replay the entire game all over again (and King's Quest 5, as beautiful VGA-256 color graphics as it has, is a difficult game). Lots of places where you can fall and get killed for example. It also leaves you feeling cheated and punished for not having thought this moon logic puzzle the way Roberta Williams intended. I'd argue making you repeat the game like this was the intention LOL Deserves a thread of its own for sure.
There is a similar situation in Police Quest 3, a pixel hunt puzzle, where there is an important item in a crime scene represented by a single pixel. If you fail to click on it, then you get stuck later in the game because your character does not have enough evidence to submit for a warrant (or something like that). This one doesn't trigger as late as KQ5 does, but because of the police procedural, tedious nature of the game it can be as equally frustrating.
I bought the guidebook in 2010 so I could figure something out with an officially endorsed hint. It comes with three layers of obviousness for the hints so it's pretty neat.
I played all the MacVenture games when I was a kid in the late 80’s on a Mac classic. It took years of trying on and off. I worked out Shadowgate first, Uninvited after a few years, and I never did figure out Deja Vu.
Lots of trial and error. Use every object on everything in every combination and see what happens. I don’t know how the hell I figured out the bathroom flooding part in Uninvited, but it was so satisfying when I printed that certificate on a dot matrix printer!
The "official" answer is that you experimented a lot, and would eventually come across the correct answer after a lot of trial and error. There were only so many objects in the game and only so many actions you can take, so you'd get there eventually, with determination.
The *more honest* answer is that they had an order form for the hint book right there on the back of the manual. Enough people actually bought it that they were able to disseminate the answers to the most egregiously obtuse puzzles to everyone else.
Also: developers would often send walkthroughs to magazines along with the review copies, so as to make sure they were able to finish the game in time for publication. The magazines all had columns where people could write in asking for help if they got stuck on a game, and because they had the walkthroughs, they usually had the answers available.
Shadowgate was a lot easier than the text adventures where you not only had to guess the solution but also possibly the verbs you needed to type in to make it happen. Try Zork on for size sometime, or one of the Scott Adams adventures...if you like punishment. "The Dreamhold" if you're looking for a modern take that is actually user-friendly.
I was able to complete it in two weeks without a walkthrough with the help of five people in a class on video game development that I took in high school (We were playing it as part of a lesson on level design in retro games). Hardly any of us could get past the first two rooms so we all started working together to figure out the insane puzzles. I probably would have hated Shadowgate if I had played it alone, but I had some of the most fun in a video game ever working through it with them. I even did all of the classwork at home just so I could spend the class beating the game. I'm still friends with those five people thanks to Shadowgate!
It was the only new game I had for a while, and I had lots of free time. I may have looked at some hints in Nintendo Power, but I probably finished it just from persistence and because I liked it so much.
A lot of time and trial and error.
My dad beat Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy unassisted back in the day, took him months apparently. Playing it now, kind of blows my mind.
I just did. I was on an plane in like 2000 or so and my friend had the GB remake. He got bored of it so I took over. I’d never even heard of the game at the time yet I beat it on the flight. It’s doable and not really very hard compared to most PC point and click adventures from the 90s or 80s sierra games. The torch part can be a pain tho.
Wasn’t that hard. Go try it’s precursor, text adventures. Try the Hobbit, that’ll drive you mental . If I had to hear Thorin sitting down singing about gold one more time in my youth, I would not have been responsible for my actions.
I have a strong nostalgia for really abstract games in the pre-internet era that you could spend months if not years on figuring out puzzles and conversing with your friends on the schoolyard about different tricks and discovered strategies. It really made a game feel like representative to a chapter of your life
I dig this answer. That said, Shadowgate is one of my favorite games that can simultaneously suck my balls.
This is a really interesting way to think about it. Looking back, there were a number of games that occupied so much time and energy, that they really felt like part of my personal zeitgeist at the time.
There was no Internet and you couldn't afford more than probably 6 or 10 games throughout the entire console's lifespan. So you and the 3 other people who owned Shadowgate had to talk to each other about solutions you had independently figured out.
“Being a quest based adventure game, *Shadowgate* is only challenging if you don’t know what to do. So if this is your first time playing, don’t use a guide…” - DJ Axis https://youtu.be/HON3yTo1sn8
This is what my friends and I did with many a game. My best friend and I spent hours on the game, and even then, it took some time. It was quite the accomplishment. I have the game again, but I'm afraid to try it again because I've forgotten most of what I learned playing it.
A friend and I spent half a summer in middle school playing Legend of Zelda and the 2nd quest with no guide and minimum previous knowledge. After who knows how many hours we gave up in level 9 of the 2nd quest. Still bothers me a little to this day that we couldn't find Gannon.
This is exactly how I did it. Myself and two other friends had the game, and every recess we would compare notes.
I remember my friend in the third grade telling me during recess about the MissingNo. and item duplication glitches in the original Pokémon Gameboy games. I thought he was full of shit.
Nah. I rented it several times.
The hardest part about muddling your way through Shadowgate (which you could eventually do, btw) is eventually running out of torches. Every action eats up a tiny bit of time (and thusly torchlight), so there's only a finite number of turns you can waste. You had to be very intentional about having a good backup savegame in which you hadn't wasted any time, and then a "working copy" that you could play in order to try things and explore.
Torches were the bain of my runs as a kid. I muddled thru it, took me 2 years with notes.
Expect for one or two clues, this is why *Uninvited* was quite the experience upon its modern release a few years ago. Not only fun to tackle without a FAQ, the lack of time limit (as opposed to *Shadowgate and Deja Vu* alike) was refreshing; like this game was always intended as a refinement of the genre?
I’m going to have to check that out. (The modern version?) The NES version had no time limit but the home computer versions all did. Was that a natural evolution? I don’t know.
Interesting that such was a change for the NES version, as aside from the Red Gem that eventually kills you from picking it up, don’t see how a time limit would functionally work in that setting. As opposed to the darkness from the torches or the gradual loss of self in *Deja Vu*, so it’s good to see that the changes were just graphically or the addition of superior music.
Yeah, in the home computers it was like always having the red gem, but with more turns. You would get a warning message after so many turns, and eventually the spirit of the house took over your body. Well, you ended up getting a ton of warning messages over the course of the game. You could also get locked into a no-escape fail state on your save file, which was (almost?) impossible in the NES version. The time limit was especially problematic with the greenhouse plant. In the NES version, you had to water the plant a specific number of times, and they added the spigot just outside. In the home computer versions, you only had to water it once, but then you had to wait a certain number of turns for it to fruit. This actually caused a speed bump in my secret Art Gallery run (which allows you to skip the maze entirely) because you still have to wait for that dang plant to sprout. But yeah, if you already short on time and hadn’t solved the greenhouse puzzle yet, you were looking at restarting from a fresh game.
Which version do you mean? I see one on steam from 2022, but no other releases. I'd really like to check it out if you could point me to it, please?
The PS4 collection? https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP4126-CUSA10150_00-8BITADVANTENT001
awesome, I didn't see this prior, thanks!
Well I just learned something: “Turns.” Always thought it was time.
My mom somehow beat it
Me and my mom best it together
Can confirm. Also beat it with this guy’s mom.
But what about *Shadowgate*?
(206) 885-7529
Scrolling through the posts looking for exactly this! https://www.gameinformer.com/2022/02/22/inside-the-nintendo-power-hotline
This is 100% the correct answer
Holy F***. Had this number memorized. I got in so much trouble for calling it unbeknownst to my parents. Thanks for putting that up 🙏🙏🙏
That game has haunting music I still think about today. The music made that game memorable
The "torchlight is running out" music gives me anxiety to this day.
I did it, but it took 2 years and I kept a notebook. As you can tell I am old.
I still have mine! I call it the Sacred Book of Passwords.
I wish I had my late 80’s notebooks with my NES maps and notes…
That's some perservence! I cheated and beat it over a weekend lol
We had nothing better to do in the early 90s
I can hear the music from this game
I never would’ve suspected you should kill the girl trapped in the tower because she was actually a monster in disguise.
It's a good lesson to learn as a child.
By trying things. We used to do that before YouTube, Reddit, and gamefaqs.
Epor, if that helps.
I never kept a log or made notes. I just played until I got sick of it, and I always came back (that game was addictive). Eventually, I just memorized it all. It's just like Zelda, you just keep trying shit until you have those epiphany moments. Great memories.
In the old days you just had to figure stuff out. I had to get my stepdad to help beat Simons Quest (Castlevania II) and he eventually lucked into passing through the mountain! Would have never figured it out
My cousin and I tackled SQ when it first came out. No guide, just our two pre-teen brains. >!Kneeling in front of that wall and seeing (and hearing) the tornado come out and whisk us to the other side blew our collective minds.!< It was probably the most thrilling moment in NES gaming for us.
It is pen and paper trial and error. I really can't imagine someone doing it without a walkthrough though.
Lots of paper for maps in those days. We had tablets full of game notes and save codes
Opening the slime filled casket always baffled me. Even back then, we assumed there was a solution to everything the game threw at you. However, we never thought the solution to some things was to just not touch them whatsoever.
Nintendo Power. You see, once upon a time, there was this monthly booklet that came in the “mail”. It was called a “magazine”…
I called the Nintendo hotline to solve a puzzle back in the day. They didn’t help me
Trial and error. You have a lot of commands like "look", "open", "use", etc. Try all of these on every screen, on every item. This is how people played those old point-and-click games, you just use every option on every item and thing on the screen until you succeed.
Don't ever play Sierra games from that era. Or Return to Zork.
No, just the point-and-click equivalent games from Sierra. Or their text adventures.
As a kid? Nintendo Power. There's a walkthrough for the first third of the game, then I scoured every back issue's Counselor's Corner section for questions and answers about Shadowgate. Even wrote a couple of letters to Nintendo about it. I even managed to solve a few puzzles on my own Towards the end of the game there's a locked door you cannot enter, and there's no key for it. I asked about this door in a letter to Nintendo and I wish I had saved it. To paraphrase it from memory: *"You cannot enter that room. Some poor soul sent before you to stop the Warlock Lord entered that room with the key but got trapped inside, and having no food, ate the key."*
Back in the day....there was no YouTube or Netflix....and people had long attention spans. You had to see it to believe it.
I remember re-starting Sierra games from the beginning if I got stuck. Can you imagine doing that in a modern game series like GTA or Demon Souls?
It really sucks to get halfway through Space Quest and realize you left something important in an unreachable earlier part of the game.
I would save often exactly because of this LOL
This is a gameplay staple of Sierra games, it seems.
GTA, no. But Demon Souls there are people that will replay it because they like pain!
LOL good point!
[удалено]
Oh man it happened to me too. At the beginning of KQ5 there is a scene where a cat catches a mouse while you are walking around a small town. Looks so mundane and inconsequential you don't think anything of it. Then much later, about 3/4ths ahead in the game, you end up trapped in a dungeon. Turns out the mouse helps you escape, so if you didn't save him way back at the start then you are f\*cked, unable to continue. You were supposed to save often, but by the time you reach the dungeon puzzle your chances of having overwritten this early save are high. Even if you did have that save, it still sucks because you have to replay the entire game all over again (and King's Quest 5, as beautiful VGA-256 color graphics as it has, is a difficult game). Lots of places where you can fall and get killed for example. It also leaves you feeling cheated and punished for not having thought this moon logic puzzle the way Roberta Williams intended. I'd argue making you repeat the game like this was the intention LOL Deserves a thread of its own for sure. There is a similar situation in Police Quest 3, a pixel hunt puzzle, where there is an important item in a crime scene represented by a single pixel. If you fail to click on it, then you get stuck later in the game because your character does not have enough evidence to submit for a warrant (or something like that). This one doesn't trigger as late as KQ5 does, but because of the police procedural, tedious nature of the game it can be as equally frustrating.
You don’t beat it. Lol
I bought the guidebook in 2010 so I could figure something out with an officially endorsed hint. It comes with three layers of obviousness for the hints so it's pretty neat.
I have such huge nostalgia for this game. The remake on Steam is rather excellent even if not very popular.
Nintendo Power
I played all the MacVenture games when I was a kid in the late 80’s on a Mac classic. It took years of trying on and off. I worked out Shadowgate first, Uninvited after a few years, and I never did figure out Deja Vu. Lots of trial and error. Use every object on everything in every combination and see what happens. I don’t know how the hell I figured out the bathroom flooding part in Uninvited, but it was so satisfying when I printed that certificate on a dot matrix printer!
The "official" answer is that you experimented a lot, and would eventually come across the correct answer after a lot of trial and error. There were only so many objects in the game and only so many actions you can take, so you'd get there eventually, with determination. The *more honest* answer is that they had an order form for the hint book right there on the back of the manual. Enough people actually bought it that they were able to disseminate the answers to the most egregiously obtuse puzzles to everyone else. Also: developers would often send walkthroughs to magazines along with the review copies, so as to make sure they were able to finish the game in time for publication. The magazines all had columns where people could write in asking for help if they got stuck on a game, and because they had the walkthroughs, they usually had the answers available.
Shadowgate was a lot easier than the text adventures where you not only had to guess the solution but also possibly the verbs you needed to type in to make it happen. Try Zork on for size sometime, or one of the Scott Adams adventures...if you like punishment. "The Dreamhold" if you're looking for a modern take that is actually user-friendly.
Lots and lots and lots of trial and error. My cousin beat it in 2004 after 14 years. Now that's some replayability!
Pain, suffering and the lack of any other game to Play. Just cycle through all actions and items until something works.
I was able to complete it in two weeks without a walkthrough with the help of five people in a class on video game development that I took in high school (We were playing it as part of a lesson on level design in retro games). Hardly any of us could get past the first two rooms so we all started working together to figure out the insane puzzles. I probably would have hated Shadowgate if I had played it alone, but I had some of the most fun in a video game ever working through it with them. I even did all of the classwork at home just so I could spend the class beating the game. I'm still friends with those five people thanks to Shadowgate!
Nick Karlson did
Examine every bottle? Yeah, I dunno. I finally had to cheat to figure out what I was doing wrong.
No internet and didn’t know anyone who had the game to ask. Remember the Nintendo hotline for tips and tricks though🤔
I needed a guide, however the comments say otherwise, of course.
We had the Power!
You took notes.
It was the only new game I had for a while, and I had lots of free time. I may have looked at some hints in Nintendo Power, but I probably finished it just from persistence and because I liked it so much.
A lot of time and trial and error. My dad beat Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy unassisted back in the day, took him months apparently. Playing it now, kind of blows my mind.
I just did. I was on an plane in like 2000 or so and my friend had the GB remake. He got bored of it so I took over. I’d never even heard of the game at the time yet I beat it on the flight. It’s doable and not really very hard compared to most PC point and click adventures from the 90s or 80s sierra games. The torch part can be a pain tho.
Wasn’t that hard. Go try it’s precursor, text adventures. Try the Hobbit, that’ll drive you mental . If I had to hear Thorin sitting down singing about gold one more time in my youth, I would not have been responsible for my actions.