One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Bard’s Tale on the Commodore 64 (1985). I wasn’t mature enough at the time to build a solid strategy in playing the game. I didn’t even map my progress. It didn’t seem to matter back then, as I typically would die off fairly early on while wandering the dusty streets of Skara Brae. And I didn’t care! The character and monster graphics - to me - were simply amazing, not to mention their limited animations. I just loved it even though I barely got far at all. Frankly it was a bit over my head. EA Flats collection, that Bard’s Tale would be one of my first for the C64. I remember when I actually bought that program for the C64 at the mall a million years ago...
But for the Amiga? Today? Holy smoke - finding an original Bard’s Tale for the Amiga is surprisingly hard. Either no one wants to sell theirs, or there just aren’t many out there floating around anymore (or both).
In any case, I did finally snag a pretty nice specimen recently. Even though it already is in the Games Library, later this year I’m going to try and do what I never have done before - actually finish it from beginning to end. And I think I’ll do it entirely on my Amiga 1000 since Bard’s Tale is one of the few fantastic games that totally supports two disk drives: DF0 for the game disk and DF1 for the character disk. It’s heavenly.
In preparation for such a momentous occasion, I also found (after a looooong search) the only Clue Book by EA I’ve ever seen for the game. It’s heavily marked up by a previous owner, but honestly that doesn’t bother me at all. I actually kind of dig that sometimes to see the little notes and whatnot someone jotted down decades ago as they played these games pre-internet and only had their brain and this clue book to figure things out. That’s how I like to still do it today. Why not? We’re not in any rush, right?
I’ve also got a pristine boxed copy of Thief of Fate, the 3rd installment in the series. I’ve yet to find Bard’s Tale 2. But I’ve got plenty of time. I’ll come around eventually I know.
It should come as no surprise that when I started to build my