Demons was written and developed by Mike Schelhorn and published as code in 1979 in the book 80 Programs for the TRS-80 by Jim Perry.
The book was published in 1979 and given to subscribers of 80 Microcomputing magazine in 1980.
If you wanted to play Demons you had to diligently sit and type in the code line by line and pray that you didn’t make any mistakes doing so.
Demons begins by having you choose a character class. The amazing thing is that there are 14 different character classes to choose from. In seven of the classes the gender is male and in the other seven female. I personally played as an Enchantress, then a Woodcutter, and lastly as a Songstress (where I surprisingly did very well). I tried to select varied classes to experiment with.
The strength score acts much like hit points or hardiness. The higher your combat rating the more you’re likely going to come out on top of any physical combat.
Magic points apply towards the casting of spells and the use of the teleporters found on the overland map.
The higher the charisma the higher the liklihood of singing monsters to sleep with a lyre. The last character I ran I chose the Sonstress class and she had a high charisma. This might possibly be pointing out a bit of a game imbalance but I found this class/attribute combination more potent than any of the spellcasting classes. My Songstress would often sing the tougher opponents to sleep and I never suffered a single scratch.
Intelligence seems to affect random encounters and combat and seems more like a luck attribute. I would have thought it might have impacted magic and spells in the game. Speaking of which:
The spells with which you have to choose from during combat are many, varied, and extremely impressive. I greatly enjoyed playing an Enchantress in my first run at the game and experimenting with the different spells however I did not last very long against the tougher opponents.
Demons is turn based and the objective is to traverse an overland map and acquire as much treasure as possible within 150 days. The overland map is ascii based and you can see it depicted above. The H on the map represents your character’s house or home base and this is the spot on the map where you begin the game. The ? on the map represent castles. There are always three castles on the map in each game and it is the castle where the greatest repository of treasure can be found. You’ll often find a magic item to aid you and which also has great value or you’ll find a hoard of gold coins. You’ll want to be sure that you visit all three castles as the payout there is much better than in harrowing random encounters.
The + on the map represents teleporters. There are five of them scattered about the map. They require magical points to operate and you can choose which teleporter you want to transport to. In this way you can avoid some random encounters while trying to get to the castles and you avoid days of overland travel as well.
The [, #, and $ characters represent different types of terrain and where you may experience random encounters while traversing them. The lower your intelligence score the more random encounters you seem to have. Moving over these characters on the map can take a day or days.
There are some graphics in the game. Your wandering monsters that you encounter are depicted by graphics and you can see an example of this by the demon depicted above. The demon always made short work of my Enchantress characters but my Songstress character with high charisma was able to sing a demon to sleep with her lyre.
The three castles are also depicted with graphics as shown above.
Here you can see a glimpse of the battle my Enchantress had with a demon.
The game will declare you a winner if your gold piece totals from your travels land anywhere near 4000 or over 4000. If your gold piece totals are below 2000 the game will cheekily let you know.
You move about the overland map using the numerical keys on your keyboard.
0 – rest which will recover 2 points of strength or 3 points of magic. If you have a Magic Jar in your possession you can recover all of your points with rest. Resting may also cause a random encounter to occur so be wary. Resting will take a day or days depending on the extent of your injuries.
1 – move east
2 – move northeast
3 – move north
4 – move northwest
5 – move west
6 – move southwest
7 – move south
8 – move southeast
9 – status of your character
Sure – in order to play or experience this game you’d have to type the entire thing in line by line from a magazine. But this was the norm for quite a few years and we’ve played many that originated this way. The game and what it offers a home computer user in 1979 makes it even more impressive. It’s not an Akalabeth or Temple of Apshai or even Clardy’s Wilderness Campaign of that year, but in an age where you didn’t have a lot of fantasy offerings in your collection or library yet, I find it quite surprising. I could see a young 1979 me spending some time with this one.
Next up on the docket is another uncovered find from 1979 entitled Mines of Mordor.
Until next time…