Gurklikes

Inspirations

Article

The gurklike takes its form from the home-computer role-playing games of the early and mid-1980s, chiefly those released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Several developers have named their sources directly: John Watkinson of Larva Labs cites Ultima IV and The Bard's Tale II for Gurk; Flat Black Films cites the early Ultima games for Lowlander; and mkudlo cites Ultima, Phantasie and Wizard's Crown, alongside Gurk itself, for RPG Party: Goblin Raiders.

Watkinson also names the solo-authored Commodore 64 games of Paul Norman, Aztec Challenge and Forbidden Forest: "There seems to be a kind of intimate charm to games that were all the work of one person." He wrote the code, sprites and music of the Gurk series himself.

The games#

Rogue (1980)#

Rogue supplies the genre's naming convention: "gurklike" is formed as "roguelike" was. Its procedural dungeon generation is also the technique that fit the original Gurk into a 64K J2ME MIDlet, by a modified route: Larva Labs generated maps with a random algorithm, selected the best, and shipped only the random-number seeds, so the world is fixed and hand-picked but costs almost no storage. Watkinson names NetHack rather than Rogue itself.

Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress (1982)#

Ultima II was designed by Richard Garriott and published by Sierra On-Line on August 24th, 1982. A single character moves one square at a time across an overhead tile world of wilderness, towns and dungeon entrances. Flat Black Films describes Lowlander as harking back "specifically [to] the awesome early Ultima games by Richard Garriott"; Lowlander's lack of a party, its one departure from the gurklike traits, follows the same model.

Ultima III: Exodus (1983)#

Ultima III was released for the Apple II on August 23rd, 1983, the first Ultima published by Origin Systems. It introduced a party of four that travels the overworld as a single icon and, on entering combat, transfers to a separate tiled battle screen where each character is a distinct figure acting in turn before the monsters do. That two-mode arrangement is the structure Gurk uses, and so do Kyen, Bylina and Realm of the Wyvern.

Phantasie (1985)#

Phantasie was designed by Winston Douglas Wood and published by SSI in 1985. A party of six crosses a top-down world map; towns are menus of shops and services, and combat resolves in a separate window in which each character's action for the round is chosen before the round plays out. The combat window is not a walkable grid. mkudlo names it for RPG Party: Goblin Raiders, whose town screen follows the menu model rather than Ultima's walkable towns.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)#

Ultima IV reached the Apple II on September 16th, 1985 and the Commodore 64 that December. Its overworld is sixteen times the size of Exodus's, and it has no final villain, ending instead in the player character's mastery of eight virtues. It is the first game Watkinson names: "Ultima IV and Bard's Tale II were probably the biggest inspirations. I loved the music in those games. The sense of adventure was great in Ultima IV, as you could just go anywhere and get into trouble." Gurk takes the open structure and not the virtue system: "there is a central quest driving you forward, but you can also walk around and get lost, do certain things out of order." Watkinson also cites the series negatively: he was "very disappointed as a kid that Ultimas V and VI had the same world map as Ultima IV. I wanted to explore new places!" The three Gurk games share no world map and no continuing story.

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight (1986)#

The Bard's Tale II was designed by Michael Cranford, developed by Interplay and published by Electronic Arts for the Commodore 64 in 1986. It allows up to seven active characters, grants levels at a Review Board rather than automatically, gates the archmage class behind levels in four other magic-using classes, and runs to 25 dungeon levels. Watkinson names it for that system: "Bard's Tale II (and III as well) had a satisfying system for levelling and gearing up your characters. That probably provided the core values for the Gurk series." He cites its music too; music was the feature the 64K original Gurk had no room for, and the main addition of Gurk II.

Wizard's Crown (1986)#

Wizard's Crown was designed by Paul Murray and Keith Brors and published by SSI in 1986. A party of up to eight fights on a grid of individual squares where facing decides what a weapon does: shields protect only the front and shielded side, spears strike two squares away, flails bypass shields and axes break them. Matt Barton credits its combat system as the influence on SSI's later Gold Box engine. mkudlo names it for RPG Party: Goblin Raiders. Directional facing of the same kind appears in SKALD: Against the Black Priory, where attacks land along cardinal directions and rogues manoeuvre for backstabs.

NetHack (1987)#

NetHack was first released on July 28th, 1987 by the NetHack DevTeam; it is a fork of Hack and a descendant of Rogue. Watkinson lists it in his playing history rather than among the inspirations: "Later on, I got into Nethack on the PC." The Gurk games take none of its permadeath, ASCII display or single-character play.

Pool of Radiance (1988)#

Pool of Radiance was published by SSI in June 1988 for the Commodore 64/128 and MS-DOS. It was the first licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game and the first of the Gold Box series, with a party of six plus up to two recruited NPCs and combat resolved on a tactical grid. Watkinson lists it among his favourite CRPGs, and played Dungeons & Dragons on paper. TouchArcade's review of Gurk III described its battle screen as one that "will look very familiar to old-school Ultima or SSI Goldbox fans". SKALD's parties of up to six come from the same line.

Console RPGs#

Gurk is often compared to Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Watkinson rejects the comparison: "I didn't play a console growing up, and I didn't much care for the step-by-step story style of RPGs like Final Fantasy. Real-time action in RPGs doesn't really interest me, either." The Gurk III soundtrack was written on synthesisers emulating the sound chips of "the C=64, NES, and other classic systems", making the NES an influence on the music but not the design.

External articles#