Tir Na Nog
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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The first of a trilogy of similarly-designed titles from Gargoyle Games, Tir Na Nog is a complex mix of arcade and adventure elements. The game is viewed from the side, and to change direction you must rotate the view.

You play Cuchulainn, and you must restore the Sidhe race to its former position of intelligence, enlightenment and civilization. This can be done by retrieving the four pieces of the Seal of Calum, which was shattered when the Great Enemy invaded.

Many puzzles are presented in the form of cryptic text messages (displayed in a neat pseudo-Celtic font), ranging form 'find my crown for a gift' to 'The backdoor key is me' - lateral thinking is required to interpret these messages. 

The action side of things is challenging, especially before you have found a good sword or mace. When you die, you return to the start of the game, but the settings of objects are left exactly as they were - making it important to regularly save the game, as it's possible to lose weaponry in a situation so precarious that you have little chance of retrieving it without suffering more combat.



Trivia

Tir Na Nog is Irish Gaelic for "The Land of Ever Young" or "Land of Eternal Youth". This is an Irish legend about a place were the plants and trees never die and people stay young.


CBM64 version by Design Design, 
Map painted by Charlie Roberts. 
Cover illustration was drawn by S.B. Graphics Limited of Birmingham. It shows a Celtic deity, probably Cernunnos and is taken from the Gundestrup Cauldron, National Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark.


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Despite their initial success and acclaim, the Gargoyle graphic adventures are now often met with confusion or indifference. Their strange use of cameras and unconventional control schemes often cause people to reconsider their classification as adventure games and doubt their quality. Still, they remain an important stepping stone in the adventure genre and a technical marvel on the 48K ZX Spectrum. What Greg Follis and Roy Carter came up with melded together their diverse talents into a unified whole. Fluid animation, expert coding, and intricate design are the hallmarks of Gargoyle's four graphic adventure games, creating a distinct style in a genre that relies far too often on typical conventions. While the unique qualities of the Gargoyle adventures make them worth examining, their excellence makes them worth playing.


Greg and Roy gave conflicting stories about how development began on their first graphic adventure. In one interview, Greg states that he created a fourteen part animation of the "walking man", which would become the basis for all player characters in future Gargoyle adventures. In another, Roy describes how he wrote a routine that showed a character walking in a scrolling background.

Either way, the next step was to determine a setting for this walking man. Originally given the generic title "Arabesque", the game had no story until further into development. The Epic of Gilgamesh was their first idea for inspiration, but Greg and Roy quickly realized that Celtic myth was more relatable for their European target audience.


In Irish folklore, the Tír na nÓg, or Land of the Young, is a name for the Celtic Otherworld, a realm inhabited by deities and spirits. It's the backdrop for many stories and an iconic part of Celtic mythology. The game's hero, Cú Chulainn, is a prominent Irish myth hero, the archetypal heroic son of a god and a human. With setting and hero determined, the title became Tir Na Nog.

The rest of the story has no mythological basis and was largely conceived by Greg. The manual contains fictional extracts from the Leabhar Glaodhach, the Book of Tears, which details the game's story.

The Sidhe are a prominent race of people who take it upon themselves to emtomb the big baddie of the area, the Great Enemy using the Seal of Calum. Eventually, a thief steals the seal while the Sidhe are celebrating and the Great Enemy break frees and reigns torture across the land. After this tragedy, the Sidhe people become dark, simian-like creatures that roam Tir Na Nog, the afterlife.

The remanants of the seal are shaped into four separate items: the Stone of Fal, the Spear of Lugh, Dagda's Cauldron, and Nuades Sword. These artifacts do have a mythological basis as the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The mythical Tuatha Dé Danann were a supernaturally-intelligent race that inhabited early Ireland. Somehow, these four treasures wind up in Tir Na Nog.

Cú Chulainn is killed by his enemies at the feast of Samhain and awakens in Tir Na Nog. He realizes that he has one last quest to complete: to unite the four fragments of the Seal of Calum, defeat the Great Enemy, and save the Sidhe.

Even with the detailed story, the gameplay is more centered around Greg and Roy's original animation than anything else. The "walking man" stays true to his title throughout, constantly going from place to place. The Gargoyle team estimated that Tir Na Nog's roads equal 3,000 miles actual distance. While this seems to be a huge overstatement, the game remains vast, with hundreds of paths to take and dozens of caves to explore. Greg reported that the game is consciously winding by design: "we were trying to produce a real time environmental experience where the puzzles are three miles away from each other, not just next door".

The game is always side-scrolling, but paths go off in all cardinal directions. To achieve this goal, the Gargoyle team programmed all the paths as simple vectors made up of north-south and east-west paths that intersect in various spots. To move to another path, the player switches to a cardinal camera perspective at any time. The camera switches at 90 degree angles, keeping everything two-dimensional throughout. Although navigation is difficult at first, a few minutes playing with the camera controls and several hours of careful mapping make everything much easier.

Even though walking is the focus, the stellar animation isn't the only eye candy: the backgrounds feature some brilliant parallax scrolling, an almost unheard of achievement on the Spectrum. The background scrolls a thin band in the middle and clouds on top, which are all drawn onto an offscreen bitmap using the correct pixel offset and then quickly drawn on the screen. The game's fifteen different sub-areas also feature different backgrounds, offering up more visual variety than the typical game. While this might sound pretty basic today, this was huge for the Spectrum scene circa 1984.


Inventory management is the game's second core design element. Cú Chulainn has four inventory slots, and there are many keys, weapons, and other tools to fill them. Items, when picked up and dropped off elsewhere, will remain in that spot for the duration of the game. Eventually, juggling items becomes important, as you'll need a certain key or weapon to reach new areas. Items are usually found in caves, but many can be found lying on roads, buried underground, or guarded by a monster. Some side-quests are available, but they are minimal and usually yield a weapon inconsequential to completing the game. All in all, it's an inventory slog from start to finish, using item A on item B to get item C.

Figuring out what item A to use on what item B is where the game becomes deceptively difficult. Oftentimes, the player will stumble upon messages written on stones and scrolls across the land, few of which have any obvious answer. "Find my crown for a gift" might sound like you're supposed to give Cernos his crown, but it's never that obvious. He really wants a pair of antlers. "Linger by finger", "key is cold then net unfold", and "the backdoor key is me" are just some of the taxing hints that the game presents you. Suffice to say, many Spectrum magazines were filled with hints and tips to solve the game's difficult puzzles. Only true adventure gamers with superhuman lateral thinking skills will be able to quickly ascertain the solution, and only after familiarizing themselves with every item found throughout Tir Na Nog.

Difficult puzzles aside, the only thing stopping Cú Chulainn from frantically grabbing the pieces of the Seal of Calum are his would-be friends the Sidhe. An axe or sword will always be needed to combat these dark beasts. Battle is incredibly superficial, with the player simply hitting a button to strike. The player can also humorously attempt to attack enemies with any non-weapon item found in the game. This isn't advised, as hitting a Sidhe with a flower will only lead to problems. If the Sidhe ever touch Cú Chulainn once, all his inventory items are dropped in that spot and he re-spawns at the very beginning of the game. Since Chulainn's already dead, he's impossible to kill, but the anguish of having to retrieve crucial inventory items from far-off places is occasionally torturous. As the player can save at anytime, this rarely becomes a problem aside from the lengthy cassette load times.

While all of these options for movement, camera, and inventory may sound complex, the controls are relatively simple. The Spectrum's three bottom keyboard rows perform separate tasks. The bottom row moves, the middle row controls the camera, and the top row picks up and drops items. Any of the Spectrum's corner keys are used as an attack button. It's quite different from most games, but in many ways it's easier to manipulate than a shoddy text adventure parser or Police Quest 1.

Following the release of King's Quest by only a few months, Tir Na Nog is one of the earliest graphic adventure games. With a basic inventory-driven gameplay and a simple control scheme, Tir Na Nog is as purely graphical as the genre gets. There's no text parser, no environmental descriptions, just a brief story and exactly what you see on the screen. The imagery is stunning with stylish animation and great minimalist backgrounds, but it admittedly leaves many elements rather underdeveloped, specifically combat.

Still, the sheer size of the game world and sense of exploration it imparts is positively intoxicating. It's very different from a typical '90s LucasArts game, creating a tight-lipped, concealed world that refuses to give the player any easy answer. Mapping the area, experimenting with different items, and solving intricate riddles are enough to keep the best gamers busy for weeks.

Released in autumn 1984, Tir Na Nog sold very well on the Spectrum. One source claimed it quickly sold over 35,000 units. It was nominated Game of the Year in the Computer Trade Association Awards, and Roy Carter himself was nominated as Leisure Programmer of 1984. Reviews were uniformly stellar, and many magazines talked about Gargoyle as the next big thing. The game's success allowed them to leave their jobs and dedicate themselves full-time to game development.

The release dates for other ports are difficult to determine. Shortly after its initial release, development of a Commodore 64 version was outsourced to Design Software. Based on reviews, the game was probably released around May 1985. This version suffers from some incredibly washed out colors, making it look much worse than the ZX Spectrum version. While many sources claim the Amstrad version was released in 1984, it was probably ported by Gargoyle themselves and released in 1985. This version sports a fully colored Cú Chulainn and gets incredibly choppy when there are multiple animations onscreen. Some sources erroneously claim that the game received an MSX port, confusing it with SystemSoft's similarly titled strategy series Tir-Na-Nog.

A fan port for the Commodore Plus/4 was made in 1988 by Andras Szigand, a prolific figure in the demo scene at the time. This version is similar to the C64 version, but the background image is drawn erratically along the edges of the screen as it scrolls. It's rather distracting, but the game seems to be wholly intact otherwise.

As with any great 8-bit computer game, the Tir Na Nog cassette was constantly reissued over the years. Hewson Consultants's Rebound label seems to have existed solely to reissue the Gargoyle Games library. They quickly re-published the game in 1986. It was also featured in the compilations Now Games 2 and the Amstrad Action Pack. It eventually was featured as the cover tape of Sinclair User 118 and Your Sinclair 65.


http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gargoylegames/gargoyle.htm


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Description from the packaging:

Tir Na Nog is a Gaelic phrase meaning Land of Youth, the Celtic Other World. This game is about the exploits of the great hero, Cuchulainn, following his departure from the world of the Living and his entry into Tir Na Nog. His subsequent attempts to locate and re-unite the fragments of the Seal of Calum form the basis of a vast interactive adventure, set in the magical landscapes of Celtic mythology.




http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/tir-na-nog
