Legend of the Red Dragon

Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) is a text-based, online role-playing video game released in 1989 by Robinson Technologies. LORD is one of the best known door games. The player's goal is to improve their skills in order to defeat the Red Dragon which has been attacking the village. The software runs on MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2. The game was sold to and is currently owned by Metropolis Gameport.

History

LORD was created by Seth Robinson of Robinson Technologies and is currently maintained by Michael Preslar. Robinson began to write LORD in Pascal to run on his bulletin board system. As he did not have access to other door games such as Trade Wars, he needed something that would occasionally bring people back to the BBS. The first version of LORD only featured the chatting and flirting systems. Over time, Robinson incorporated features that he had seen work well in other games: for example, the restricted number of turns per day, and the concept of random events. Eventually LORD became a mixture of action and romance. According to Preslar, further updates to the LORD software were planned, including a web application and versions for ELF-compatible Linux and Unix systems (completed but available only to beta testers), but his latest statement on the matter, in 2013, is that he no longer has a system that allows him to work on the game. and others have presented bugs or loopholes to be exploited by players. The current maintainer of the LORD software has introduced a scripting language called Lady in order to allow smoother development of game extensions.

Wizardstone

Wizardstone was planned to be a major IGM; the author was so enthusiastic about it that he convinced Robinson to advertise it by mentioning its two main characters in a forest event within the game itself. The IGM had a number of features that Robinson was impressed with, most notably its blackjack game.

Though the IGM Wizardstone was never released it is nonetheless important to the history of the game, being the only IGM mentioned in the game itself, the inspiration for the "Olivia" forest event character, and the source of the Blackjack event.

The IGM was supposed to contain an ending to Olivia's story, as stated in the game. There was once talk of adding an ending to Olivia's story to the game, but nothing ever came of it.

Reception

The game sold only seven copies in its debut year, but word of mouth drove sales to 30,000 units over the next seven years of release.

In Gamasutra's essay on the history of computer role-playing video games, LORD was considered to be a highly playable and memorable game, with colorful text and humor.