If the title of this post alone doesn’t mean much to you, then gather ’round the campfire children and settle in for some story time. King of Dragon Pass is an incredibly unique role-playing game developed by A Sharp and originally released on desktop way back in 1999. I say it’s unique because, as our own Eli Hodapp described it in his review of the iOS version back in 2011, King of Dragon Pass is “a largely text-based menu-driven mash up of a Civilization game and a Choose Your Own Adventure book." There are no flashy graphics here, unless you consider static illustrations flashy, and playing the game will involve more reading than most games we’re used to. This is a special beast, friends, but one that will reward you with its depth should you decide to delve deep into its mechanics. As mentioned it made its way to iOS back in September of 2011, and beyond our review you can also get loads of information about King of Dragon Pass from Shaun’s excellent RPG Reload on the game.

So a fairly obscure PC game finds new life and a new audience more than a decade later on mobile platforms, and in fact for being such a niche type of game King of Dragon Pass did really well on mobile selling more than 30,000 copies in the year and a half following its mobile release. Not too shabby for a game that sells for ten bucks. In the fall of 2014, A Sharp announced that they were working on a spiritual successor to King of Dragon Pass called Six Ages. Given the tremendous depth of the first game, it’s no surprise that Six Ages would take a long time to complete, and it wasn’t until nearly three years after that announcement that A Sharp revealed Six Ages to be feature complete. Now almost a year after that last milestone, the legend that is Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is finally finished and will come to pass (HEH) on iOS June 28th. Here’s a trailer.

The game will once again take place in Glorantha, the fictional fantasy universe created by Greg Stafford way back in the 1960s that has been used as the setting for numerous games over the decades including King of Dragon Pass. However, Six Ages takes place 2000 years prior to the era of King of Dragon Pass and explores a different part of Glorantha that is roughly four times as big as the area in KoDP. Additional features will include: “Short story elements, automatic saving, and built in note taking make it perfect for brief play sessions; Procedural content and over 400 interactive scenes allow for dynamic and repeated playthroughs; Over 468 000 words of text; Multiple difficulty levels, and the option for Iron Willed players to limit restores; Gorgeous hand-painted high-resolution artwork; and fully accessible to blind players via VoiceOver [iOS only]." Most of the original development team from King of Dragon Pass have returned to create Six Ages and create a game with the same essence but built from the ground up with touchscreens and modern hardware in mind. Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind will launch on iOS June 28th for $9.99 and will be up for pre-order on June 21st, and it’ll be heading to additional platforms sometime in 2019.