So what kind of game did I want to make? I had two basic ideas: the first was something that came out of my brainstorm sessions with Ken and Jim: the idea of using fairy tales, rather than High Fantasy (such as Tolkien) or Swords and Sorcery (like Conan) as the informing genre of the game.

This meant that fairy tale tropes such as talking animals and rustic characters would be a significant part of the game. It also meant that the character attributes would be “spiritual”: rather than having strength, intelligence, dexterity, and other Dungeons & Dragons-style attributes, the main attributes would be “bravery”, “luck” and “kindness”.

To go along with the fairy tale theme there would be a narration track — a region below the main play field which showed a parchment scroll depicting the player’s deeds and challenges. “Julian was getting hungry!”.

The second idea was that the game world would be huge, open, and contiguous — instead of loading each map in chunks whenever you crossed a map boundary (like Ultima), I would load pieces of the map in the background as you walked. Thus, the game would never have to pause while waiting for the terrain to be loaded from disk.

However, I knew that I would not be able to draw a world that huge. So I came up with the idea of ‘meta-tiles’ or ‘super-tiles’. You see, most games in that era used ‘tiled’ artwork — that is, the background consists of square, 2-dimensional bitmaps which could be re-used many times within a single scene. I hit on the idea of creating ‘super-tiles’ which were made up of smaller tiles. Each tile was 16 x 32 pixels, and each super-tile was 16 x 8 tiles, for a total of 256 x 256 pixels. This allowed me to create vast amounts of terrain with only modest amounts of memory — the final overland map was roughly 100 screens wide and 150 screens tall.

Unfortunately, as many people have noted over the years, the problem with this approach is that the terrain is very repetitive. I was aware of this at the time, and I sought to overcome this by creating variety — special tiles representing towns or dungeons, different regions with different terrain types (swamps, deserts, forests and so on). However, there is only so much variety that a single person can create, especially when you consider that the entire project took only 7 months.

You might also notice from the screenshot that everything is tilted. I had taken a drafting class in high school, and learned about “oblique perspective”, which was a way to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane. I wanted to avoid the situation seen in early games like Zelda or Gauntlet where everything was rectangular and blocky, but in hindsight my solution was not very successful. Later, I would come up with the idea of isometric, diamond-shaped tiles (another influence from my drafting class), but a lot of other game developers also came up with the idea at around the same time.

Loading the data in the background was a challenge, and I could not figure how how to get the Amiga filesystem layer (AmigaDOS) to load data without pausing the program. So instead, I cheated: instead of writing out the terrain as files on disk, I wrote them directly to the floppy tracks as raw data blocks. I could then use the low-level floppy device driver to load the data in the background while the game was running.

This meant that when you put the Faery Tale disk into the computer and listed the files on it, all you would see was a few files needed to ‘bootstrap’ the game — most of the game content was hidden from view.

During this period I also created some additional development tools. I already had Musica which I had created for Discovery. To this was added Anima (my character animation editor) and Tiled (the tile/map editor). These were essentially specialized bit-mapped paint programs, with a full suite of drawing tools (lines, dots, circles, rectangles, flood-fill) plus special key commands to flip between animation frames or place tiles and super-tiles on the map.

One other decision I had to make was: what to call it? A lot of my friends were into fantasy artwork depicting fairies such as the work of Brian Froud. And I knew that the word “fairy” has many archaic spellings: fairy, faerie, faery, and so on. I basically picked one at random. If I were to make the choice today, I probably would pick “faerie”.

Another thing I wanted for Faery Tale Adventure was that the box would contain not only fantasy artwork, but an actual photo shoot of people in costume. I wanted to give the player the sense that not only could this game transport them into another world — but that somewhere in the real world, there were people living lifestyles that were as exciting as their dreams.

For this purpose I hired my friend (and notable science fiction writer) William Rotsler to do the shoot. We got Terry Karney, a friend of Greg’s from Renaissance Faire, to play Kevin — he dyed his normally sandy hair red for the shoot. For the location, we spent an afternoon driving around upper Beverly Hills looking at all the ridiculously pretentious homes, until we found one place that was a pastiche of about 5 different medieval castle architectural styles. We knocked on their door and asked them if we could take pictures on their property, and they said we could — but we had to be “careful of the emus”.

I used the Dream Knight costume in the shoot, and then added a version of the same character into the game, mainly as a justification for having him in the photos.

The cover art for the box (depicting a dragon) was done by my friend Ed Kline, who also was a science-fiction prop maker whose ray-guns and other works have appeared on numerous movies and television shows. Ed also did work for other MicroIllusions games, and helped me out on some later projects. I should also say that of all the artists and creative people I have met in my life, Ed is the most “alien” — and he would consider that a compliment.

Greg Hemsath and Bonnie Reid worked on the paper map for the game.

As I was putting the last touches on Faery Tale Adventure, Jim was busy expanding MicroIllusions at break-neck pace. This was a growth period in the games industry, where just about any fool could, with a little bit of luck, create a successful game company.

(For those of you who have watched the series Halt and Catch Fire, it was very much like that. Each of the four seasons of the show depicts a different era of the personal computer industry, and I recognize each of them from my own personal experience. I was there — not a central figure by any means, but I lived on that bleeding edge.)

Jim was finding all kinds of talent — people like Reichart Von Wolfsheild (the creator of Firepower) and Robert McNally (Ebonstar and many more), to name just a few. At the same time, however, his penchant for “clever tricks” was alienating the very talent he was trying to attract. The relationship between Reichart and Jim ended very badly — I was called in to give a deposition in the resulting lawsuit several years later.

Jim launched over a dozen development projects, many of which deserve a Medium post of their own. Many of them, like Romantic Encounters at the Dome or Star Travel, I can barely remember.

He hired my old friend Joe Pearce who I had met playing Champions when I lived in San Diego. Jim had wanted Joe to create a dungeon-crawling epic named Land of Legends. Unfortunately despite the fact that Joe was a very disciplined and talented coder, Jim’s vision was simply too grandiose for anyone to accomplish, and the project was cancelled several years later.

Jim moved MicroIllusions down the street to the upper floor of a two-story office building in Granada Hills (the bottom floor was a real-estate company). As part of the rental deal, he gained access to a 3-bedroom residential home next door, so I moved in there, along with Allison Hershey (my girlfriend at the time), Greg Hemsath and his wife Bonnie. All four of us were doing part-time contact work for MicroIllusions — Greg worked out one of the garages doing disk copying, packaging and shrink-wrapping.

All four of us were active science fiction fans, attending all of the local conventions, and both Allison and I had exhibited our works at convention art shows. I was also a relatively minor celebrity as a result of the costumes I had created, and was often invited to be on panels at conventions. As a result, we knew many talented science fiction and fantasy artists who were curious about doing artwork on a computer.

Thus was born the idea of “Amiga art parties”: We would borrow a half a dozen Amiga computers from the MicroIllusions office and set them up on folding tables at our house and hold a big potluck for all our artist friends. We would tutor anyone who wanted to sit down in front of a machine, and we also had computer animation veterans such as Brad Schenk showing off their latest work.

Quite a few of these artists went on to work on game projects for MicroIllusions, and some of them had long and successful careers in the computer game industry (although some never made the transition from 2D to 3D asset creation).

In the mean time, in the first year after publication of Faery Tale Adventure, I made $50k in royalties — which may not seem like a lot today, but was more money than I had ever made in my life. I was ready to plunge into my next project — Music-X.

(Read the story of Music-X here.)

The apex of MicroIllusions came several years later, which was the Hanna-Barbera deal — a licensing agreement allowing them to develop computer games based on The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo and Johnny Quest. Most of these projects never got very far — The Flintstones demo was so painfully slow that Ken Jordan remarked “Videogame or slideshow? You decide!” Robert McNally and his brother Michael (who is now a director at Facebook) did a wonderful adaptation of The Jetsons, but Hanna-Barbera cancelled the licensing deal before it had time to generate much revenue. I don’t know exactly what happened, but lots of lawyers were involved.

Years later I learned that just about every single royalty statement that I got from MicroIllusions contained arithmetic errors — a few of which were in my favor.

The last time I saw Jim, he was working in his father’s wrecking yard, and the assets of MicroIllusions had been sold off to another party.

One final note: I’ve mentioned the names of many people in this article, and I want to stress how pivotal each of these people were — I’ve left out many parts of the story for the sake of brevity, but everyone I’ve named deserves “legendary” status.

Part two of this history covers the sequel, Faery Tale 2: The Halls of the Dead.

Part three tries to answer the question of whether there will be any more Faery Tale sequels.

See also