Intellivision's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain evoked the do-it-yourself, low-fi spirit of a franchise

An ancient quest, one that bards will sing about in every tavern this side of Cloudy Mountain. A heroic ranger, traversing mountain passes, crossing fjord rivers, and hacking her way through cursed forests, protected only by her wits and the taut string of her trusty bow. Her arrows, enchanted by the Witch Queen, bounce off cavern walls, fit to kill all manner of intriguing rats, bats, snakes, and spiders. She pursues them through the labyrinths encountered on her journey, using dung and skulls alike to impede their advance, and that of the tunnels' fiends and ferocious dragons, whose attacks land close enough to rake the fibers of her cloak, but never quite knock her off her feet.

And so she hunts, careful to avoid the pink spots said to be indestructible even by the magical weapons of the brave adventurers who set out for Cloudy Mountain, never to return. By hook or by crook, she gets there and faces the legendary winged dragons that guard the two lost halves of the Crown of Kings. The crown’s fragments bear the midnight seal of the ancients. Three arrows carved and fired straight through the creatures’ hearts are the only way to strike them down. The ranger retrieves one fragment, then the other. A jumbled, computerized explosion of sound greets her in triumph. You return to the map screen, relinquishing control. You’ve done something I’ve never done. You’ve beaten Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on the Intellivision.

It was once the most technologically advanced piece of Dungeons & Dragons known to mankind. Its mountainous labyrinths, composed entirely of green and yellow pixels, held wonders and horrors for those brave enough to brave their depths. Its enemies ranged in difficulty, from one-shot KO rats, to two-shot minibosses, to winged dragons in the fabled Cloudy Mountain that required three arrows to defeat. The game's sound design was enthralling, the back of the box quick to reassure players, and rightly so, that “exciting sound effects highlight the game.” You were alerted to nearby monsters in the labyrinth by the sound of their wings or the slither of their bodies through the mud before you even saw them. To find them, you had to uncover the rest of a tunnel by walking through it, and by then it might be too late.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons starts you with just three lives and three arrows. Many enemies are faster than your character, and if they touch you, you lose a life. Once you run out of arrows, which you aim by pressing a number on the Intellivision’s control pad, you have to find more in the tunnels or you’re a sitting duck. It feels much more like a survival-horror prototype than any RPG-style D&D experience we’d recognize today. That said, it showcased the Intellivision’s greatest strength as a console that captivated an entire generation of early home gamers: its ability to spark players’ imaginations despite its technological limitations.

My grandparents bought my dad his first Intellivision after a rare visit to New York City in 1981. He was a high school sophomore. A misfit at his private school in Norfolk, Virginia, who loved old Marx Brothers movies and computers. They all went to a department store, and once they found the small room devoted to Mattel's latest electronic marvel, complete with technicolor ads and spotlights shining on the machine in all its futuristic glory, that was pretty much it. He soon took one home. His fascination with the strange wood-paneled box, which by today's standards looks more like an antique telephone than a gaming device, grew with each cartridge he popped into the Intellivision's card reader. He was more into sports games, especially hockey, which involved opposing colored blobs rowing the pixelated puck from side to side amid crashes of strange sounds. But it also recalls the disorienting mazes of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, released in 1982, two years after the launch of the Intellivision and in the midst of the corresponding tabletop role-playing game's first steps into mainstream entertainment.

The original Dungeons & Dragons was a small three-book set published in 1974 and written by the father of D&D, Gary Gygax, and his collaborator at the time, Dave Arneson. It was published by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR) as what was essentially a supplemental style of game for players already familiar with wargaming. Despite its humble beginnings, the game outgrew its original target audience, gaining a cult following among a younger audience of mostly high school and college kids. Later in the 1970s, in an effort to be more inclusive to casual gamers while also encouraging growth in the game's more complex mechanics, TSR published two separate sets of rules: the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This split would continue until Wizards of the Coast purchased the declining franchise in 1997 and released D&D 3rd Edition three years later, unifying the disparate rulesets after their two decades of separation.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for the Intellivision arrived on the scene just as the D&D craze began to sweep across America in the 1980s. Concerned mothers stayed up late talking in hushed tones about how they feared their children were engaged in demon worship, having glimpsed pentagrams and oddly shaped dice strewn across their desks, ruining the domestic order of their ceramic-topped kitchen counters. Creative youngsters were fascinated by the worlds of great adventure locked inside their heads, and that fascination has proven to grow with them to this day.

After major surgery in college, my uncle gifted me an Intellivision. Of the cartridges he included in my care package, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons quickly became one of my favorites. It helped reconnect with my dad and rekindled my interest in video games old and new. And it eventually got me into Baldur’s Gate 3, which I’ve now completed nearly twice in nearly 150 hours of play. I’ve been both DM and player for many evening sessions of the board game that inspired us both, and while BG3’s mechanics are, of course, much closer to the modern tabletop ruleset, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons better captures the spirit of the franchise’s meteoric rise. The game ethos that inspired so many of us to fly our nerd flags, woo Astarion and discover those mysterious tattoos, even spend hours writing a fantastical story, complete with monster stat blocks and skill checks, that only a few of our friends will ever know exists.

Because D&D began as a do-it-yourself dream. A low-fi concept fed to the human mind as fuel for hungry imaginations. A dangerous adventure in a box. And as I sit next to my girlfriend and my dad, trying for the hundredth time to get to Cloudy Mountain, trying to outrun demons and dragons only to shoot an arrow wide and meet my bloody end, I can't think of anything that will ever make me feel closer to the game's interwoven stories that helped make me who I am today.

Now, of course, Dungeons & Dragons has experienced a renaissance unlike any other modern media franchise. After an era of relative disinterest in the late 1990s and early 2010s, it has since spawned everything from actual gaming podcasts to feature films. A revised fifth edition tabletop ruleset is coming out this fall, while last year was dominated by Larian’s wildly successful roleplaying game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’s more curious video game grandchild. I use the word curious here because, on the surface, nothing connects BG3 and its progenitor other than bows and arrows, rats, and the name D&D.

In fact, remove the name and you have two distinct experiences that have no relation whatsoever. One is the finest RPG ever made, with branching stories, steamy romances, and turn-based battles in free space, complete with a nuanced physics system. The pinnacle of customization, immersion, and graphical nuance. The other is a blip-blooping slog through identical environments, its difficulty due as much to its technological limitations as to the intent of its designers. But play both and you’ll walk away feeling immersed in the same form of grand adventure: one that you’ve uniquely created.