> The Arcade Signal

Azthengar, a name that lingers in the shadows of old, forgotten websites where games were once given freely to the world. Some were cracked, others were stored on floppy disks, passed quietly from one computer to another. Then, with the slow hand of time, they began to disappear. Sites that once lived on webrings or early game archives faded away, their URLs long since forgotten. I remember stumbling across a link years ago with a short blurb that read something like: a forgotten CRPG, programmed by a team of one. At the time, many people were learning programming through BASIC, and countless experiments were taking place across the entire realm of home computers.

Of course, I don’t know how many games from that era were created, or how many have been completely lost to the ages. This weekend has been a time for rest and enjoyment. I spent time with my family, my wife, the cat, and even worked a little on some other projects I have going. But while I’ve been out here enjoying the spring weather, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about it. This was the era of Ultima, and those early games in that series really captured my imagination.

When the series later shifted into more of a sci-fi direction, that’s when I checked out. Don’t get me wrong, I love early CRPGs, but this is one game that I feel a real bond with. There are only a handful of games in the world that truly stay with you, and this is one of them. In it, you play a nameless knight who must collect the five pieces of the Sun in order to rid the land of evil and save the kingdom from the wicked Serpent King. It feels like the kind of project that should have stood the test of time, yet somehow it never truly caught on, lost in a sea of corporate gaming on systems that, at the time, were far more appealing to the wider gaming audience.

I’ve heard the story of the lone programmer who wrote it on an old computer, hoping to make something great, only to disappear from the scene entirely. After doing a little digging, I discovered that they supposedly turned their back on their life and simply vanished. Where they went, no one really knows. My guess is that they suffered some sort of breakdown and chose to start over somewhere else, perhaps becoming a teacher, or maybe working quietly in a computer shop that has long since closed its doors. I can’t find a word about the game in print, or even in the Wayback Machine. But what excites me now is the possibility of bringing it back. The code was found on a set of five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks in an abandoned storage locker in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and had those disks sat there another year or two, the game might have been lost forever. This is a discovery that will take time to uncover and preserve, and as this journey begins, I want to thank all of you for coming along for the ride.