Nowadays, the phrase “Russian game” increasingly evokes a feeling of fear, not pride: too many unsuccessful projects have fallen on gamers over the years. However, do not forget about the rare but high-profile successes of the domestic game industry. Earlier we talked about “Space Rangers”, this time it’s the turn of another series – King’s Bounty.
->
->
When the grass was greener
Character selection screen
King’s Bounty was originally created by American John Van Kanegem, the author of Might and Magic. The game was released in 1990 and spawned a whole subgenre of turn-based strategies, with which another series of the same Kanegem, Heroes of Might and Magic, would later be much more strongly associated.
The story of the original King’s Bounty is extremely simple: King Maximus, a wise and kind ruler, for many years maintained peace and order in a vast country stretching over four continents. In this matter, he was assisted by the Scepter of Order – a special artifact that was recently stolen by evil forces. The loss of the scepter weakened Maximus, and the kingdom quickly began to decline. The player takes on the role of one of the four heroes (knight, barbarian, paladin or sorceress) and goes in search of an artifact. Time is limited: the king is dying, and you need to manage to cope before the death of the monarch.
It takes 200 days to explore the world and find eight scraps of a map that hides the location of the artifact. How exactly to spend them is up to the player himself: you can focus on finding what you need, ignoring everything else, or you can try to capture all the castles on the map. In any case, the player will have to carefully think over the management of the army: just to fill all the slots to the limit is hampered by the leadership parameter, and besides, the units require a salary for maintenance. By the way, the hero does not have his own castle, and the hiring of creatures takes place strictly in external dwellings, scattered across all four continents.
In addition to studying the map, the game offers to take part in tactical battles. Everything is familiar: on a separate field, divided into cells, “stacks” of units are fighting. Given the strengths and weaknesses of their own and enemy creatures, the player must cope with the battle with the least losses, solving such a tactical puzzle.
Kanegem never returned to King’s Bounty, later creating “Heroes” on its basis (you can get acquainted with the history of the franchise in other material). But the ideas were picked up by developers in the post-Soviet space, and back in the 1990s.
Kingdoms among birches
Loading screen of a domestic unofficial sequel
The first King’s Bounty II, excuse the pun, was created in 1992 by the Kharkov programmer Sergei Prokofiev. For the game, he invented his own world, consisting of five continents, but the basis remained the same. Of course, there were also changes: trade in goods appeared in the strategy, as well as the ability to chop wood and chop rocks. The plot, alas, was not completed: Prokofiev conceived a dilogy, but the developments did not go beyond ideas. But in 2005, as part of the Ukrainian company “Class A”, he released the game “Heroes of Malgrimia”, which develops the ideas of King’s Bounty II.
Screenshots from ZX Spectrum, so the resolution is appropriate. King’s Bounty in the version of Yarosh and Zelenkevich
A year later, King’s Bounty for the ZX Spectrum was released, created by Russian programmers Ruslan Yarosh and Dmitry Zelenkevich. The title was essentially a reimagining of the original for more primitive devices. In 1996, for the same Spectrum, King’s Bounty 2 was released – a port of Prokofiev’s version. And in 2001, a demo version of King’s Bounty 3 appeared – oddly enough, again for the ZX Spectrum. It featured the most complex gameplay in the series, and players admired the title’s graphics and soundtrack.
Today it’s hard to evaluate the creations of post-Soviet programmers, but we should give them their due: the development of King’s Bounty’s own versions has greatly influenced the game industry in the CIS countries, as various game designers often report.
New times
Look
