Kyrandia

History

The largest and most detailed fantasy adventure ever to that point for The Major BBS, Kyrandia is styled after the "magic-users" of the popular role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons". Unlike the previous adventure game products from Moonshae Telecomm, Kyrandia was not based upon the system written by Tim Stryker for Fazuul. Scott Brinker and Richard Skurnick created a brand-new infrastructure to improve performance, add features, and, practically, avoid owing royalties to Galacticomm. Content-wise, Scott Brinker invented a completely new world, with very descriptive room text, more challenging quest plot lines, and even a few NPCs. Kyrandia was also the first adventure game to incorporate a separate editable "location file", allowing for greater map flexibility and customization by Sysops. Several BBSes had heavily customized Kyrandia games on their systems.

Kyrandia continued to be sold by Galacticomm after the acquisition of Galactic Innovations, and eventually replaced Quest for Magic in the Entertainment Edition of The Major BBS. The Entertainment Edition was sold to Metropolis along with a series of other entertainment and utility add-on products in February 1998.

Story

You will travel to the world of Kyrandia, a fairy tale land of magic and mystery, realm of the beautiful and powerful goddess of Kyrandia, Tashanna, the "Lady of Legends". Here, you begin as a young apprentice from a small village who seeks to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and power, with high hopes of being granted the title of "Arch-Mage of Legends" – the mightiest wizard of Kyrandia! To achieve your goal, you must cross the lands of Kyrandia, face unknown perils, solve mystical enigmas, battle rivalrous mages, and conqueror your own mind, body, and soul...

Time has stood still for too long on Kyrandia – now is the time for one mage to rise above and master the powers of sorcery and magic...

From the catalogs: "From the Gateway of Rainbows to the Mountain Kingdom of the Lady Kyra, the mystical land of Kyrandia will intrigue your users and keep them playing, and paying, for hours of almost unlimited fascination. Hundreds of artistically described "locations' create a breathtaking scenery, and with its romantic storyline, Kyrandia's text rivals the contemporary fantasy novels of today's bestseller list."

Gameplay

As with the other adventure games in the Moonshae Telecomm/Galacticomm lines, the game is a standard text parser like text adventure games and MUD games. Kyrandia had several new features for the time. Players have personalized spellbooks which they seek to fill with all the spells (68 total) in the realm. The spells, which range from fireballs and lightning bolts to teleportation and shape changing, have varying levels of power; some even require material components such as gems and flowers. Magic items range from scrolls (some helpful--some cursed) to special relics from the world's patron goddess to dragon-summoning staves of power! Creature "animation" has both good and bad wandering monsters including brownies, elves, dryads and a semi-intelligent, walking/flying dragon. There is also a village with interactive inhabitants and a gold-based system of currency. Village locations include a spell shop, a temple, the gem-cutter's hut (where players can trade gems for gold), and more. The multi-faceted battle system will keep players in exciting, mystical combat for hours – even after the game has been solved.

Galacticomm vs. Westwood Studios

Westwood Studios came out with a series of PC games entitled The Legend of Kyrandia in the mid 1990s. Unfortunately, the game appears to have been a near-complete copy of the then-Galacticomm owned title.

In a published interview, Rick Gush, the designer of the game for Westwood, answered a question about the idea behind the game this way: "I'm not sure. There was an online text game of that name that Mike Legg and Brett Sperry were playing. I think Brett then bought the rights to the game. The jerk he bought it from came back later after Westwood was successful and tried to make a stink, but the court case was decided against him after several years of nasty wrangling."

This was not the case. Galacticomm never sold the rights to the game to anyone. In fact, Kyrandia was a major component of the Entertainment Edition at this time, and was largely responsible for much of the sales of that product. More likely, there was a license granted that wasn't properly reviewed, or simply a normal Sysop license, and Westwood took advantage of it. Galacticomm sued, as it was inherently obvious that Westwood got the idea for the game from Scott Brinker and Richard Skurnick's original work and that they and Galacticomm were not being properly compensated when Westwood took advantage of the situation. Unfortunately, Tim Stryker dropped the suit because he decided it was costing the company too much money for the attorneys.

This is a sad example of being right in law does not always equate to getting justice, as the legal expenses often get in the way. This was also the very first sign of financial trouble with Galacticomm, though nobody knew it yet.

To this day Scott Brinker and Richard Skurnick have not been properly compensated by Westwood.