Boris Bezdar reminisced about the first five games of Might and Magic.
More information.It all began in 1986, when Jon Van Caneghem released the Might & Magic Book One, after working on the game singlehandedly for almost three years. After the original release on Apple II, the game had achieved such a success, that ports on nearly a dozen different platforms followed shortly, IBM PC and PC Engine included. The Secret of the Inner Sanctum was even released on NES at the beginning of the '90s, manifesting and celebrating the undoubted popularity of the game.
Though Book One was not nearly the first RPG for home computers, with Ultima, Wizardry, and SSI's series of Gold Box games holding the vast majority of the market, it still managed to take a foothold for a franchise to come and sold nearly a hundred thousand copies by 1989.
Plotwise, the game didn't invent the wheel. From the start, there are hints to some rivalry between two mighty wizards, named Corak and Sheltem, the good one and the bad one respectively. The later story falls in line with many popular RPGs of that time, with mixing of sci-fi elements into the fantasy setting. So, Corak and Sheltem weren't actually wizards, but cyborgs, build by higher race of Elders to serve as wardens of the colonised worlds. Sheltem had gone rouge and went into hiding, and Corak had been sent to deal with him. It is upon the player and his party of six characters to travel the world of Varn (that actually is not a world per se, but a 'Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle'), find the main baddie, and follow him to another world. There are also lots of sidequests on the way to grind through.
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