''Spellbinder'' is an adventure game, released for the

BBC Micro The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphas ...

and

Acorn Electron The Acorn Electron (nicknamed the Elk inside Acorn and beyond) was a lower-cost alternative to the BBC Micro educational/ home computer, also developed by Acorn Computers Ltd, to provide many of the features of that more expensive machine at a ...

in 1987.

Plot

The player takes the role of a Magelord, named Eldon the Spellbinder. His task is to find the evil Magelord outcast Zorn, in the castle of Lorraine, and defeat him by use of the so-called Ultimate Spell.

Gameplay

The game is pseudo-3D, allowing the player to move left, right, forwards and backwards in a room, though not up and down. It was presented in a

monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochrom ...

format, with black and one other colour being used to draw the sprites and backdrops, although the colour varied from room to room, illustrating the environments. A large number of items could be examined for clues, or searched for possible items. The game was relatively open-ended for a game of the time, similar to ''

Exile Exile is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons and peoples suf ...

'', allowing the player to move around a large section of the castle right from the start, and start to mix various spells. A few of these spells were listed in the manual, but most had to be discovered from in-game clues. Unusually, for a BBC Micro game, it has continuous background music: a version of ''Midnight Summer Dream'', the 1983 song from British rock group

The Stranglers The Stranglers are an English rock band who emerged via the punk rock scene. Scoring 23 UK top 40 singles and 19 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning five decades, the Stranglers are one of the longest-surviving bands to have origina ...

' album '' Feline''.

Development

The game was written by Dan and Etan Shirron, two teenagers from Israel. They were 14½ and 16 when they started coding the game in 1986. The equipment used to write it was a memory monitor chip, a monochrome 14" TV, a cassette tape recorder and their own BASIC-written graphic-design software. The game was originally named ''Magelords'', later to be named ''Spellbinder'' by Superior Software marketing team.

References

External links

''Spellbinder'' review
- ''Electron User'', January 1988 {{Superior Software 1987 video games Acornsoft games Adventure games BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games BBC Micro and Acorn Electron-only games Europe-exclusive video games Role-playing video games Single-player video games Superior Software games Video games about witchcraft Video games developed in the United Kingdom Video games set in castles