In 1982, Veronica Megler and Philip Mitchell (with help from Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie) made adventure game The Hobbit, and it wowed players with its cast of interactive characters and its tens of illustrated screens. In 1983, Trevor Hall made Twin Kingdom Valley, which brought that up to nearly 200 screens, and added the visual trick of seeing places in the distance get bigger as you approached them. In 1984, Mike Singleton put that trick at the centre of The Lords of Midnight, and took things to a whole different scale. Depending on how you count it, it has either 3,904 screens, or 31,232. And that wasn’t even the best thing about it.

Mike Singleton was from Liverpool and, like Geoff Brown of U.S. Gold, was a teacher before his move into computer games. Specifically, he was an English teacher. He received a programmable calculator for his birthday one year, and got into programming enough to be ready to upgrade when offered the opportunity. That came through a friend who worked in a betting shop and could see the potential of some electronic assistance. They bought a Commodore PET together, and beyond calculating complex bets, Singleton soon made a virtual horse racing game. Having that in the shop turned out, at the end of a test prosecution, to be illegal under the UK gambling laws of the time, so he ended up with only a couple of sales in Ireland to show for it. Singleton didn’t stop making games there, though.

He made assorted titles for PET-focused Petsoft, and when a deal for Petsoft to make games for Sinclair’s new computers fell through, Singleton was able to pick it up on his own. He ended up spending one Christmas holiday writing games for the ZX81 Cassette 1 compilation of games, and earned royalties from it of £6,000 — “about the best rate of pay I’ve ever had or are ever likely to have”. He invested much of that into running a play-by-mail game called Star Lord, which gained hundreds of players including one from all the way in New Guinea, and made enough money to quit teaching.

Alongside running Star Lord, he continued making a variety of computer games. Among those was a simple arcade game he made with Sean Logan, called Shadowfax. It combined the horse animations he had worked on for the illegal betting shop game with a love for Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. Completely unlicenced, the game has you as Gandalf on his horse, riding out against the Nazgûl. Shadowfax made it to #65 in MRIB’s games chart in October 1983. Singleton’s big breakthrough was to be almost as obviously based on Tolkien, from the title on down.

  • Shadowfax (Postern, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Shadowfax (Postern, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

It was another friend that brought Singleton the opportunity that would become The Lords of Midnight. Terry Pratt had been editor of Computer & Video Games magazine but was now heading up Beyond software, another wing of publishers EMAP. In September 1983, Pratt and Singleton talked through game ideas. Singleton had recently seen The Hobbit in action and had been “appalled at the speed at which the graphics came up” and convinced he could do much better. He came up with a concept for something called “landscaping”, that would be able to construct a view in different directions based on your location and a map. Pratt liked the idea, and Singleton came up with The Lords of Midnight from that starting point.

The views of forests and mountains and frozen wastes in The Lords of Midnight indeed load much faster than those in The Hobbit or Twin Kingdom Valley. One price of this is that although dragons, wolves and the like appear in colour in front of you, the first-person view of the landscape is rendered in minimalist monochrome. That’s arguably preferable anyway, helped by the well-chosen colour scheme that was the basis for its ice-bound setting. A blue sky and blue features sit on top of a stark white world. The white is swapped for black as night falls, and it’s effective despite the sky not actually changing colour.

As well as stripping out colour, The Lords of Midnight takes out enough of the traditional contents of adventure games that it arguably isn’t one at all, instead focusing on the emergent elements that The Hobbit and Twin Kingdom Valley had added to the formula. The Lords of Midnight is a combination of minimalist adventure game, even more minimalist RPG, and very unusual strategy game. 

You control a group of characters who each separately wander the world, making allies and raising armies. There are a whole lot of Lords to recruit. Also, a dragon. They each get their own colourful shield to represent them when they’re under your control, and you prepare them for the big battle against Doomdark and his foul forces, navigating your strategy entirely from on-the-spot perspective. Meanwhile you can also try to get Morkin to find Doomdark’s Ice Crown and bring it to one of the places or characters capable of destroying it.

All of this is not done through either a text interface or, for the most part, menus, but instead a whole lot of different single keys for different things. At the time this meant an overlay to go on the Spectrum keyboard, and for me it meant playing in a window with a text file listing the commands next to it. You press buttons to move forward or to think, you can look in each of eight compass directions by pressing a number from 1-8, and you can choose from your potentially many, many heroes to control by pressing the key assigned to each. I found it surprisingly easy to get the hang of.

In addition to instructions on what to do, the game came with a map and a brief novella as an introduction to the story. I read a lot of ‘80s fantasy books as a child, and the Lords of Midnight novella isn’t the worst-written version of Tolkien fantasy I’ve seen. As the ‘Lord(s) of’ in the title suggests, though, it might be the most obviously indebted. It makes little effort to hide its mapping of Frodo and Gollum onto Morkin and Fawkrin. It’s not as blatantly Lord of the Rings as Shadowfax was, but it’s not far off.

I first tried out The Lords of Midnight before reading the introduction, and it showed off the more distinctive writing within the game rather well. Its world can seem quite bare, with long distances between anything of note, and minor fights giving such little feedback that they feel particularly inconsequential. What it does, though, is really make the most out of its concise text. In The Lords of Midnight each, often repeated, line is evocative and sometimes more.

Names of places have lots of invented fantasy names (“you start off with a few word endings and tack different syllables on the front until you come up with something that sounds good”) but also the occasional Plains of Blood. The night-time progression of Doomdark is conveyed through updates like “The bloody sword of battle brings death in the domain of Blood and of Marakith.” Battle outcomes have lines like “Farflame alone slew eighty-five of the Enemy”. Even when the text makes no sense, it makes no sense with a certain poetry. “Morkin: ice trolls slew him. He thinks again….”

Your characters’ status gets updated after each move, and it includes an update on how tired (or invigorated) they are, but also one that runs something like “The Ice Fear is slightly cold”. As a concept for an unstoppable dread enchantment over the land, the Ice Fear is a terrific choice of words. After you have completed each day and been updated on the night, the game asks a question. “Do you want dawn?”. As The CRPG Addict noted in a post on The Lords of Midnight a few years ago, this question is completely pointless in practical terms. And yet, after the threats of nighttime, it helps to give a little more sense of the relief of a new day. Given the quest is to overthrow someone called Doomdark, it feels like a regular recommittal to the whole epic purpose of your adventure, too.

On the game’s release, reviews tended to focus more on the visuals and epic heft than the writing, with the 32,000 screens mentioned in most. Crash called the graphics “little short of stunning”. Keith Campbell in EMAP’s Computer & Video Games, doing a rather better job of acknowledging the conflict of interest than ASP had with The Fall of Rome, said “I felt as if I was participating in one of those Charlton Heston films” before ending with “There Lord Emap, can I have that promotion now?”. Phil McDonald of Micro Adventurer wrote that “Atmosphere, that elusive ingredient sadly lacking in so many adventures and games, fairly oozes from Lords of Midnight.”

Away from the contemporary reviews, what I’ve been amazed by in researching this post is the number of more recent playthroughs and histories and analyses. There are not as many words on the internet about The Lords of Midnight as there are for The Hobbit or Manic Miner, but relative to the number of people who played it at the time it might outdo them both. Something in its scale, the space it left for the imagination, and the way it shaped that space with carefully chosen words, left a deep impression on a lot of players. 

Mike Singleton wrote an even more technically impressive sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, within the same year. A third game called The Eye of the Moon ended up unfinished and unreleased, but was somewhat incorporated into a different game I will eventually cover. Singleton returned regularly to revisions and updates and all things Lords of Midnight right up to his death in 2012. A writer called Drew Wagar has since released two novels based on The Lords of the Midnight and its sequel. Even right now, some 41 years on from the game’s original release, there is a Kickstarter campaign underway for a tabletop game called Morkin, based on the game and its story. The campaign has been funded well past its goal.

  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 21 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 01 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 08 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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