Game: Below The Root
Developers: Dale Disharoon, Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Publisher: Spinnaker Software/Windham Classics
Publication Date: 1984
Platforms: Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC
Genre: Adventure
Hours Played: 0
Referring Blog: The Adventurer’s Guild Posts: 1, 2, 3, Won!, Rating
One of the great pleasures of the early years in gaming was window shopping.
You’d go to a store and look at all the cool boxes on the shelves, because – back then – it was difficult to find information about games, so sometimes, you just bought a game sight unseen, because of the artwork that upfronted the package, or because of the screenshots on the back of the game.
You wouldn’t even necessarily be going to a computer game store, because those didn’t exist, yet.
My very first memory of actually buying a game, in fact, is from 1988 when I walked into – what was then – a furniture store. They had a little section where you could browse boxes and I very often did [but that’s a story for another time, because we’re not playing that game.]
So the act of buying a game was pretty visceral.
Of course, once you got that box back home, you’d be in for another treat, because games in the 1980’s lived on a sliding scale of opulence.
On the one hand, you had Infocom, king of the “feelie,” a term that came to be synonymous with the little bits that the game maker thought to put inside the box to draw you into their world, because very often, those worlds were rendered in primitive bitmaps or “crude” text. No fancypants realistic graphics for us.
On the other, well, you had basically every other game company who thought just far enough to put a disk in the box and some instructions for playing the game, as well as, perhaps, a short set of instructions for running it. [and if it was a casette, you’d literally JUST get the little fold out with instructions that was big enough to fit inside that case.]
Below the Root lay somewhere in the middle.
On the one hand, you have the pretty opulent Commodore 64 box with it’s fold out that told you a little bit about the game and the world.
Seriously, check this out:
![The INCREDIBLY opulent [for the time] fold-out cover of Below The Root for the Commodore 64. Here we have an outer flap which leads to an inner gate-fold that has game images and descriptive text telling you a little about the game.](https://lostwolfeslair.com/TIP/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/02_02_btr_c64_foldout_cover.jpg)
I love how evocative this box art is – right from the old-timey feel of the box itself to the actual picture depicting a little bit of Green-Sky. It’s incredibly evocative and a MUCH more interesting image than the so-prevalent SEMI-SHAVEN MAN-DUDE WITH GUN.
There’s hints of what we might see and learn, here: the world is divided into two planes – an above and a below. The above is pretty colourful, hinting at a sort of false utopia, perhaps, while the below is dark and pretty dingy.
And the flying person is neat. It suggests the game’s likely primary mode of travel.
There’s so much good, here.
I’m not sure why we don’t do this anymore.
[Well, I know, and much of it has to do with focus testing, anyhow, onward!]
On the other…well…they didn’t want to make SPECIFIC instructions for each port of the game, so they just bundled them all into a game manual that told you what to do regardless of which version you were playing.
Along with that, you got a map – it’s difficult to tell just from looking at it, if the map is complete. There seem to be squares surrounding what’s drawn here that suggest I might need to add more. That’s daunting. I’m not a terribly good artist.
And, of course, you got the disk.
Up next! I decide which version of the game to play and we have a closer look at the manual.
Image Attributions:
Wishbringer feelies via The Infocom Gallery
Thexder Box and items via Pix’s Origin Adventures
Below the Root map and box via Mobygames