Lords of Midnight

Mike Singleton’s Lords of Midnight holds a unique accolade and presence in my heart: the only game I wanted to play so much I spent an entire week doing nothing but making it work.

Now, this is nothing to do with dodgy Spectrum tapes (while anyone who encountered the ridiculous fastloader on Doomdark’s Revenge will certainly have spent a few hours yanking the plug out the back and starting again after the picture came up flashing purple, Midnight had a perfectly reasonable loader on it).

Mike Singleton. Relax, girls, he’s fifty-odd now.

This story begins in 1988. I was the tender age of 17, and I was cleaning out some boxes of crap at home and found a few old Spectrum games I’d forgotten to give to my cousins when I gave the thing away a few years previously. One of these was Lords of Midnight, and re-reading the back of the box, my mind drifted off to the happy days of five years previously, marching vast armies across the plains of Kor to administer a good kicking to the Witchking.

But – no Speccy. Bugger.

I came home from college on Friday and played with the tape. I fed bits of it into my ST, via a sampler box on the back, and noticed how clear the tones looked. Then I paused, and had a rummage in my antique paperwork pile. I managed to find a hand-disassembly of the Spectrum loading routines I’d done some years ago… and contemplated this for about ten seconds. Then I got my assembler out.

An hour or two later I had the loading screen up on the ST, and a large image file of the main game for Midnight. By the end of Sunday night, I had an inch-thick print-out of the entire code for Midnight.

”Greetings, Thornak. I trust your journey was agreeable”.
”Indeed, Vrantax. I rode at dusk, and… AAAAAAGH A dragon! Get it!”.

Monday at college. I wasn’t paying much attention to the lectures. Instead, I was working through hundreds of pages of Z80 machine code, annotating it, drawing lines, blocking out code. Same all night at home. By the end of college on Tuesday, I was heavily backed up on homework but in possession of a reasonable understanding of where the landscape drawing code was and how it worked, and that evening I had castles and mountains appearing on the screen of my ST.

The next few days passed in a bit of a blur. Lessons were lost to print-outs, printouts were obsessively studied at home, 68000 assembly replaced Z80 in my head and on the ST. For the bits that I couldn’t understand, I developed a ‘straight through’ cross-assembly technique that should have produced the right results even if I didn’t know what it was doing. Sleep largely went out of the window – I would try, but my brain wouldn’t stop thinking long enough to sleep properly.

By the end of Friday night I had Samsonite eyes (large bags) and a complete game apart from the big impenetrable block that was the battle computer, the enemy AI. I could run around, fight battles (against other stationary units) but there was no response from Doomdark. No choice but to just lay the whole thing down in one days’s heavy drudge and hope that it worked.

And so from Sunday?

I just played. And played. And plaaaaayed. Glorious Midnightery. Of course, it wasn’t quite right. The AI had got screwed up a bit in transit I think, it never quite felt the same as the original. But it was close enough.

College the next week wasn’t much fun. I was too busy waiting to run home and play Midnight again. I still wasn’t sleeping well – now because I had white-and-blue mountains and forests floating in front of my eyes when I closed them. And I hadn’t done any homework.

A lecture, yesterday. That you should have been at. Just get the handouts.

After I’d beaten it by battle, and by quest, I made a few changes so you got all the characters at the start, and stuffed Doomdark royally almost before he even got out of bed on the Solstice. There was no rape and pillage in Corelay that day, by God. I let Farflame the Dragonlord recruit dragons (that was a bit unbalancing, it was like nuking an enemy army) and even changed Lorgrim the Wise so he wasn’t shite. Crikey, if you had to walk that bloody far to get him he should at least be useful.

I enjoyed it so much that at Easter I did the same for the sequel – Doomdark’s Revenge. It only took four days with college not in the way, and the battle computer came out pretty good – it seemed to play much the same as the Spectrum version. Many more hours of play ensued, although DR was so much less ‘real’ than Midnight, I lost interest before I really mashed the computer badly. Which was exactly the same feeling I’d had when I first played the Spectrum version.

I carried on my amazing conversion attempts – but had no success with Avalon and Quazatron. They were too impenetrable.

Quazatron. “U8… R… US… Ah, fuck it. Where’s Pheenix?”

Two years later, I started work on a multiplayer Midnight – but after several days of cleaning up code I tried to play it and found I’d irretrievably broken the battle computer and I didn’t know where or why. It was pretty much the end of The Midnight Experiments.

That’s not the end of my Midnighting, though. Last year’s two-weeks-in-the-sun holiday was immeasurably enhanced by a PDA, a Spectrum emulator and my first ever success at stopping Doomdark on the Plains Of Blood without the start-with-all-characters hack. For an encore, I Revenged myself upon Doomdark with a total victory, recruiting 80 of 127 characters, and only hid Luxor down a tunnel for a few turns in the big battle at the end. Finally, I managed to really enjoy the game and play it through properly.

DIO, June 2004.

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