Gold Box - History

History

In 1985 TSR, after seeing the success of the Ultima series, offered its license to game developers. Ten companies, including Electronic Arts and Sierra Entertainment, applied for the license. SSI President Joel Billings acquired the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) license from TSR in a 1987 major deal due primarily to their computerised wargaming experience and their broader vision. The development of the Gold Box engine and the original games was managed by SSI's Chuck Kroegel and George MacDonald. Later versions were led by Victor Penman and Ken Humphries.

The first game produced in the series was Pool of Radiance, released in 1988. This was followed by Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990), and Pools of Darkness (1991), the games forming one continuous story rooted in the once-glorious city of Phlan and later encompassing the entire Moonsea Reaches and four outer planes. A series of TSR novels with identical titles paralleled the stories in the games, and also were best sellers. The original four titles were developed in-house at SSI, and were the best selling Gold Box games. Their success spurred an era of rapid growth at the company.

Earlier games in the series were playable on the Apple IIe, the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the IBM PC. Later games in the series were released only for the Macintosh, Amiga, and PC.

When SSI began work on the Dark Sun engine in 1990, development of the Savage Frontier series was passed to developer Stormfront Studios. Stormfront set their first Forgotten Realms Gold Box title, Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991), in Neverwinter, far from the locale of the prior games in Myth Drannor. Gateway became the fourth Gold Box game to go to the #1 position on industry sales charts.

All of the online RPGs of the 1980s were text-based MUDs, describing the action in the style of Rogue or Will Crowther's original Adventure game. Stormfront's Don Daglow had been designing games for AOL for several years, and the new alliance of SSI, TSR, America On-Line, and Stormfront led to the development of Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, which ran on AOL from 1991 to 1997. NWN was a multi-player implementation of the Gold Box engine, and was the most popular game on AOL for over five years. It paved the way for later hits such as Ultima Online (1997) and Everquest (1999).

Dark Sun was supposed to replace the aging Gold Box engine with its first game, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands in 1992. Unfortunately, the new engine was still shaky when Shattered Lands appeared in 1994. With the Gold Box engine's sales finally fading after an incredible six-year run, the losses SSI absorbed during those two years of delays played a critical role in the sale of SSI to Mindscape in 1994.

The memory of all these games is kept alive by Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, or FRUA for short, released in 1993, which was an editor that allowed players to create their own stories using a version of the Gold Box engine. An active community grew up around this game, including hacks that expanded its powers and its graphics abilities.

However, interest in the series eventually waned, although the mantle of this genre was later assumed by more recent role-playing games such as Baldur's Gate, and more recently, Neverwinter Nights.