Remember in the early Eighties when developers invented fantastic names for the technical advances that set their games apart? We had Sandy White’s Softsolid 3D, Ultimate’s Filmation and Melbourne House even coined the term ‘4D graphics’ around 25 years before Sony had the same silly idea. And then there was Mike Singleton’s The Lords Of Midnight, which was billed as “the world’s first Epic game”. Elsewhere, publisher Beyond described it as a “living fantasy novel”.
When the game was released for the ZX Spectrum in summer 1984, players quickly discovered that this was no case of hyperbole – was indeed epic. It featured a huge game map consisting of 3,904 locations, and at each location the player could turn in eight directions, resulting in
