Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on the Intellivision held some mystic for me when I was a kid. First of all when I was little Dungeons and Dragons had a weird aura of danger and mystery surrounding it thanks to all the weirdos who thought it could lead you into Satanism.
The game too had it’s own uniqueness to it. You played a single hero and you tried to get items and kill stuff. I was so young that I didn’t understand if there was an actual ending or not, despite the fact the map having a final destination of the Cloudy Mountain… it just felt so big and epic, beyond the scope of my still forming brain. My cousin Kyle had an Intellivision and this game and we spent a lot of time on it. We never got that far into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons partly because of our age and mostly because the controllers for the Intellivision sucked so hard that most of the time we’d be forced to try to run away while struggling with the barely responding controllers.
The other thing that this game left me with was a misinterpretation of what the D&D universe is like. For awhile I thought it was a lone bow wielding hero fighting snakes and junk with an occasional dragon thrown in. Later I learned the truth thanks to Saturday morning cartoons, that D&D is really about a bunch of kids from Earth that get sucked into a fantasy universe and must try to find their way home.
Here’s a clip of the game if you’re curious:
The D&D and Tron games were the reason I wanted an Intellivision. Never got one but I was happy with my 2600.
I liked my cousin’s a lot, but the controls really made it hard to play a lot of the games.