Drakensang – Official Dev Diary #2

16. 02. 2007: Our first contact with The Dark Eye

Hi there! Today I’d like to tell you how we came in contact with The Dark Eye in the first place, and what fascinates us so much about Aventuria. Back in the days, when Germany was still split into two halves, we didn’t know The Dark Eye. To be honest, we hadn’t ever heard of role playing games before, but at that time we were already enthusiastic board-game players.

What was the first thing my good old mate Floh and I did right after the reunification? We spent all our savings on computers, software and equipment. In addition to the AMIGA, a memory card, several Competition Pro joysticks and the arcade shooter “Xenon 2 Megablast”, we also bought a bunch of old issues of games magazines.

This magazine is to blame for everything! In the April 1989 issue Bernd read an article about role playing games – and was instantly infected with the infamous RPG virus!

In one of those magazines – it must have been the „ASM“ – there was an article about role playing games. We could barely imagine what these games would look like and how you were supposed to play them, but it sounded very exciting to us. Unbelievably exciting!

A couple of months later, when I accidentally ran into a strange looking box in a toy store, I realized what I had just seen: it was the The Dark Eye rule set box in the 1988 edition! Obviously, that was a mandatory buy. When I opened the box I was instantly fascinated by all the stuff I found inside: the tables, game documents and the legendary twenty-sided die, of course.

On the very same evening we played our first adventure, like thousands of other The Dark Eye fans. The TDE veterans among you know what adventure we must have played that night – it was the adventure which came with the rule set box, in which the hero had to rescue Silvana from a pirate’s claws.

This is the rule set box Bernd found by chance in a toy store.

So, how did we like it? It was much better than we had expected. It was exciting. It was entertaining. It was - fantastic. I really appreciated the way the rules were set up to allow anyone to easily step into the world of Aventuria and advance from newcomer to experienced player in a short period of time.

That was when we got addicted to the world of The Dark Eye. We could have known at the time that we wouldn’t just stay players of the game forever. We just couldn’t get enough of TDE, and so it happened that we began to dream a common dream – to create a part of Aventuria ourselves.

How the opportunity arose to actually work on a new TDE computer game will be dealt with in two weeks. ;-)

- Written by Bernd Beyreuther, Creative Director of Radon Labs GmbH -

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