Gold Box

Gold Box is the name for a series of computer role-playing games produced by SSI. The company won a license to produce games based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from TSR, Inc. These games shared a common engine that came to be known as the "Gold Box Engine" after the gold boxes in which most games of the series were sold.

History
In 1987, SSI President Joel Billings acquired the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) license from TSR in a major deal that may have amounted to "betting the company" on the franchise. 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.

Features
The "Gold Box Engine" had two main features. Outside of character creation, game play took place in a screen that displayed text interactions, the names and current status of your party of characters, and a window which displayed images of geography, and large or small pictures of characters or events. When combat occurred, which was often in these games, you switched to a full screen combat mode, in which player character icons could move about to cast spells or attack icons representing the enemies. All the games typically involved long dungeon crawls, and were heavier on combat than on role-playing.

The Gold Box games formed a number of series in which you could move characters who had finished one game to the next one in the series. In addition, characters from Pool of Radiance could be imported into Hillsfar, a game based on an entirely different engine, and then exported into Curse of the Azure Bonds. The system was improved over time, adding better colors, graphics, more player-class levels, and new story lines.

List of Gold Box Titles

 * Titles that reached #1 on the sales charts in bold.


 * The Pool of Radiance Forgotten Realms series (developed internally at SSI):
 * Pool of Radiance (1988)
 * Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989)
 * Secret of the Silver Blades (1990)
 * Pools of Darkness (1991)
 * Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (1993)


 * The Savage Frontier Forgotten Realms series (developed by Stormfront Studios):
 * Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991)
 * Treasures of the Savage Frontier (1992)
 * Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, for AOL (1991)


 * The Dragonlance series (developed internally at SSI):
 * Champions of Krynn (1990)
 * Death Knights of Krynn (1991)
 * The Dark Queen of Krynn (1992)


 * The Buck Rogers series:
 * Countdown to Doomsday (1990)
 * Matrix Cubed (1992)

Additionally, Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace (1992) used the Gold Box combat engine.