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The Bard's Tale
Developer(s)Interplay
Publisher(s)Electronic Arts
Year introduced1985
Genre(s)Role-Playing

The Bard's Tale is a series of turn-based role-playing games heavily based on Wizardry. More than that: the original version of the first three Bard's Tale games allow to import characters from Wizardry I.

Original series[edit]

The games share an almost identical character creation, interface, and combat mode with Wizardry. Notable differences are: (1) the introduction of the bard class, with a "bard song" ability; (2) the surface is an actual city to be explored, instead of a simple menu screen (it becomes an extensive world in later titles); (3) there is more than one dungeon.

Other titles[edit]

Related games:

  • Deathlord is an Ultima clone that can import characters from the first Bard's Tale, Wizardry and Ultima 3.
  • Legend of Faerghail is a German tribute to Bard's Tale that can also import characters (Amiga version only).
  • Dragon Wars was developed by part of the team of Bard's Tale 3 and it can import characters, too.
  • Centauri Alliance is also known as "Bard's Tale in Space". It is a science-fiction role-playing game, but characters can be imported from the fantasy titles.

Character transfer utilitues[edit]

A peculiarity of the original Bard's Tale series was the ability to import characters from unrelated series. On different operating systems (C64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Amiga) the same title could have a different character transfer utility (CTU) or none at all. Anyway, disk-reading errors are extremely frequent, except for the DOS ports.

The full original trilogy of Bard's Tale was released for four different home computers, listed in the following table. Other systems received just one or two titles in the trilogy (Apple IIgs, Apple Macintosh, Flag of Japan.svg NES, Flag of France.svg Amstrad CPC, Flag of the United Kingdom.svg ZX Spectrum).

System Games and character transfer utilities
C64
  • (1983) Maze Master: (no CTU)
  • (1985) The Bard's Tale 1: (no CTU)
  • (1986) The Bard's Tale 2: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, Ultima 3
  • (1988) The Bard's Tale 3: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2
  • (1988) Deathlord: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3
  • (1989) Dragon Wars: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3
  • (1990) Centauri Alliance: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3
Apple II
  • (1985) The Bard's Tale 1: transfer from Wizardry 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3
  • (1987) The Bard's Tale 2: transfer from Wizardry 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3, Bard's Tale 1
  • (1988) The Bard's Tale 3: transfer from Wizardry 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3, 4, Bard's Tale 1, 2
  • (1989) Dragon Wars: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3
  • (1990) Centauri Alliance: transfer from Wizardry 1, 2, 3, Ultima 3, Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3, Might & Magic 1
  • (1987) Deathlord: transfer from Wizardry 1, Ultima 3, Bard's Tale 1
MS-DOS
  • (1987) The Bard's Tale 1: (no CTU)
  • (1988) The Bard's Tale 2: transfer from Bard's Tale 1
  • (1990) The Bard's Tale 3: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2
  • (1990) Dragon Wars: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2
  • (1990) Legend of Faerghail: (no CTU)
Amiga
  • (1986) The Bard's Tale 1: (no CTU)
  • (1988) The Bard's Tale 2: transfer from Bard's Tale 1
  • (1991) The Bard's Tale 3: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2
  • (1989) Legend of Faerghail: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2, Phantasie 1, 3
  • (1990) Dragon Wars: transfer from Bard's Tale 1, 2


Pages in category "The Bard's Tale"

The following 2 pages are in this category, out of 2 total.