Mage Quest

Apr 12, 2025

The game wasn’t supposed to exist. But here I stood, at an exurban Thrift Rite Books, holding what appeared to be an original copy of Mage Quest, the box containing all six of the five-and-a-quarter floppy disks and an illustrated eight-page instruction manual. It was in surprisingly good condition too, given its age. The titular mage, his heavily bearded face veiled in shadow under a chestnut hood, held his thin, impossibly bent fingers outstretched just off the surface of a clouded crystal ball. He was not looking into the orb but straight at me, his bright eyes shining through the umbral gloom that clung to him on the cover of the box.

The back of the box described Mage Quest as “a journey into the forbidden arts of magic.” Another offset block of text further down briefly described the nature of the game.

YOU are the wizard. Can YOU unlock the secrets that will free Cosmas from his prison? In this interactive 3D adventure game, you start as an apprentice wizard. Gather your spells, your magic ingredients, and learn to command the supernatural. As you gain knowledge and skill, you will become powerful enough to free the great wizard Cosmas. But be careful. Magic is only for the brave. Will you be able to avoid the mage hunters who captured Cosmas and seek to keep him confined in his crystal prison?
Mage Quest© is a production of High Country Computer Games, Inc. 1985.

Along the left-hand side of the box ran a series of screenshots showing a pixilated character in a tunic and a feathered hat navigating what looked like a wizard’s study, a cave, and a heavily wooded forest path.

The clerk at the register could not recall who had brought the game in as a trade-in or how long it had sat on the bottom shelf of the small used games section. He was willing to part with it for very little, given that vanishingly few of his customers would have the disk drive or operating system to run it, assuming the disks would even work.

I first read about Mage Quest on one of the classic computer game forums. Another user had posted a picture of a page from a 1985 High Country Computer Games catalog, advertising their offerings for the Christmas season that year. Listed just below the company’s popular Kings’ Crusade I and II was a game called Mage Quest, which no one on the forum had ever heard any reference to previously. There were subsequent rumors of sightings and vague, second-hand knowledge of the game was passed around. One contributor to the forum swore his older brother had played it. Another was certain he had seen a copy for sale on a Japanese-based computer game trading website. But there was no hard evidence that the game ever existed, other than the single enigmatic catalog listing.

High Country itself had gone out of business in 1999, unable to keep up with the rapidly evolving gaming market. The two founders of the company both died about a decade ago. The most compelling theory about the listing was that the catalog page itself was a fake, printed and photographed simply for the fun of generating a little mystery. That was my own conclusion up until I saw the box reclining horizontally on the shelf.

****

It was easy enough to install the game on the old MS-DOS computer rebuild I had put together in my workroom a couple of summers ago from parts I purchased online. Games of this era were installed and run from a simple command line floating in a black void on the monitor.

A:> INSTALL C:

The floppy drive began to whirr. I was prompted to insert each of the six disks, one at a time, as the game was transferred and configured onto the hard drive of my computer.

INSERT DISK 2 OF 6

When the installation was complete, I ran the game.

C:> RUN MAGE QUEST

The game opened with a more crudely pixelated sixteen-color version of the artwork on the cover of the box; the smoothness of the airbrushed cover art now giving way to a rough-hewn phantasmagoria. A low-burning green flame or swirl of mist appeared to dance robotically in the crystal orb resting in the foreground of the image while a synthesized medieval carol, sounding not unlike a music box, tinkled through the speakers. The intensity of the mage’s eyes, staring at me through the screen, had been reduced to empty, black squares.

PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE

A simple text box provided the backstory. The wizard, Cosmas, had been captured by a group of mage hunters working for the evil king and had been imprisoned in a magic-proof crystal prison. With Cosmas out of the way, the king was able to exert his own tyrannical will over the people of his kingdom, Westdonia. In the game, you play Archibald the Apprentice, Cosmas’ faithful student and aid who, too young and guileless to be seen as a threat, was left with unrestricted access to Cosmas’ workshop and library. It is up to you now, as Archibald, to follow in Cosmas’ footsteps, learn the art of magic, and eventually free Cosmas from his captivity.

The gameplay functioned largely the same as High Country’s early Kings’ Crusade titles, with which I was familiar. The game placed you in a particular scene or room that you navigated with the keyboard’s directional arrows. A simple text interface allowed you to manipulate objects, examine your surroundings, engage in dialog with other characters, or save and reload a game. The opening scene showed you, as Archibald, in Cosmas’ study, holding a broom.

Things have been quiet since Cosmas’s … departure. You haven’t been up to his study in a while and it’s getting dusty. Perhaps you should tidy it up.

LOOK AROUND STUDY, I typed into the command box.

When Cosmas was here, you weren’t allowed in this room. Bookshelves crammed with books cover the walls. A large desk by the window is covered in parchments, half-opened books, glass vials, and occult objects you have never seen before. A mirror hangs on the far wall.

CLEAN ROOM

The animated figure of Archibald began moving objects around the room before frenetically sweeping back and forth across the floor with a little broom held in his hands. He bumped the table and a book fell to the floor.

You arrange Cosmas’ belongings in tidy stacks and begin to sweep furiously around the room. It was very dusty in here! Without looking, you bump into the side of Cosmas’ desk and a book falls to the floor.

LOOK AT BOOK

An Introduction to the Arcane Arts. This is not a title you have seen before. Your curiosity gets the better of you and you flip through the first few pages. This volume appears to be a detailed how-to for wizard novices. It’s a hefty book.

As the game progressed, Archibald began to study magic under my direction, performing little feats of prestidigitation at first, levitating objects, opening doors, and lighting candles from across the room. As the spells became more complex, Archibald had to gather ingredients and spell components around the town and the player had to be careful not to draw attention to Archibald from the mage hunters. If caught, he would be imprisoned in the crystal prison with Cosmas and you’d have to reload a saved game.

As his spells became more complex, Archibald began chanting in an unfamiliar tongue designed for the game (or so I assumed). His wand made ever-more complicated patterns across the screen—little lights would dance in geometrical patterns across the screen and I would find myself almost nodding off as I watched the pixels flickering in and out while the sound of indistinct tonal patterns tinkled through my speakers. The game wormed its way into my sleep, and I would see the shapes forming on the backsides of my closed eyelids; Cosmas’ face would emerge from the darkness and he would look into my mind and then fade out again.

The gameplay of Mage Quest soon became utterly bizarre. Pages of runes would flood the screen while Archibald’s chanting would drone on and on. What little active play remained grew increasingly lurid and unpleasant. After Archibald had completed the spells contained in the Introduction to the Arcane Arts, the game directed me to learning more advanced magic from an eyeless, bodiless head summoned from a well. In exchange for offerings dropped in the well (which included a goat heart and the finger of a dead man), the face would croak instructions and Archibald would begin chanting along with it.

I continued to play the game over the next few days, but a growing uneasiness crept into my thoughts. It was as if the game continued to run in my mind even when I had turned off the computer. Standing with my face in the cool fog of the freezer or leaning over a load of laundry, I would sometimes hear the thin, synthetic plinking of the game’s music or the distorted electronic wah-wah of Archibald chanting. Most unusual of all, I would sometimes find myself at my desk, playing the game, without remembering how I got there or without recalling booting up the machine. I woke from my bed one night with the computer’s power light illuminating my room with an eerie emerald glow—an expectant C: prompt blinking at me in the darkness from the faintly buzzing monitor. I was certain I had turned the machine off before bed.

****

It was after one of these episodes that I began looking through the material I had on my shelf included in some of High Country’s other games. There were more extensive credits in the little guide to Kings’ Crusade I, and I wrote down the names of three of the principal game designers who might still be alive. With a little research at work the following day, I found that one of the programmers, Pat Lofton, was now associated with game design at Empyrion Games in San Diego. It was not hard to find his contact information, and I sent him a short email, without too many details, explaining that I had found a copy of Mage Quest, and innocently asking about its history.

It’s always nice to hear from fans. It’s been a long time since my stint at High Country. Larry and Greg were the principal programers back then. I don’t recall having written any code for Mage Quest. My recollection is that at the time, that was one of Larry’s projects. We all had a lot of ideas back then and the truth is that we only followed through with a few of them. If Larry got Mage Quest to production it’s news to me. Hang on to that. It’s probably worth something.
Larry and Greg butted heads and Greg had a lot of Larry’s projects destroyed after Larry left the team. None of us were getting along with Larry at that point so we had a fire in the back of the studio when Larry left. Greg burned a bunch of Larry’s stuff. I thought the last of his Mage Quest pre-production materials went up in flames. Anyways, it’s a cool find.

Pat’s email piqued my attention; I couldn’t help but follow up with him over the next couple of weeks. I wanted to know more about Larry and Greg, their background, and their falling out.

Larry and Greg were both phone phreaks. That’s where they met. In that community. Probably around 1970. There weren’t a lot of west coast kids at Harvard then and I think they bonded over computers and technology. The phone phreaking thing, which you may have heard something about, was ostensibly about hacking the phone system for free long-distance calls and party conference calls and that sort of thing. Sometimes the phone would ring in my apartment and it would be Larry and Greg and ten other guys from around the world on a party line, all charged to some corporate account at Ma Bell. But for most of us (and I was pretty involved too) it was a kind of game or a puzzle. Or maybe black magic. Our spells were the beeps and boops of tone dialing. Larry could whistle the right tone to switch a call into an open carrier line and make free long-distance calls. I guess we sort of carried over that attitude into computer gaming.

Things started out pretty well between Larry and Greg and the rest of us. We were all having a lot of fun at High Country. The King’s Crusade games did well. Better than expected. We weren’t very business savvy and we wasted a lot of money and missed opportunities just farting around. Greg was starting to mature a good bit though and he wanted to take things more seriously. He wanted High Country to be a proper business, with business plans, marketing research, and shareholders and shit. Larry wasn’t going in that direction. He was heading somewhere else entirely. He had gotten into real black magic stuff. Crowley, Golden Dawn, ritual magic. Far-out stuff. Things just weren’t going to work out between Larry and Greg at that point. And some of Larry’s work was just kind of demented and frightening. Greg didn’t like any of that Mage Quest stuff. It really kind of freaked him out. So when Larry was sort of forced out, Greg wanted to burn all of it. I think something really spooked him but he wouldn’t talk about it. Larry went off to the mountain west somewhere and I never really heard much more about him. One more thing that I thought was weird now that I’m thinking back on this stuff. The spot behind the warehouse where we dug a pit and burned all Larry’s stuff. Nothing ever grew there. Grass all around the area in a ring with a black patch in the middle.

I spent the next couple of weeks tracking down any information I could about Larry. I didn’t have much to work with. Larry had left High Country around 1987 and had moved to Colorado. I found a brief story covering Larry’s departure from High Country in a 1989 issue of PC Gaming Magazine. The magazine covered much of the backstory I already knew. The magazine was unable to get in touch with Larry, but Greg seemed happy to talk to them about the future of High Country following Larry’s departure. Greg was pushing High Country to keep up with the rapidly developing technology. The company, at that time, was about to release a new series of games built around 3D animation with more robust graphics and better sound than what had gone into the first wave of High Country games. Greg’s only comments about Larry were very reserved. He noted only that they had had some “creative differences” and that Larry, at that time, was living somewhere around Colorado Springs.

A photo accompanying the article, taken years earlier, shows Larry and Greg in their first office space. Greg, in a tie-dyed shirt, sits somewhat reclined in a swivel chair with his arms folded across his chubby frame, unselfconsciously stretching a toothy grin across his round, bearded face as he looks directly into the camera. A long desk, piled with books and a couple of boxy, oversized monitors, is immediately behind him. A single Spiderman figurine sits along the top edge of one of the monitors next to him. Closer to the edge of the photo, a much leaner and clean-shaven Larry in a short-sleeve button-down shirt leans against the edge of the desk, propped up with the heels of his palms immediately by his side with a wry, crooked grin on his face. His gaze is diverted away from the center of the picture off towards something out of the frame. A whiteboard hangs on a wall behind them, covered in illegible scrawl. Someone has also drawn what appeared to be a little cartoon picture of Greg in the corner of the board.

Looking at the picture, I was startled by a certain sense of familiarity. I recognized the office, the desk, and I had a vague memory of drawing an image not unlike the sketch along the side of the whiteboard. It was as if I were recalling a dream suddenly, one that had been vivid in the dreaming but immediately shattered and lost upon waking. It was also as if someone else’s memories, alien to my life, were infiltrating my own. I knew—or I thought I knew—that Larry was looking towards a water cooler. I knew that the door behind the photographer led to a hallway that divided into two smaller offices and that the front door at the end of the hall opened directly onto a parking lot where a 1976 burgundy Cutlass Supreme was parked in the spot closest to the door.

I did not have much luck learning anything more about Larry after he moved to Colorado Springs. The only information I could find was a report from about five years ago describing the circumstances of his death. The Colorado Springs fire department had responded to a call in the middle of the night. Larry’s house was engulfed in flames. One fatality. The Fire Marshall had concluded that a “chemical accelerant” or electrical accident had triggered a sudden and violent explosion that had quickly consumed the house. The cause was not believed to have been related to arson. The remains of the occupant of the house were found in the basement but there was never any reported obituary or funeral.

****

The disquiet I felt about Mage Quest continued to grow. Over the next two weeks, I struggled to avoid its grasp on my mind. It became like a vapor or miasma that settled around me, obscuring my surroundings, working its way into my lungs, and sapping my body of its natural warmth and vitality. I put the game in a box of old notebooks and school supplies in my garage and entirely avoided my rebuilt computer. But the game’s images and sounds continued to linger in my thoughts, distracting me from the world around me. My conscious will had lost control; something deep and abiding had coiled up and settled itself in a hidden chamber of my brain and I was not its master.

One morning, a couple of days ago, I was startled awake from a deep sleep, the late morning sun streaming through my window. I was suddenly aware of something cold and sticky on the sheet by my right arm. I sat bolt-upright in bed and saw that my hands were covered in a dried red-brown film, highlighting the edges of my fingernails. It was smeared across part of my pillow and the bedsheets next to me too. I was sure it was blood, but it wasn’t my blood. By the door was a pair of my boots, partially covered in mud. A trail of dirty footprints led away from my room, down the stairs, to the back door. The door was unlocked, and traces of dried blood were smeared around the doorknob. A bloody hand had partially pressed against the door by the knob as if to push it closed. Mud was lying in clumps by the door where it had been unceremoniously kicked or scraped off of a pair of boots. I had no memory of this. After hastily cleaning myself, I put on a coat and followed the footprints out the back door. They led from my house into a wooded powerline easement abutting the back side of my property. I soon lost the trail and went back inside. I had no idea where I might have gone.

Last night, I made a determined effort to rid myself of Mage Quest. I cleared a space along the woodline in the grass and dug a shallow hole. I placed the box face-down in the hole with its disks and instruction booklet. I threw a few sticks and pinecones in around the box and covered the little pile generously with lighter fluid. It erupted in flames with the touch of a match. I watched the flames, tinted with green and blue, dance across the face of the box, blackening and curling the cardboard. There was a momentary chemical smell that rose from the fire with the smoke, and the faint sound of wheezing like moisture escaping from a fresh log in the fireplace. It was soon over, and there was nothing left but ash. I shoveled the displaced earth into the hole and went back inside.

****

I just looked over at the digital clock by my bed. 2:00 am. I’m sitting at my desk in front of the monitor of the rebuilt computer I used to run Mage Quest. I thought I had deleted all of the game files. But it looks like I logged on last night too, at about this time. Someone—and it must have been me—uploaded Mage Quest to a file sharing server. A text file had been saved not long after. These were not words that I could have written. I do not know what they mean. I’m not sure I will ever know what they mean.