Here, for the first time, players were able to see each piece’s human form. Almost every chess game that came before Battle Chess presented the board in a two-dimensional view from above, with traditional shapes representing each piece. The game begins with an isometric view of a populated chess board, and the graphics, especially for 1988, are quite breathtaking. It didn’t take long for pirates to remove the game’s copy protection, although more low tech solutions (such as including a list of all the moves in a separate text file) also worked. The moves from these games fill up the last nine pages of the game’s manual. Before the battle can commence, players must provide a specific move from one of twenty historical chess matches. It’s on the tip of my tongueĪfter a bit of loading, the title screen disappears to reveal the chessboard along with a staple of 1980s computer games: a copy-protection question. Below, two swords and a knight’s helmet rest just above copyright information and Interplay’s name. The magenta flag on the left sports a lion, while the blue flag on the right displays a golden eagle. The words “Battle Chess,” seemingly carved from marble, float above two flags. The first impression of Battle Chess comes in the form of a colorful title screen. Battle Chess and Neuromancer, both released in 1988, were the company’s first two titles to be both developed and published by the company. In 1988, Interplay began publishing their own titles before eventually becoming a publishing house for other developers. Mindshadow, Hacker, Tass Times in Tonetown and Borrowed Time were all published by Activision, while Racing Destruction Set, Wasteland, and the Bard’s Tale trilogy were published by Electronic Arts. In the mid-1980s, Interplay developed several hit games for big publishing houses. For the first time ever, they got to witness those battles playing out for themselves. In Battle Chess, released by Interplay in 1988, players no longer had to imagine those battles. When one piece takes another, it is up to the player to imagine the battle that just happened. The average game of chess lasts 40 moves, which meant a match on the hardest level of Video Chess could last two weeks or more.Ĭhess not only requires patience, intelligence, and strategy, but also imagination. According to the manual, the system can take “up to 10 hours per move” on the game’s hardest setting. The biggest problem with Video Chess was that it was too easy to beat on the beginner levels, and the hardest levels pushed the Atari 2600’s hardware past its limits. A year or two after that, we got Video Chess for the Atari 2600. The first chess game we owned wasn’t very good in fact, it didn’t even check whether or not your moves were legal. I soon found someone (or rather, something) that would play chess with me as many times as I wanted: our TRS-80 Model III home computer. It was finding other seven year olds who wanted to play chess. The hardest part wasn’t memorizing how pieces moved or learning strategies. ![]() Each character’s square explained how that piece could move on the board. My first chess board was a children’s edition that used flat paper squares with the pieces printed on top of them. ![]() I learned how to play chess when I was seven years old.
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