Spellbinder (video game)

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For other things with the same name, see Spellbinder.

Spellbinder
Developer(s)	Superior Software, Acornsoft
Publisher(s)	Superior Software, Acornsoft
Platform(s)	Acorn Electron, BBC Micro
Release date	1987
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Input methods	Keyboard

Spellbinder is an adventure game, released for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron in 1987. The player took the role of a Magelord, named Eldon the Spellbinder. His task was to find the evil Magelord outcast Zorn, in the castle of Lorraine, and defeat him by use of the so-called Ultimate Spell.

The game is pseudo-3D, allowing the player to move left, right, forwards and backwards in a room, though not up and down. It was presented in a monochrome format, with black and one other colour being used to draw the sprites and backdrops, although the colour varied from room to room, illustrating the environments. A large number of items could be examined for clues, or searched for possible items. The game was relatively open-ended for a game of the time, similar to Exile, allowing the player to move around a large section of the castle right from the start, and start to mix various different spells. A few of these spells were listed in the manual, but most had to be discovered from in-game clues.

Unusually, for a BBC Micro game, it featured continuous background music - a version of Midnight Summer Dream, a piece by the British rock group The Stranglers.

The game was written by Dan & Etan Shirron, two teenagers from Israel. They were 14½ and 16 when they started coding the game in 1986. The equipment used to write it was a memory monitor chip, a monochrome 14" TV, a cassette tape recorder and their own BASIC-written graphic-design software.