The Bard's Quest: Dungeons of the Unknown

Controversy

According to a claim on the CRPG Addict blog, the first episode of The Bard's Quest appears to be an edited version of the original sample scenario that was included with The Bard's Tale Construction Set ("The Star Light Festival"), while others have responded that this is not true. No evidence has been provided to substantiate these allegations and according to the blog author, he is not completely sure that they indeed the same.

The CRPG Addict later posted an update to his original article, stating: "Eight months after I posted this, I heard from one of the developers who worked on The Bard's Quest. He claims that while he and his colleagues--who were all aged 12-14 at the time--started with a "Starlight Festival" nucleus but created a full, original game from it. He also says that the two sequels were produced and sold, and that the trio made $12,000 - $14,000 in profit selling nearly 2,000 copies. As for my experience, I'll quote directly: "The one you claim as 'plagiarized' is different from the one that was sold and that was probably due to a mixup when someone downloaded the game from an Internet FTP site that the Tour de Force BBS sysop had uploaded it to, and then unzipped it and decided to upload it to CompuServe but rezipped a new archive instead of the original one from Tour de Force. I can only assume that maybe they were comparing it to the BTCS sample game and zipped the sample game, probably by mistake." I don't fully understand all of this, but I can't imagine that a real plagiarizer would take the time to write about a 27-year-old game to defend his friends' honor, so I accept his account. I asked for permission to post his entire e-mail but never received a response; If I do, I'll put it on my blog somehow."