Below the Root: A story, a computer game and my lifelong obsession (2015)

This was probably the first game I really loved and played to obsession (on an Apple ][)

It was also where I discovered my first 'wall hack'. The apple version only loaded the current tile into memory - every time you stepped off screen, it would load the new tile from a floppy and reset your character position to the opposite edge (e.g. walk off the right edge, load the tile to the right and reset your character to the left side at the same height).

I found out (largely by accident, initially) that if you removed the floppy, it would try to read a couple times, and then give up. It would still reset your character position to the other side of the screen but not update the actual tile graphics & platform locations. You could use this to cheat past otherwise impassible barriers - find a tile you could walk all the way from one edge of to the other at the same height as the barrier, take out the floppy, walk across the tile the right number of times so you are in the tile 'past' the barrier, then put the floppy back in and walk back so you're now on the other side. :)

The version I played also had a charming bug(?) where if you underflowed a stat counter (e.g. by doing a 5 manna action when you only had 4 manna left) the game would print the message "I have nothing more to give" and then lock up, leaving it ambiguous whether it was your character that had nothing more to give, or the actual game.

I almost worked on this game, but I was burnt out so I took a break from all that. I ended up doing some play testing on it.

This was the kind of game Dale excelled at designing. He would do the original versions and his small crew would do the porting. One coder per platform.

The art was done by our go-to artist. I forget his name but he had a whimsical, clown-like personality.

Dale drew a lot of counterculture-type people into his orbit. He was the California stereotype, that way. But he lived clean, no drugs or even alcohol that I ever saw at his parties, and it’s such a fluke that he died so young.

Dale taught me to drive and is the reason I got good at harmonica. He was a wonderful man.

Great article—I love that the author tried to reach out to the original creator of the game "Below the Root," even though they ultimately failed to secure the rights.

I'd encourage anyone with a desire to create an homage to a game they have nostalgia for to just reach out to the original authors. You'd be surprised at how often a simple request like this can lead to you being able to breathe new life into an old game.

Story time. A favorite game of mine as a young child was an old DOS game called Redhooks' Revenge. It was essentially a graphical naval adventure where each player would take turns rolling dice and moving their ship. Landing on ports would allow you to conquer them Risk-style, and at various times you would be asked a maritime-themed trivia question depending on the square you landed on. Answering correctly would give you bonuses like rum, water, extra cannons, etc.

My sister and I used to play it for hours on end to the point where we'd basically both memorized all the quiz questions. Decades later, I was messing around with the files, attempting to figure out a way to add additional trivia questions. I ended up reverse-engineering the weird binary format of the asset file to randomly inject customized trivia into the game every time it was started. You had to be really careful when injecting the questions not to accidentally alter any additional addresses in the file; otherwise, the game would just crash.

Out of random curiosity, I looked up the original company, ImagiSOFT, and got in touch with the author, who happily gave me permission to develop an official sequel, Redhook's Revenge II: Call of Booty.

https://specularrealms.com/redhook

I have also been obsessed with "Below the Root" since it came out.

Dale Disharoon/DeSharone had an odd insight into textures. Look at the ladders. Look at the vines, both those that can be climbed and those that can be cut with a "trencher beak". Look at the way the trees evoke growing wood. The visuals are much more evocative than should be possible at this resolution.

Dale also did a Disney-licensed Apple II game based on "The Jungle Book" which is similar in character to "Below the Root" and a game based on "Alice in Wonderland". Both are strange and mystical and full of odd vines that remind me of the patterns left by the cellular automaton "Langton's Ant".

All Dale's games were unfair and opaque but that was the state of the art.

The only link I clicked on in the article was supposed to be for The Dreamsong, and it was broken. But I found the game here: https://www.thedreamsong.com/

We are of the same ilk!. Same age. My buddy Morgan had a tandy 1000 and got a modem. Long story short:

We discovered BBSing from Lake Tahoe to San Jose to play the Pit, and all sorts of other things.. PCLink, $926 long distance bill leads to month long grounding, and me convincing mydad that he needed a computer to run his business... and a printer!.... oh yeha... and a modem. O.o

Rolls nat 20!

Here I am But my first love then was Ultima ][ -- Bards tale...

Morgan retired from the gaming world as a top exec at several of the AAA gaming cos...

All because these games that game the perfect mix of reality. Fantasy Reality (that which you see in the computer) and Full Blown Imagination.

You internal visual overlay still carried a huge % of the game experience.

Something I Lament for todays youth. Need to start "Cult of the Dip Switch" 4K?? - EGA ALL THE WAY!

Wow... quite the obsession. BtR was a fun game, and I am looking forward to playing The Dreamsong!

I had this (the Apple II edition) as a kid, but I didn't have the books it was based on, and between that and the poor controls combined with easy and easily repeatable failure states, it felt extremely opaque and unfair - especially because there so obviously was something there of interest and possibly even lasting value, in the sense any story can have that, but the game was so poor at being a game as to reliably frustrate my every attempt to find out what that "something" might actually be.

I suppose I'm glad there were people with whom it landed very well, but I also wouldn't exactly call it a must-play, or even a classic. Much more I'd class it alongside the middle- and late-period Sierra games, which likewise remain fondly remembered among those few who were able to think sufficiently along with the particular logic of their authorship - and among all us others, not so fondly.

I was also obsessed with this game (Commodore 64). I never had the real version, and my bootleg floppies didn't come with a map.

Somewhere in my boxes, I still have (8-12-ish?) pages of taped together graph paper that I drew the map on, one screen at a time.

I recall enormous frustration waiting for some subset of the (was it 6?!) disks to load one at a time, especially when missing an edge and gliding all the way to the ground from a tree limb in the sky.

Despite all the waiting around, Below the Root is one of the best games of all time for me.

I absolutely loved Below the Root when I was a kid. I definitely shared the author's sense of wonder when playing. The game world felt expansive and mysterious. It was probably the closest to an "open world game" I ever played on an Apple II.

I'm excited to try out the Commodore 64 version now that I know it was the original.

This game blew my mind when I discovered it in an Apple computer lab as a 7 year old. I emailed back and forth with Zilpha Keatley Snyder for years, and she always replied within 24 hours of an email, like clockwork.

I read the books much later (in my 20s) and while stylistically I found them hard to get through, I can see how they also would have stretched my mind if I'd found them as a tyke.

This was the video game of my youth on an Apple II. Way ahead of its time and still a masterpiece today. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who loved it.

The author should just port the game to JavaScript and point to the original assets on GoG.

Very sorry to hear about the authors passing, I would have loved to hear about what inspired them.

This is the kind of thing the internet should be used for. Excellent article and dive.

Played the original on c64(well, 128d) back in '87 and it blew me away. I grabbed the disk image a few months ago and played a bit and I'm still impressed. I love the story, the music, the graphics and the gameplay. It's just a really stellar, underappreciated game.