King's Bounty (1990) is a fantasy strategy game with role-playing elements, designed by Jon Van Caneghem — of Might and Magic fame — and published by New World Computing[1][1]. Its hero hunts down villains with an army of hired monsters to recover a stolen sceptre; the design became the basis of Heroes of Might and Magic[1].

Origin

• Van Caneghem talked to John Olsen of Task Force Games about Bounty Hunter, a concept designed mainly by Robert L. Sassone; the idea grew into combining it with themes and mechanics of the board game Titan and releasing it both as a computer game and as a board game[1].
• Task Force published the King's Bounty board game in 1991[1].
• The treasure map assembled piece by piece was an idea borrowed from Sid Meier's Pirates![1].

Releases

Dates per the CRPG Addict and the Digital Antiquarian; sources disagree about the Amiga version[1][1][1][1][1].

Setting

The Four Continents are ruled by King Maximus, who keeps the peace with an artifact called the Sceptre of Order. A band of villains led by the dragon Arech Dragonbreath has stolen and buried it, dividing the map to its hiding place into 25 pieces: 17 he entrusted to his followers and 8 are hidden with the "artifacts of power"[1][1]. The continents — Continentia, Forestria, Archipelia and Saharia — open one after another, each found through a map on the previous one; each is 64 by 64 squares[1].

Gameplay

• Four classes: Knight, Paladin, Barbarian and Sorceress. They differ in how fast the hero advances, how many spells he can know, spell power and the weekly commission[1].
• The hero takes a contract on one of the 17 villains; a successful siege of that villain's castle captures him and recovers a piece of the map[1].
• The army has five units, each a stack of one type of troop[1]. The first time a unit is attacked in a battle, it retaliates[1]. The creatures are listed on King's Bounty (1990) — creatures.
• 14 spells, 7 for combat and 7 for the adventure map; each town sells its own spell[1][1].
• The quest runs against the calendar: 200 to 1000 days depending on the difficulty[1]. A day is 40 moves over normal terrain, and a week is five days[1].
• Monsters, treasures, contracts and the Sceptre itself are placed at random in each new game[1].

Reception

• In Computer Gaming World, Alan Emrich credited its serious time pressure, nail-biting battles and expanding megalomania with keeping it from becoming monotonous[1].
• The Digital Antiquarian calls it a modest commercial success but not a sterling one[1].

Legacy

• Van Caneghem later decided that King's Bounty had perhaps been a little ahead of its time and tried again: the result was Heroes of Might and Magic (1995)[1]. In Heroes of Might and Magic, the obelisks that reveal a treasure map to the Ultimate Artifact are a legacy of King's Bounty's sceptre[1].
• In the former USSR an unofficial King's Bounty 2 for DOS was made in 1992–1993 by Sergei Prokofiev, a programmer from Kharkov[1].
• In 2007 the name returned with Katauri Interactive's King's Bounty: The Legend — see the series overview.