The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Below the Root
A side-scrolling adventure game with an amazing world and five different characters to choose from.
RELEASE DATE: 1984
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Dale Disharoon / Windham Classics / Spinnaker Software
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Commodore 64
Prior to my research for this book, I had never heard of Below the Root or author Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Green-Sky Trilogy, which is a series of youth science fiction/fantasy books from the 1970s to which this game serves as a sequel (though it also confusingly shares a name with the first book in the series). And yet it appears that for a subset of gamers growing up in the 1980s, Below the Root was one of those games many grade school-aged kids played and loved. Because the game was marketed as an educational title by publisher Spinnaker Software (under its hoity-toity Windham Classics label, at that!), I’m guessing that this was one of those games that showed up in computer labs on the Apple II or which parents bought for their children to try to balance out their game libraries on the Commodore 64 with something that seemed like a learning experience.
Whatever the case may be, I was really surprised to find that Below the Root is an adventure game that looks and plays a lot like a console game – imagine the village sequences in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or Zelda II: Link’s Awakening and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here – with a little of what we’d today call a “Metroidvania” (or which I tend to call a “progressive exploration platformer”) baked into the design. When you consider that Below the Root predates all of these games and also manages to be a compelling adventure without including any combat mechanics, it’s easy to come to the realization that this game is something special.
Below the Root starts out with the presumption that you’ve read the books, and since they are out of print and have never been adapted to another medium, you’ll either have to study the manual or buy the Kindle editions if you want a well-informed sense of what’s going on. The books take place on another planet called Green-Sky and center on a group of tree-dwelling human colonists called the Kindar and a group of subterranean dwellers called the Erdlings. The world is largely peaceful (in the books, there is a lone gun that causes a lot of problems, which shows you the scale of violence there), but it turns out that the Erdlings were once Kindar who were imprisoned below the roots of a vine following a societal rift.
The books detail how one of the Erdlings, Teera, finds her way to the surface and befriends some young Kindar who rediscover their peoples’ ancient psychic spirit skills and work with Teera to free the Erdlings. Being a 1970s science fiction/fantasy series, there’s a lot of jargon like “grund” (the giant trees where the Kindar live), “nid” (a hammock made out of living tendril) and “pense” (psychic communication used to detect emotion or to transmit messages). All of this forms the backdrop for the game, and the five characters you can select are taken directly from the novels.
But before you decide this is all too complicated, let me mention that I played the game first and then read the novels, much as I did with the Witcher games, and I still had a blast; the game is simple enough that all of this background information is helpful, but not needed, to solve the puzzles and appreciate the game world. Once you select a character, you begin in your nid-place (home) and begin exploring the canopy of interconnected trees (grunds), each helpfully labeled in places to let you know which grund you’re on, like “Sky Grund” or “Silk Grund.” One thing you’ll discover right away is that it’s possible to run into walls, which knocks you down for a spell (but doesn’t hurt you). You’ll also soon discover that you can leap or fall from the trees. If you’re wearing a garment called a shuba, you can push the action button and pop out a pair of wings like a flying squirrel and glide down gently. Otherwise, you crash gently and can continue on your way, though getting knocked down risks tearing any shuba you may be wearing.
In the early stage of the game, you’ll explore and locate items that are either on the ground - and free for the taking - or which are owned by a resident and which require permission to take. While most people you’ll encounter are friendly and offer you helpful items, some discriminate against Erdling characters and others are generally nasty to anyone they meet, something you’ll only know if you use the pense ability on them. As a result, it’s a good idea to use Neric on your first playthrough since he’s well-liked and can pense. If you’d rather play as an Erdling, Herd is the best choice. (Of the five, Charn is the only character to definitely avoid, as he’s got pretty much everything stacked against him.)
Another aspect of your quest is to locate five characters who can raise your spirit ability. As you explore, you can talk to anyone you see, and they will often give you cryptic hints where they tell you to seek out a hermit or to find the wise child. Locating these individuals boosts your spirit points and also gives you information on Raamo, a friend you’re trying to rescue who is trapped in an underground cave. The game also features animals with whom you can pense to increase your spirit power. Just be careful not to try this with a spider or snake – they will only do you harm!
One of the things I really enjoy about Below the Root are the game’s graphics, which are simple, but well-crafted and effective. Your character’s animations for walking, running, jumping and gliding look great for a game from this era, and the world itself is impressively detailed. In a way, the look and feel of the game reminds me of the much more contemporary 2015 game Undertale, and if you can appreciate that game’s retro-style aesthetic, Below the Root will certainly appeal to you.
The simple graphics also allow the game’s parser system to work – you walk to where you’d like to conduct an action, open up the menu, and then select your intended action from a list. If there’s an item you want to pick up, you just walk next to it and select, “take.” It there’s something you want to purchase, you simply approach the shopkeeper and select, “buy” and the game is smart enough to complete the transaction without needing you to first select a token (the game’s currency) to initiate the action.
I was impressed as well with the sheer vertical and horizontal scale of the game; the trees feel very tall, and the game world itself feels like it stretches on for awhile without ever growing too difficult to navigate. There are many buildings to enter, and there’s an entire underground area to explore. You can ascend the environments via easy-to-use ladders, vines and stairways, and you can utilize items or powers to extend tree branches to get to hard-to-reach areas or to expand your launchpad for gliding down.
The one gripe I do have about Below the Root is that the game is so non-linear that it doesn’t provide you a lot of guidance on what to do next, and thus I found myself referencing a game guide fairly early in the game simply because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be accomplishing. This is perhaps more of a reflection of my impatience than the game’s design – after all, many platform adventure games require backtracking and uncovering new areas organically, and Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest had the same issue many years later! – but it is an attitude fairly common to modern gamers weaned on in-game direction, automaps and area-based progression. Thankfully, guides and maps are easy to find today, and there’s no reason to get stuck unless you want to tough it out yourself.
If you decide to play Below the Root – and you absolutely should! – I recommend the Commodore 64 version over the Apple II or DOS Booter version simply because it’s the best-looking and best-playing of the three. While the terminology used in the game is a bit overwhelming at first, the controls and design are smooth enough to keep the experience fun until you acclimate.
If you enjoy Below the Root, I’d also recommend the 1985 follow-up from the same developer, Alice in Wonderland, which is a similarly great game based upon more familiar source material. While you might expect it to be a straight adaptation of the original novel based on first appearances, it actually includes elements of both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. It’s also full of puns, riddles and utter nonsense.
I would also recommend Justin Stahlman’s 2015 game The Dreamsong (http://www.thedreamsong.com/), which is inspired by Below the Root - and even uses some of Below the Root’s graphics, with permission from the original artist. You won’t even need an emulator to play it since it’s designed to be played in a web browser. It’s a great game, and it’s also free!
An interesting sidenote: Below the Root developer Dale Disharoon - who later changed his last name to DeSharone – went on to develop the CD-i’s Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and Link: The Faces of Evil, two games which are often pilloried, but not quite as bad as you’ve heard. His later company Animation Magic also collaborated with Blizzard Entertainment on the cancelled Warcraft Adventures in the mid-1990s, a project which also involved adventure game legend Steve Meretzky at one point.
Sadly, DeSharone passed in 2008, and two of the last games he worked on were the underrated 2000 PC game M&M’s: The Lost Formulas (later remade as M&M’s Shell Shocked for the PlayStation) and the also underrated 2002 Gamecube and PC game Darkened Skye (an action adventure based on the popular Skittles “Taste the Rainbow” ad campaign). You can bet those titles will appear in this series once we reach that era.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about graphical adventure games, 3D games, arcade action games, wargames, grand strategy games, RPGs, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!