The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - SunDog: Frozen Legacy
You can bore yourself with modern games like Starfield or you can play this amazingly deep 1980s open-world space trader and strategy game with great graphics and a well-designed interface.
RELEASE DATE: 1984
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: FTL Games
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Atari ST
Prior to conducting my research for this series, I had never heard of SunDog: Frozen Legacy and was only familiar with developer FTL Games because of their 1987 hit Dungeon Master. But as I came across a screenshot of the SunDog starship (from which the game takes its title) and recognized that the Atari ST version of the game bears an awful lot of graphical resemblance to the 2012 classic FTL: Faster Than Light, I tracked it down immediately and gave it a try.
A few hours later, I wondered how I’d never come across this incredible game, particularly when I discovered that the original version was released on the Apple II in 1984 and the Atari ST version came out just a year later, which meant it was sitting on shelves just as I was getting into gaming. Compared to the likes of many strategy games of the same era, SunDog: Frozen Legacy is amazingly advanced, both in its excellent point and click interface design and in its varied gameplay mechanics. You begin the game as Zed, a former slave who’s inherited a starship from your uncle. The bad news is that the ship’s in need of repair. If you can get it up and running, you can leave the planet Jondd and begin a career as a space trader and also fulfill your uncle’s last contract, which involves helping the religious colony of Banville to get the items they need and to retrieve cryogen pods (containing their disciples) from other worlds to help boost the colony’s population.
After you’ve created your character, the game begins just after you’ve been given your uncle’s non-functioning ship. You first have to investigate it to figure out what repairs it needs and then go into town to buy the parts you need. You can leave the ship on foot or via your truck-like cargo pod, but either approach carries plusses and minuses. Pedestrians can be mugged or hassled by panhandlers or shady salesmen, and walking around can quickly bring an end to your adventure if things go badly. Driving your vehicle is safer and allows you to carry more, but you have to find a place to park it off the street or you risk getting a ticket from the local police that you’ll have to pay to get it unlocked (which may mean a dangerous hike to the Uniteller bank building). It’s also handy to find a visual guide to the structures in town, as there are 8 distinctive buildings, a tube station, a teleport station and a parking lot which you’ll need to learn to recognize since they all serve different purposes. When you go inside a building, you have to sidle up to the counter and wait for someone to help you, which is a nice touch since it suggests you’re not the most important person in town by a long shot.
Leaving town is necessarily early on because you need to find the colony of Banville, but the overworld map can be challenging to navigate due to the terrain. Time can also go by more quickly than it does in town as you’re moving. If you decide you don’t want to locate Banville and just want to head off to the stars and begin your space trader career, you can do that, but once you finally do find the colonists, you’re given a 9-stage questline to bring them fulfill increasingly difficult requests that help to advance the plotline, but which provide little to no money. Finishing this questline is the only way to properly beat the game, though it continues on even after you’re done. What you do in the Drahew Region of space is ultimately up to you.
A large part of the adventure involves flying to other worlds and trading commodities so you can keep your ship up to date, improve your equipment and, believe it or not, ensure that you’ve got enough food to eat. It’s important to make sure you’ve got enough fuel on your ship and that your equipment doesn’t break down as you’re travelling; you never know when you’re going to be attacked by space pirates or other menacing bad guys. Ship combat is probably the least fun aspect of the game because the controls and dogfighting system are so archaic, but it’s a small blemish on an otherwise excellent experience.
Much of the fun of SunDog: Frozen Legacy instead lies in exploring and seeing what you can discover for yourself. The non-linear nature of the game and loose storyline allow you to enjoy the game’s universe on your own terms, and while there’s definitely some challenge (save your game often, as you’ll be dying a lot!), the fun lies in seeing what’s around the next corner or finding ways to make major trades that net you the big bucks. It’s definitely a game where you’ll want to have a notebook handy to keep track of a variety of things as you travel from world to world, but this helps the experience to feel very deep and personal in the way that only a well-made open-world game can.
While the graphics are decent on the Apple II, I feel the need to praise the Atari ST version’s aesthetic because it feels almost modern; the character sprites have a small and simple appearance, but move really smoothly, and the cities and ship have a nice three-dimensional look to them that pops on the screen. The game’s interface, which often overlays pop-up windows on top of the main action, is incredibly well-designed and intuitive with both the Apple II’s joystick controls and the Atari ST’s mouse. You feel like everything you want to do is a result of interacting with the game world instead of merely triggering menus. It’s really, really hard to believe this game came out in the mid-80s when you compare it to its contemporaries, and it is among the best titles I’ve played on the Atari ST in particular.
One thing I will not praise about SunDog: Frozen Legacy, however, is its manual; it puts a lot of faith in the user to understand what’s happening in the interface and provides almost no detail about how the game actually works. Given how complex the game is, I’m guessing this was one reason SunDog: Frozen Legacy never rose to great prominence, because it’s very hard to know what to do without some good instructions or enduring a lot of trial and error. In the mid-80s, only a handful of gamers were online and able to provide guidance to one another, and the enthusiast press of the day also barely covered this game, and so there were few printed resources as well.
Fortunately, a team started by Bruce Webster, who was one of the original creators, has been working on a remake for the last decade or so, and one of their contributions has been a better manual and a ship owner’s guide, both of which explain everything in much more detail and mostly apply to the original game. Be sure to check those out, and feel free to sign up for their beta (which unfortunately includes an NDA prohibiting players from discussing their experiences in, say, a series like this one) if you’d like to see the current remake build. I also recommend referencing this site if you need any maps for the cities or star systems.
I was interested to learn from Bruce Webster’s blog that two sequels were conceived, but never developed; Webster says the game did not sell well on the Apple II, and by the time it gained a following on the Atari ST, Webster had left the company due to burnout. The development team was working on Dungeon Master by that point, and that game was such a hit once it released that it became the studio’s sole focus from then on out. It’s a shame SunDog: Frozen Legacy got lost in the shuffle, but here’s to hoping that more gamers will rediscover this amazingly underrated gem and it will inspire some great new games down the road.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about 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.
This series will continue to cover games written by unique personalities like Chris Crawford, Roberta Williams and Danielle Bunten Berry, by great writers like Steve Meretzky, Michael Bywater, Robert Pinsky and Brian Moriarty, and based on the work of famous authors like Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
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!