Brøderbund 1984

Language:

English

Authors:

David Alzofon

Platforms:

Atari 400/800

Entered by:

Canalboy

Added:

20-02-2026

Edited:

07-06-2026

Synopsis

The plot of Ronin concerns a princess who was kidnapped by an onibaba, a demonic sorceress who had a grudge against the princess's father. The princess was being held in a fortress on a mountaintop in Japan (the whole story had a feudal Japanese setting). You roam the landscape, fighting duels and gathering information that will lead you to the princess's location.

Notes

Requires two disk drives (place both disks in corresponding peripherals).
When requested for the password at the beginning of the game, press RETURN twice (as the copy protection is not implemented in this prototype, you can bypass this step this way).

Although the title was started prior to the sale of Synapse Software to Brøderbund Software, the latter is kept as the publisher as the game was automatically acquired by the new company and would've been a Brøderbund Software release proper.

The author, David Alzofan, gave permission in 2023 for the prototype to be shared with the Atari community and it has been archived by J. Hardie of the National Videogame Museum.

I (the author) had some experience with Zork thanks to my mid-1970's connections at Stanford, and Cathryn and I tried to correct everything I found awful about that title, which I realize was a landmark but felt more frustrating than entertaining to me.

Once you reach the "castle" on the mountaintop, you have to defeat the sorceress. That takes some magic in addition to sword skills. Sword fights were designed somewhat in the vein of an RPG, with dialog and description generated, not only when you DID something, but when you DIDN'T do something. If you fail to defeat the sorceress, the game throws you back to the beginning again, but each reincarnation makes the game easier to do and after a couple of reincarnations, you should be able to defeat the sorceress. The reincarnation feature was to encourage the user to explore the landscape, where a lot of surprises and interesting characters were hidden.

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Further Info:

• Search at Atari 8-bit Forever
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• Search at Museum of Computer Adventure Game History

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