paper manual and quick reference card. The utility disk would let players import characters from The Bard's Tale, Wizardry and Ultima III, as well as rename characters. Richard Garriott of Origin Systems believed that Deathlord unduly resembled Origin's Ultima games. He ended Origin's affiliation with EA after the company published it, and later Ultima games included a pirate character named Pirt Snikwah. Reception Computer Gaming Worlds Scorpia in 1988 described Deathlord as "A mediocre effort at best" and "a compendium of standard CRPG features glossed over with a tinge of pseudo-Orientalism by pasting Japanese names on as much as they could". Criticisms included poor documentation, poor class balance, and meaningless character alignment. The game hid the townspeople with important pieces of information, making mapping necessary, and frequently the player had to search many squares in an area for an important item. She described a dungeon as "one of the most idiotic dungeons ever", with a two-level maze of locked and fake doors, with a diagonal passage full of teleports and fake walls above. Without a lack of mapping aids, this was very difficult, especially in sixteen-level dungeons that did not contribute to the story. In 1993, Scorpia called the game "poorly designed and implemented mishmash with a quasi-Ultima look", "extremely pointless", and "definitely one to avoid". Compute! discussed the game's high difficulty and poor quality of the manual. The magazine stated that Deathlord was not the most impressive game, but was a good one. Home of the Underdogss Sarinee Achavanuntakul calls Deathlord "One of the best, largest, and most underrated RPGs ever made" and goes on to say it, "offers a unique gameworld inspired by Japanese myths, plenty of traditional exploration-based fun, and the largest map ever made for an Apple II and Commodore 64 game." Legacy In 2022, a free modernized version was released as Deathlord Relorded on itch.io. Using a custom open source build (available on GitHub) of AppleWin, it fixes many bugs and completely replaces the user interface. Other changes include updated races, classes with bonuses and streamlined backups and restores. References External links Images of Deathlord package, manual and screenshots from C64Sets.com Archived GeoCities fan site with maps and walkthrough Deathlord Relorded The source code for the custom emulation layer of Deathlord Relorded 1987 video games Apple II games Commodore 64 games Electronic Arts games Fantasy video games Japan in non-Japanese culture Role-playing video games Video