others release crumbling ceiling or pit traps. Chests can be picked up by enemies if they step over them. There are several enemies in the dungeon. In general, "human" type enemies are more dangerous than creatures. Often the game will describe whether the monster one encounters is strong or weak. Development Sword of Fargoal was created by author and programmer Jeff McCord based on his original dungeon adventure, Gammaquest II, which was programmed in BASIC for the Commodore PET computer and written in 19791981 while he was still in high school in Lexington, Kentucky. Gammaquest II created randomly generated dungeons that were revealed piece-by-piece as the character explored the map, and stayed "lit" behind the character as it moved, emulating the "mapping" of a dungeon level. The game graphics, however, were limited to the character set of the computer. McCord accepted an offer to publish the game from the video game developer and publisher Epyx in 1982 on the VIC-20. His original name for the new version was Sword of Fargaol, deriving the name from the Old English spelling of jail (gaol), but his producer at Epyx, Susan Lee-Merrow, convinced him to change it to its present form. The following year, with the release of the Commodore 64, McCord was asked to release a version of Sword of Fargoal for that machine as well. McCord was unable to implement the conversion as it was written in BASIC, and the sprite-based graphics required machine language programming. McCord's friend Scott Corsaire (then Carter) and Steve Lepisto wrote all the machine-language code that was needed so that game would perform fast enough for the C64 version of the game. Reception Computer Gaming World noted some bugs and inconsistencies with the documentation, but called Sword of Fargoal "an exciting and intriguing adventure game. The graphics are beautifully crafted". Ahoy! called the VIC-20 version "an engrossing adventure-type maze game". The magazine stated that the Commodore 64 version was "nearly addictive", but criticized the lack of a save-game feature. It also stated that the randomized dungeons removed mapping and solving mysteries, important aspects of adventure gaming, and concluded, "This game is so close to its goal, and yet so far". Computer Gaming World in 1996 listed Sword of Fargoal as No. 147 on the "Top 150 Best Video Games of All Time". Legacy An enhanced iOS port was released in December 2009 and briefly was removed