The Legacy of Hydlide: A Look Back at a Groundbreaking Game
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Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist ’80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.
“IN OTHER DIMENSIONAL SPACE THREE JEWELS KEPT THE KINGDOM IN PEACE” Hydlide, T&E Soft’s groundbreaking “Active Role Playing Game.” Back in 1984 this game didn’t just set standards or raise bars, it invented them. Gaming still owes Hydlide a debt of gratitude. This was the Elden Ring of its day, an open world action RPG where half the fun lies in working out how to get somewhere and then trying to survive the journey using nothing but a sword, shield, and wit.
Its head-turning combination of ambition and freedom soon saw the game ported from its PC-88 home to just about every major computer brand Japan had for sale that decade, each new version of the game carefully adapted to fit its new home.
The Evolution of Hydlide Across Different Platforms
Some of it’s obvious. On every format this is a real-time RPG where Jim runs straight into enemies to attack them, and recovers his health by taking a quick break in the sunlight. The overworld layout stays the same, as does the overall goal. But some of Hydlide’s most important details are more subtle.
There are plenty of other details that seemed essential, but somehow the game is no less “Hydlide” if a port altered or even outright removed them. Like the game’s intro, explaining exactly why Jim “TRIED TO ATTACK THE MONSTER TO REESTABLISH THE KINGDOM.” The MSX version simply doesn’t bother with it, and the game doesn’t exactly suffer for its absence. It turns out the adventure itself really is enough.
So, that’s Hydlide then? Nothing more than a mixture of a few things it should and shouldn’t have with a few optional extras thrown in, like a recipe list? Yes but…no, not quite.
It was only after spending some time with the Sharp X1 version of the game that I realised what really mattered. Although this particular port appeared around the same time as all the others (1985), it took advantage of the hardware’s unique ability to give programmers quick access to all the RAM, all the time to produce something truly spectacular. I’m still Jim and I’m still off to restore peace to the land through physical violence, but here the game’s right-angled rivers have been replaced by more organic edges, and the rigid screen-by-screen exploration has been ditched in favour of a smooth free scrolling system. This is without a doubt the most advanced version of the game the ’80s ever had.
But it isn’t Hydlide. The magic’s gone. Enemies here blandly mingle with other types instead of being cleanly separated by the unbreakable edge of the screen, draining areas of both the safety that comes from knowing when I’m standing in a field of weak monsters and the sudden shock of blundering my way into a screen filled with something new.
The detail that’s been gained can’t match the clarity of what’s been lost. Hydlide is supposed to have rules. Order that keeps the chaos confined within each screen, every new view showing me no more or less than everything I’m supposed to see. Everywhere else it played like a high-speed string of tabletop encounters, a connected sequence of tactical maps covered with a limited range of terrain type squares and a smattering of monsters. On the Sharp X1, it was just an endless field with some random enemies in it, the gaming equivalent of being able to freely look around a movie set instead of seeing all of the action through the director’s lens.
At least T&E Soft only made that mistake once. The 2001 Windows remake of Hydlide upgraded the graphics once more, but returned to the familiar flip-screen wandering and striking and the unnatural right-angled corners of old. It could have easily expanded the story, introduced new mechanics, and given Jim an equipment screen or reams of new dialogue—nobody would have been surprised if a remake of a decades-old game tried to reinvent itself.
Instead it wanted to be something better—it wanted to be Hydlide.
