Retrospective: Moonstone

It all comes back to the fighting, however, and the numerous grisly ways your knight can end his quest. I'm sure I wasn't alone in often playing badly on purpose, just to see what revolting death animations I could discover.

Combat itself was more in the wandering style of beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage (though set on a single screen) than the single plane one-on-one brawls of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, and each monster lair would throw numerous enemies at you. It was also delightfully ruthless. Enter the swamp area of the map and it was entirely possible to be killed instantly by murky creatures that burst from the earth and dragged you down. Some of the larger enemies could squash you flat in a single blow. And yet, perversely, once you'd worked out the correct combination of attack and distance for each type of foe it was fairly easy to romp through every encounter unscathed.

The genius of Moonstone was that it could be as shallow or deep as you fancied. You could play it as a single player gibfest and just dive in, heading straight for the lairs and slicing up whatever lay within. Or it could be an epic four-player quest, with all the backstabbing, stat levelling and inventory hoarding you could possibly want.

What stands out most, revisiting Moonstone in 2011, is that it really couldn't be made today. Not because of the violence, which now seems rather quaint set against a gaming landscape overflowing with first-person stealth kills and ragdoll abuse, but because so much of what made Moonstone memorable came about because of the limitations of the technology.

The disparate elements that Moonstone pulled together are no longer strange bedfellows. Almost every game now has a layer of RPG experience points built into its guts. The prospect of an open game map, where you could plot your own course, is standard fare today. And pitting multiple players against each other in a shared gamespace is nothing out of the ordinary.

No, if Moonstone were made today it would probably be a third person hack and slash game with little to distinguish it. Everything it tried to do would be achievable through the easiest and most direct means. It'd be The Last Templar, basically. By having to constrain its ambition in a 2D sprite-based world, by having to cram its multiplayer action onto one offline screen, by having to reconcile its deeper adventure elements with the visceral demands of arcade combat, Moonstone was forced to find design solutions that were more interesting, more ingenious, more distinctive.

That's why Moonstone endures for me. Not just because it's a great game, although it undoubtedly is, but because it represents a time when the design boundaries were tighter, the obstacles taller, and developers had to invent new ways to get past them. Technology has marched on, and those boundaries have been pushed back, thanks in part to games like Moonstone. Game worlds can now sprawl and grow, and genres bleed into one another. And yet so often the result is games that feel increasingly homogeneous, more similar than unique, and those brilliant oddball gems are fewer in number as a result.

It seems fitting to end on a quote from the poet David St. Hubbins, whose work provides so many obvious stitches in Moonstone's ferocious tapestry. Although he was writing at a time when video games were still in their infancy, Hubbins understood that modern man could still learn a lot from ancient wisdom. Today's developers would do well to take note.

And where are they now?

The little children of Stonehenge

And what would they say to us

If they were here... tonight?