Obviously for a blog of this nature, the various officially licensed Conan games are going to be of particular interest. As near as I can tell, this release from Datasoft was the first Conan game to be released, although it really isn't much of a Conan game after all. It was originally designed by Eric Robinson and Eric Parker for the Apple II and then ported to other 8-bit systems such as the Atari 400/800 and the Commodore 64.
One of Datasoft's early distinguishing features was that they were enthusiastic about licensed games. Starting in 1984, the company released games based on Bruce Lee, The Goonies, Zorro, the Dallas TV series, and The Neverending Story, and with the exceptions of Dallas Quest and Neverending Story these games were all platforming action games with a certain amount of puzzle-solving.
In Conan, you control the alleged barbarian as he must traverse a castle divided into seven levels to defeat an evil wizard. Killing a wizard is a classic go-to move for sword-and-sorcery stories, so in that sense the game is more or less on-brand. Where it starts getting hazy is that Conan is occasionally aided by a friendly bird, which was never a feature in any of Robert E. Howard's stories, and instead of using a standard weapon, Conan throws swords that loop back to him like boomerangs.
Conan runs at a pretty fast clip, he can safely fall any distance, and he takes long somersaulting leaps, and passing levels generally requires that the player master Conan's jumping ability to avoid falling into lethal hazards like lava pits or beds of spikes. Swords can be thrown to fend off enemies such as bats or giant bugs, and keys and gems need to be collected to unlock doors or operate certain mechanisms.
The game is actually not bad at all. The controls can be unpredictable in that Conan sometimes gets caught on ledges in odd ways or they won't respond as quickly as modern players are accustomed to, but each level has a distinguishing feature. In level 3, for instance, you have to make use of portals that teleport you to a different floor to get a gem, which you place on an altar to create giant air bubbles from a lava pit, which you ride on to rise high enough to jump into a hole that takes you to the next level. It's a challenge to get through all seven levels but not an insurmountable one.
The reward for defeating Volta is a congratulatory screen that says Conan "continued in search of high adventure," but the character depicted on the screen, wearing full armor and helmet, doesn't resemble any popular depiction of Conan, even if Conan did occasionally dress that way in Howard's stories. Later revisions of the game replaced this figure with something closer to the classic Conan image. The reason for this, along with other departures from Conan's, uh, canon is because the game allegedly began as an unrelated game called Visigoth that was retitled and slightly modified to be a Conan game after Datasoft secured the license as a tie-in with Conan the Destroyer. Not uncommon for the gaming industry but this unserious approach has persistently dogged Conan as a property.
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