Menzoberranzan was a 1994 Dungeon and Dragon’s game revolving around Drizzt and the treacherous house Do’Urden, developed by Dreamforge Entertainment under the publishing arm of SSI. It was a classic dungeon crawler built on the same engine as Strahd’s Possession and Stone Prophet.
It was so unbelievably mediocre that it forced TSR at the time to rethink how they did games licensing. Here’s the story about how a bad Drizzt game saved D&D!
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Oh no, I seem to have gotten myself into some sort of a 'posting this link here so that you come play Neverwinter Online with me as a community' kind of situation:
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The devs have seen spiders we know nothing about
I would really love to see you handle the the other Masterpiece Collection games from this era – The hilariously batshit insane Dark sun games, the vastly different games of the World of Aden games and my favourite of the bunch – Al Qadim's The Genie's Curse.
I mean, there is the Eye of the Beholder series which had a similar sort of interface to Menzo and the 'Lofts but didn't seem as charming and had required hidden walls in their first area which pretty much made me "M'kay, not for me!" as a kid and I haven't yet returned to that series.
Most recently went through the Dark Sun games on stream and I had forgotten what sheer joy the writers had with that game. Every single storylet of that game is bizarre and wonderful. Second game was a bit of a diappointment in terms of tone compared to the first game, but the was enough craziness to the plot to keep me going.
Entomorph, the 2nd of the World of Adven games is also a trip – It's in the same engine as Genie's Curse so I was excited to try it and I did not see the storyline coming one bit. I tried Thunderscape which had a surprisingly banging techno-ish soundtrack compared to what I was expecting, but the scenes are just all soo…. brown… I managed 4 hours of wanding around shit covered walls with enemies that sounded like broken radar machines before I called it quits.
These are the shortest giants I've ever seen.
21:01 Nice you mentioned the game's great music. 'Drizzt's Shelter' and 'Temple of Dumathoin' are both excellent compositions IMO. Great video overall!
21:24 Krusty the Klown?!
The pronunciations made an otherwise amazing video kind of painful to watch. I'm so used to pronouncing Do'Urden as "due-arden" that everything else just sounds wrong
ngl I'm here for the thumbnail image hunk
What makes Drizzt edgy?
I love how he brings up 90s drow being perfect targets for thumbnails, but then the actual thumbnail is a shirtless human man.
Ask the drow currently backstabbing you if Menzoberrazan is right for you.
Ohhh… so THAT'S how you say it.
As soon as I saw the first 4 words of the title I thought "I wonder if it is Menzoberranzan?"
Relatable about choosing Dragonlance over FR and Drizt.
Oh myyyyy… this is right up my alley!!!!! ❤❤❤❤
Great video, Drizzt in my pants.
Fantastic video, great work my dude 👍
Love it! Been sitting in my game library for awhile, need to give it a play. BTW, got to love your presentation. Reminds me a lot of early youtube game reviews. A nostalgia type video already full of nostalgia. You got a good hook haha
I just spent half an hour yelling the correct pronunciation at my tablet while most of my coworkers looked on in concern…
I was a huge Drizzt fan at the time and I remember being absolutely blown away. By how terrible literally everyone agreed this game was. It made no sense how SSI had gone seemingly overnight from putting out era- and virtually genre-defining CRPGs to whatever this was (though granted they did not develop it themselves). Edit: I totally believe it was not that bad, if there is one thing I have learned in my decades of computer gaming fandom it is that sometimes hyperbolic hatred of games means the game is more mediocre than terrible, and people are just trying to one-up each other to bash it
Lolth should always have spider bewbs.
The Gold Box games were the best, and ran well on very modest machines.
Infuriated that the game misspells yochlol; never gonna forget that word after what one did to my boy Wulfgar
Looks like SSI liked using that weird resolution that had those wide pixels. The other game I remember using it was Blood & Magic. The graphics in that resolution always looked strange to me, a bit like old C64 games.
Drow keep spiders as pets and use humanoids like orcs and bugbears as slaves and fodder in battle
The RA Salvatore books are what first introduced me to literature and reading. I consumed those books as a child and it opened a whole new world to me, I read every single book in that long series, and I eventually branched out to other fantasy series, science fiction, and also nonfiction. I still sometimes go back to read the older books for nostalgias sake, I can’t help but love them. And for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to play a video game set in that world, a GOOD video game. I’ve since given up on that dream though, I doubt I’ll ever see one, not in my lifetime.
Menzoberranzan looks like a bad version of Thunderscape (which is great, btw)
I remember grabbing this from a computer booth at the BX when I was on Okinawa. Fun but a little clunky.
The music of this game is so awesome!
NWO footage
dragonlance you say? in 8th grade i read 2 books with raistlin and carmoran in them… i remember loving them. i had no idea what dnd was back then