Sword of Sodan

About Sword of Sodan

Sword of Sodan (1988) is Discovery Software's Amiga hack and slash game in which royal twins Brodan and Shardan fight through eleven areas to destroy the necromancer Zoras.

Sword of Sodan in Depth

Lordan, ruler of the northern kingdom, once survived the evil necromancer Zoras's attempt to overthrow him thanks to the hero Sodan. From his tower of human bones, Zoras learns forgotten spells from ancient parchments and conjures nightmarish creatures that march on Lordan's castle. Lordan sends his twin children, Brodan and Shardan, across the Cthol mountains to safety before he is killed, and they are raised and trained in swordsmanship by a bitter old man, who finally hands them the sword of Sodan. They fight their way to Castle Craggamoor and, after defeating Zoras, are accepted as the land's true rulers.

Players choose Brodan or Shardan, identical in play despite their looks, walking left to right through a horizontally scrolling world and fighting with their swords standing or kneeling; the shield is purely decorative. A map shows progress toward the castle between levels, with scrolls describing each location. The eleven areas run from the heroes' city gate through city streets, a forest and a graveyard, then six areas inside the castle's catacombs to the wizard's tower. Most levels are sword fights, though some have traps or puzzles. Players have five lives, an energy meter and a hit strength level raised by potions, which can also grant extra lives, brief invincibility or kill the current opponent outright. There are 13 enemy types and one ally, an ostrich-like creature called "the animal".

Making Sword of Sodan

Three Danish engineers created it at Discovery Software in 1988, with Visual Concepts working on a simultaneous Apple IIGS conversion. Two years later Innerprise Software, which had bought the rights, made a scaled-down Sega Genesis port with reduced graphics and sound and notable gameplay changes: enemies attack from both directions, potions are more common and can be combined, and the forest and other areas were cut or merged. Electronic Arts published it in North America and Europe and Sega in Japan, and Bethesda Softworks later ported it to Macintosh System 7.