Interceptor Software‘s Tales of the Arabian Knights was the first game I ever played on a real Commodore 64, back in 1984.

A friend, who had a C64, invited me ’round to play it. I remember it taking approximately 30 minutes to load, and I pointed out that games on my ZX Spectrum at home never took so long to load, but he said “it would be worth it.” Oh, how I now laugh…

When I first saw this game I thought it was quite original and was relatively impressed. Years later I saw the Sun Electronics‘ arcade game, Arabian, and realised that this was a rip-off*, so my view of it after that dipped.

Coming back to it now: it’s from that dark, old age of video games when just stepping on the wrong pixel would kill you, so it feels very old and archaic to play. The music is nice, and there’s some variation in the gameplay – like the side-scrolling boat/flying carpet sections – although they don’t really add up to much. The title screen even claims the game has some digitised speech, although I didn’t hear any.

Tales of the Arabian Nights is worth a look if you want to compare it to the Arabian arcade game. Otherwise you’ll probably not get a great deal out of it. Other than frustration.

* = I could be wrong and Interceptor Micros could have paid for an official Arabian license for the conversion, although it doesn’t state that it’s official anywhere in the game. It’s more likely – because it happened a lot at the time – that this ‘tribute’ was unofficial, and therefore remains on shaky ground.

More: Arabian on Wikipedia

Apostrophe use is wrong here. It should be “Micros”, not “Micro’s”. Correct grammar was not a priority for some programmers.