Old School Dungeons and Dragons video game

While the Gold Box Companion has been around for years, SNEG's Steam release of the Gold Box Classics, which also throws in the Eye of the Beholder series and a few other games, comes with updated versions of the Companion and the All-Seeing Eye preinstalled.

That's how I do it, because the thought of forcing my friends to draw on graph paper while I recite the exact dimensions of every room makes me want to eat a bullet. Even the annotatable automatic map snapped to the window's right is like having the kind of DM who just uncovers the dungeon on the table as you explore. Where the original games were strict interpretations of the rules as written, having the Companion is like playing D&D with a Dungeon Master who skips the boring stuff and ignores the more unfair rules, which actually brings it closer to the real experience of playing D&D.

The work of Joonas Hirvonen, who also created the All Seeing Eye companion apps for the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Companion snaps a menu to the top of the game window that shows summaries of your characters, complete with HP and XP bars, and gives access to a suite of options that include leveling up away from the training hall (while also ignoring race-based level caps), storing the spells you've currently got memorized then restoring them with one click, automatically identifying magic items, restoring lost levels to characters who've been drained, and so on. Thanks to the Gold Box Companion, modern players don't.

When we played these games in the late '80s and early '90s, we had to put up with that stuff. SNEG also rereleased Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse and Stronghold, which use the same launcher, but didn't include them in the bundle.

The bundle of Gold Box Classics SNEG released on Steam doesn't include the 1991 online game for obvious reasons, or Spelljammer or the two Buck Rogers games made in the engine but not published with gold boxes, yet does include the Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Eye of the Beholder series, as well as Menzoberranzan and Dungeon Hack, none of which were given gold boxes or made with the engine. Confusingly, not every game made with the Gold Box engine was released in a gold box, and which games should be counted depends who you ask. The name Gold Box refers both to the boxes some of SSI's games were released in, and the name of the engine they were made in.

Old School Dungeons and Dragons video game