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The first King’s Field (1994)

Thirteen days after the PlayStation launched in Japan, a business-software company released a first-person dungeon unlike anything else on the shelf.

King’s Field was released in Japan on 16 December 1994, thirteen days after the PlayStation itself went on sale there. Its maker, FromSoftware, had been founded in 1986 by Naotoshi Zin as a developer of business software; this was the company’s first video game. It was a strange debut: a fully polygonal, first-person dungeon crawler at a moment when console role-playing games were still sprite-based and menu-driven. Its ancestors were the first-person dungeon crawlers of home computers, Wizardry above all, rebuilt in real time.

The game sends Jean Alfred Forrester into the Royal Cemetery of Verdite to find his father Hauser, who vanished there with his soldiers. The cemetery is the whole game: five floors, each a graveyard for a class of the dead, soldiers first, then knights and nobles, then the aides of earlier kings, and at the bottom the Last King himself. Famitsu scored it 30 out of 40, respect rather than rapture, but it sold well enough in Japan that a sequel followed in seven months. It was never officially released outside Japan; English-speaking players waited for a fan translation patch, which arrived in 2006.

THE RECORD

Dates, price, and afterlives

¥6,300 at launch

FromSoftware’s own product listing gives the launch price as ¥6,300. A budget PS one Books reissue followed on 15 November 2001 at ¥1,800, and a Game Archives download on 26 July 2007 kept the game on sale into the PlayStation 3 era.

The music

The score is by Koji Endo and Kaoru Kono, credited as the composers of King’s Field on the soundtrack discs of the 2007 Dark Side Box. The house sound of the trilogy starts here.

The remake inside the tool

In 2000 FromSoftware released Sword of Moonlight, a Windows construction kit for building King’s Field games, and packed a complete remake of this game inside it as the sample project. For many players it remains the most accessible version of the original.

The company side

How a spreadsheet company became a game studio, and what it made next, is told in the FromSoftware archive, whose origins page covers this game as the first entry of the whole catalogue.

The FromSoftware origins page The remake and the tool More from the Library

The first King’s Field (1994)

THE RECORD

THE FIRST WORD