Chances are, unless you’re an old geezer like me, you’ve never heard of FTL Games. Yet, if you’ve played an RPG in the past 15 years, then you’ve unknowingly felt FTL’s influence on the genre. There are moments in gaming when a paradigm is introduced and becomes a standard for years to come, and FTL shattered previous notions of what an RPG could be when they launched Dungeon Master on the Atari ST in 1987.

Humble Beginnings

Way back in the Bronze Age of digital gaming, even before Electronic Arts owned every game company in the universe, there once was a little company called FTL (Faster Than Light) that began life in sunny San Diego, California. Operating under the umbrella of Software Heaven, Inc., FTL was founded by Wayne Holder in 1982 shortly after he created Oasis Systems, which had dabbled in the spell checking market. FTL had a single objective: make games. Two years later, in March of 1984, FTL released their first title, SunDog: Frozen Legacy for the Apple II platform. Though I can’t say this with any assurance, it is possible FTL pioneered the act of using a capital letter in the middle of a word, paving the way for hundreds of game names to come.

SunDog: Frozen Legacy

While it was a modest success on the Apple II, an enhanced version for the Atari ST released in 1985 proved to be the biggest seller for the newly launched computer platform. SunDog was a science-fiction game that was similar to Elite, though much more narrow in scope with a back story that drove the strategy forward.

Your character inherits a one-man star freighter from a dead uncle (naturally), and with it a contract that your uncle had not been able to complete. The contract involves aiding a religious group in their effort to build a colony. Problem is, you have zero idea where this colony is, so you venture out into the great void in an attempt to locate the mysterious planet, buy, find and deliver cargo needed for construction and, finally, locate the cryogenically frozen colonists who will ultimately inhabit the colony.