Doriath (Commodore 64, 1985) and the Crux Desperationis (†)

Front Cover, Cassette version

The cross you see in brackets on the title of this post represents the symbol which Greek and Latin translators used to mark inconsistent or unclear part of the text (†). That particular sign was called crux desperationis and similarly I will use that sign when a particular game meets one of the following cases:

• Not easy or impossible to find;
• Release date uncertain;
• Announced and never released;
• Released and never announced.

The first crux I'm presenting it's an example of the first case scenario: "almost" impossible to find. Doriath is a minor Commodore 64 game which I personally never seen in its original form. The best I could do was just to retrieve scans of inlay, a dumped version and a detailed fan webpage. At this stage I can guess that since collectors and users didn't consider this game peculiar and interesting, it never satisfied the basic supply and demand criteria. But still something is not clear: why if even collectors don't really care about it, the original version is not on the market at all?

• It has been printed just in few copies?
• The game didn't sell well and all unsold stocks disappeared?

Last night so, I wondered if I could find any real trace of this piece but nothing again and even if a dumped copy is easy to find, it can't cool down that compulsion to find, possess and know more about it.

Anyway, one thing came up last night: Doriath was released either on disk (only C64), according to what one user claims on his Lemon64 personal game list.

From this tiny clue, I'm going start my research again. Updates - hopefully - soon.

Edit: I just want to mention the only Doriath fan page existent at the moment: site here.