Happy Birthday!

King of Dragon Pass first went on sale in the iOS App Store on 7 September 2011. So today is the first anniversary of its public appearance. Happy Birthday!

It’s older than a year, however. Today might be a good time to run through its history.

The earliest document we have seems to be a proposal for a Dragon Pass computer game, dated 19 March 1996. The oldest correspondence (to Greg Stafford) is dated 10 April 1996. I don’t recollect exactly when we started serious preproduction, but it was towards the end of 1996. Full time work probably began at the start of 1997.

Box artwork

We delivered the Gold Master CD to manufacturing on 12 October 1999. We began shipping on 29 October 1999. At some point, there was a second print run.

On 21 March 2000, the game won the award for Best Art in the second Independent Games Festival.

The last update to the Mac/Windows game (version 1.7) was on 8 October 2002.

In 2006, we signed a deal for online distribution of the game. We then attempted to deliver a game that the publisher could distribute. Sadly, we were not able to rebuild the game without introducing some significant bugs.

Early design work

The iPhone version began with some design work in 2009, to see if the game would work on the smaller screen. It looked like the user interface and game play were practical, so actual coding began on 23 December 2009. This was never a full-time project, so even though it was approximately 1/3 the work of the original version, it actually took about as long to complete.

On 1 September 2011, King of Dragon Pass 2.0 was approved for the App Store. We started sending out PR, and released it on 7 September.

Exploration on iPad

We continued to update the game to add features (VoiceOver support and new scenes) and fix bugs. Creating a Universal version that would natively support iPad as well as iPhone took a bit longer, and we just released that on 5 September 2012.

Meanwhile, GOG.com was able to patch the original title so that it could be downloaded (for Windows only). They released this build on 28 August 2012.

So that’s a brief timeline of the game. Happy Birthday, King of Dragon Pass, however old you are!