Gold Box is the name for a series of computer games produced by SSI Simulations. The company won a license to produce games based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game system from TSR, Inc. These games shared a common engine that came to be known as the "Gold Box Engine" after the gold boxes in which most games of the series were sold.

The first game produced in the series was Pool of Radiance, released in 1988. Earlier games in the series were playable on the Apple IIe, the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the IBM PC. Later games in the series were released only for the Macintosh, Amiga, and PC.

The "Gold Box Engine" had two main features. Outside of character creation, game play took place in a screen that displayed text interactions, the names and current status of your party of characters, and a window which displayed images of geography, and large or small pictures of characters or events. When combat occurred, which was often in these games, you switched to a full screen combat mode, in which player character icons could move about to cast spells or attack icons representing the enemies. All the games typically involved long dungeon crawls, and were heavier on combat than on role playing.

The Gold Box games formed a number of series in which you could move characters who had finished one game to the next one in the series:

• The Forgotten Realms series:
  • Pool of Radiance
  • Curse of the Azure Bonds
  • Secret of the Silver Blades
  • Pools of Darkness

• The Dragonlance series:
  • Champions of Krynn
  • Death Knights of Krynn
  • Dark Queen of Krynn

• The Savage Frontier series (based in the Forgotten Realms setting):
  • Gateway to the Savage Frontier
  • Treasures of the Savage Frontier

In addition, characters from "Pool of Radiance" could be imported into Hillsfar , a game based on an entirely different engine, and then exported into "Curse of the Azure Bonds." The system was improved over time, adding better colors, graphics, more class levels, and new story lines.

Finally, the memory of these games is kept alive by Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, or FRUA for short, released in 1993, which was an editor that allowed players to create their own stories using a version of the Gold Box engine. An active community grew up around this game, including hacks that expanded its powers and its graphics abilities.

However interest in the series eventually waned, although the mantle of this genre was later assumed by more recent role-playing games such as Baldur's Gate.

See also

• List of Forgotten Realms computer games

External links

• Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor