This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 14, April 2025

Since this issue is about retro games, I want to go all the way back to my childhood to explain how I ended up starting my Open Blades of Exile project.

One day when I was a kid, my dad heard about this game called Geneforge. He set my brother and me up with the free demo of Geneforge 3 (Spiderweb Software, 2005) on the Mac Mini we shared. My brother got the first turn playing it and I watched.

He was controlling a robed magician called a “Shaper” who could create fire-breathing dinosaurs, acid-spitting worms, and hulking humanoid melee fighters to do their bidding. And this monster creation mechanic wasn’t just a gimmick, it was deeply woven into this engrossing fantasy story about the nature of life, genetic modification, consciousness, and morality.

It blew my f@#$ing fourth grader mind.

My brother and I pooled together our allowance and ended up mailing Spiderweb Software an envelope of cash and coins to receive a product unlock code so we could go beyond the demo zones.

The Geneforge franchise, a newer offering from Spiderweb Software, led us down a rabbit hole. I found the community forums where the other fans were deeply discussing the philosophy and lore of the games and playing forum-based RPGs themed after Spiderweb games.

I wanted to be in every conversation, and being an immature kid with no formed social skills or internet etiquette, I spammed the hell out of every thread, trying to put my username on the “last response by” field of every single post.

The moderators rightfully slapped me with a “one post per hour” restriction, which felt like an irrevocable mark of shame at the time. I made a new forum account and went by a new persona, trying to be better and less annoying than my former incarnation.

The mods knew I was the same person all along, but they graciously let it slide because I had mostly learned my lesson and started participating more thoughtfully.

So, being on the forums is how I discovered Blades of Avernum (Spiderweb Software, 2000), which featured a scripting language and a level editor for creating adventures. I got really into it, and it was basically my first exposure to programming.

The community would do these design contests to make adventures over the course of a week or weekend – I now recognize that this was game jamming by another name. By the time I came on the scene, it was petering out. I’d make an adventure for a contest, but only a few other folks would make one too.

That’s when I discovered Blades of Exile (Spiderweb Software, 1997), which came before Blades of Avernum and had a much deeper library of adventures to play, some that take place in entirely original settings.

Blades of Exile is an adventure-building RPG. You explore fantasy worlds in a top-down perspective, controlling a party of up to six customizable heroes. There’s an overworld full of random encounters as well as in-depth towns and dungeons to explore. The combat, story, dialog, and skill mechanics are all deep and intricate.

Some adventures take place on the surface world, while some take place in Exile, a sprawling network of caves where outcasts, dissidents, and magical creatures have been banished by a tyrannical Empire.

Players start by playing through some moderately easy built-in adventures, then they could go online to pick harder ones from a catalog of more than 200 adventures lovingly created by fans.

I was so consumed by the whole thing that when my fifth grade teacher had us give presentations on a subject of our choice, I chose Blades of Exile and lectured to my classmates about this guy named Jeff Vogel who dropped out of grad school to make his own games. I made a whole tutorial adventure for my classmates to play on a laptop I brought in.

I think the other kids thought this was pretty cool.

Much later, in 2020, I was an adult graduating college at the very start of a global lockdown and pandemic. I had lots of free time – a massive privilege, I know – but I also had depression and anxiety worse than ever.

One of my outlets was coding, and I downloaded the source code for Open Blades of Exile and fixed a few bugs for fun, then contributed these patches back to the project. Then I realized it was not feasible to get the game working in its current state. It would take hundreds of hours of work.

Let me explain.

Years after it was released, Blades of Exile became incompatible with modern operating systems and the creator released its source code to the community. The community-run port, Open Blades of Exile (2007), never really got over the initial hump of making stable, playable builds ported to modern computers.

In 2025, you can’t actually go and enjoy those hundreds of adventures I did without being overwhelmed with game-breaking bugs.

Years after those first bug fixes, I was unemployed and my passion project’s initial Steam release had flopped, which left me discouraged and thinking I should pick a new project that would come with an audience attached.

I came up with the idea to run an IndieGoGo campaign, pitching that I would spend the summer revamping Open Blades of Exile. I reached out to Jeff Vogel, and he agreed to share my campaign when I launched it. This worked extremely well, bringing in half my fundraising goal.

But bigger than that, an anonymous individual reached out saying it had been a longtime dream of theirs to fund someone restoring Blades of Exile, and that I was clearly the right person for the job. They sent me an external payment that brought me over the goal line.

I hope when I release the restoration that person will be satisfied!

For people like this anonymous backer, the pitch is dead simple: I am making Blades of Exile playable again. That’s all I really need to say, because of the sheer amount of love and devotion this game garnered the first time it was released. People have been waiting and hoping for this to happen for just about two decades.

For others, it’s a harder pitch I have not cracked the code on yet. The game looks very outdated. The mechanics are very complicated.

But it was created by the person with the longest full-time career of any indie developer to ever live – who is still working. It’s all about creating your own stories and adventures, and people loved it so much they still remember their favorite player-made adventures today. This thing inspired people and changed lives in its time.

This crazy, niche project is for hardcore Spiderweb Software fans, but it’s also for me. I want to finally play the game and have great fun. I never got to as a kid because it was too buggy.

Once I got the funding, I wanted to get out of my hometown. I heard about a program called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, where you can go live on a farm for free by helping out with the farm work.

This sounded so crazy it just might work, so I picked a farm close to a city I wanted to try living in: Chicago.

So, I was feeding goats and sweeping up their sh$@ and pulling weeds and composting, mulching, and doing manual labor unlike any job I’d ever had. After that was done, I would code on Open Blades of Exile.

I was stretching the IndieGoGo money the best I could, so I would ride public transit into the city and go to ICG meetups.

Now I’m very close to making a beta release of Open Blades of Exile on itch.io and I started a Patreon for a second wave of fundraising. I am so broke at this point; I’ve gone overboard and lost a lot of income over this project when I should have gotten a real job.

Please take pity on me and support the Patreon!

You can find Nat’s Open Blades of Exile project on Patreon, where you can both support their work and win a Blades of Exile coffee mug. https://www.patreon.com/blades_itch_edition

This article was submitted by a member of the Back Alley Games community and was edited for publication by our staff. Opinions and thoughts expressed within are not those of Back Alley Games.