Back in 2015 it was announced that the original The Bard’s Tale, The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate would be given FREE to all backers of the The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter for any pledges to tier $20 or higher.

It's been pretty quiet on that front ever since but InXile has finally issued an update with what's been going on with The Bard's Tale Trilogy Remasters.

inXile Entertainment also has an agreement in place with the original The Bard’s Tale III programmer Rebecca “Burger” Heineman to work on updated versions of the three games based on their Apple IIGS versions, to run natively on modern Windows and Mac PCs. Once she delivers on the enhanced versions, they too will be given free to backers.

Finally, some long-awaited update news on the original trilogy remasters. As you may remember, when we did our original crowdfunding campaign, we were approached by Olde Skuul and told that they were working on a remasters project. Due entirely to your requests, we agreed to offer these remasters as bonus extras in addition to your backer rewards when they were done.

The project was a large one, and was taking longer than anyone was hoping for. After discussing the situation with Olde Skuul, we agreed to part ways on this. However, the entire inXile development team – from Brian on down – wanted to see this project realized for both the backers and for a new generation of players, so we undertook a search to find the right partner for this project. That journey led us to Krome Studios, and we could not be happier with the work that they are doing so far. It is my pleasure to introduce Lindsay Parmenter, Head of Development of Krome, to walk us through a little of what they have in store for you.

The original Bard's Tale games hold a special place in our hearts - many of us here at Krome Studios, especially Design Lead James Podesta and myself, played the games back in the 80s and are also backers of Bard's Tale IV.

After some casual conversations with the inXile team, the opportunity came up to put something together that we think will be really great for the Trilogy remaster. Not only are we updating the games to work natively on modern systems, but we're also putting on a fresh coat of paint, to give a new generation of role-playing and dungeon-crawling fans an easier opportunity to experience these classic games.

As a short list, our goals for the Trilogy remaster are:

• Up-res the original art, but keep the art in theme with the originals (the original examples are from the Amiga version of Tales of the Unknown):
• And obviously it wouldn't be much good doing an up-res of character and enemy images if we didn't animate them!
• Add in various audio throughout the games for attacks, spells, and more. 
• Add some quality of life improvements, such as the automap, tooltip popups in the UI, etc. 

It's fantastic to be able to share with you some of the work that we've been doing on The Bard's Tale Trilogy. We know everybody's been waiting a while for this, and we look forward to updating you all with the progress in the months ahead.