Nox Archaist

Nox Archaist is a role-playing video game released in December 2020^[1] for the then-historical platform Apple II, alongside contemporary macOS and Windows systems.^[2] The game was inspired by the early-to-mid Ultima games^[1] and The Bard's Tale.^[2] The story unfolds in a sword and sorcery setting of a world named Vali:^[3] Sent to an island region to investigate a cult, the player character finds companions and undertakes excursions across diverse terrain, encountering NPCs, monsters, and magical hazards along the way. A DLC named Lord of Storms was released in 2023.^[4]

Nox Archaist
Developer(s)	6502 Workshop
Publisher(s)	6502 Workshop
Programmer(s)	Megan Lemmert
Platform(s)	Apple II, macOS, Windows
Release	2020
Genre(s)	Role-playing video game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Beginning in 2015, development was conducted by 6502 Workshop, a retrocomputing group headed by programmer Megan Lemmert.^[5] Programming was done in the assembly language of MOS Technology 6502, the original Apple II processor.^[6] The 8-bit^[7] game engine is tile-based and uses the HGR mode (280 × 192 pixels).^[5] The RAM requirement for the Apple II release is 128k.^[2]

Following the announcement of the project in 2016, a technical presentation was held at the 2017 edition of KansasFest, an annual event for Apple II enthusiasts. A Kickstarter campaign was launched later in the same year but failed to reach the funding target.^[5] A second Kickstarter campaign to publish the game ran successfully in 2019.^[2]

Apple II lead designer Steve Wozniak makes a cameo as a non-player character.^[1] Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, appears as Lord British, his in-game personification from that series.^[2]

Lemmert won the 2021 KansasFest Apple II Forever Award for her work on the game.^[8]