Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World (MM2) More of Everything

The success of the first game let Jon Van Caneghem grow New World Computing from a one-man effort into an actual studio. Might and Magic II sticks to that same "more of everything" philosophy, but a bigger team is already visible from the start — alongside Jon on Apple II and DOS, names like Stephen L. Cox, Mark Caldwell, Avril Harrison, and Vincent DeQuattro show up, while the IBM version was handled by the external Inside Out Software. This isn't a garage miracle anymore — it's the first stage of the studio turning professional.

In design terms, MM2 expanded the series with an auto-map, hirelings, new character classes, and an even bigger scale of numbers and quests. That scale took a toll on the quality of the first release, though — reviews and later retrospectives keep returning to the bugs in version 1.0 and the sense that the game had swung too far toward pure hack-and-slash. MM2 tends to get described, then, as ambitious but noticeably less polished than the debut.

MobyGames lists 1988 as the release year, and Compute!'s Gazette notes that Book II was already on the market by the summer of 1989, priced at $39.95, still under the New World Computing banner. The game spread across an unusually wide range of platforms — from Apple II and DOS to the Amiga, the Mac, Japanese home computers, and later console ports, including the Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES. Unlike the first game, no reliably confirmed sales figures for MM2 survive publicly.

Scorpia wrote that the game had drifted toward "monster mash/Monty Haul" — an escalation of monsters and loot without a story to match.

That quote basically shaped MM2's image from launch onward. Later players and reviewers tend to be kinder — praising the sprawling world, the freedom to explore, and the fact that it was one of the first classic "blobbers" to come with an auto-map — but even they note the steep entry barrier and the need for patience, or a walkthrough. MM2 also cemented a few traits that would follow the series for years: enormous numeric scales, a balance built more around "how do I get around this" than an elegant difficulty curve, and a blend of fantasy with science-fiction elements. There's also a well-worn anecdote that Van Caneghem later "got back" at Scorpia for her harsh review by naming a monster in the next game after her.

MM2 never got a major official expansion, but it was ported unusually widely. As with the first game, the best-preserved traces of its contemporary fan community are practical tools — print ads show character editors marketed together for Might and Magic 1, 2, and 3. The modern, strictly modding-focused scene around MM2 is noticeably thinner and less documented than the one that grew up around MM3–V.