Doomdark's Revenge
The sequel that got harder
Mike Singleton's 1985 follow-up to Lords of Midnight kept the landscaping engine, made the world bigger and the game considerably less forgiving — and charted for two years anyway.
The sequel to Lords of Midnight, published by Beyond in 1985, running the same landscaping engine over a larger and more hostile world.
Fast facts
- Author: Mike Singleton. Publisher: Beyond.
- Same technique: a stored map and a library of parts, with each view assembled on demand.
- Different temperament: more characters, more independent agendas, far less guidance.
Chart performance
CRASH charts, 7 appearances:
| Date | Position | Chart |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 1985 | #3 | Top 50 |
| May 1985 | #5 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Sep 1985 | #10 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Mar 1986 | #9 | Top 30 |
| Nov 1986 | #9 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Dec 1986 | #9 | Adventure Top 30 |
The same two-year shape as its predecessor and the same migration into the Adventure chart — but note the ceiling. Doomdark’s Revenge peaks at #3 against Lords of Midnight’s #2, and then sits several places lower for the rest of its run.
That gap is the sequel’s whole story in one number. It is a bigger, deeper, more ambitious game than the original, and it sold slightly less well for slightly less long, because what it added was difficulty.
How it was received
The reviews split, and the split runs along exactly the line the chart position implies.
| Magazine | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 10/10 | February 1985 (issue 13, Adventure Trail) |
| Personal Computer Games | 10/10 | February 1985 |
| Sinclair User | 9/10 | February 1985 |
| Personal Computer News | 9/10 | January 1985 |
| C&VG | 7/10 | March 1985 |
| Your Computer | 3/5 | January 1985 |
Two perfect scores and a 3/5 for the same game in the same season is not reviewer error. It is what happens when a game rewards the players who already know the world and offers newcomers almost nothing — the CRASH review credits Mike Singleton by name and dwells on Shareth the Heartstealer’s Icemark, the kind of detail that only lands if you played the first one.
ACE later scored it 940/1000, its highest mark of the three Beyond games in this Vault. Retrospectives are written by the self-selected audience the next section describes.
Harder on purpose
The first game teaches you its world. The second assumes you already know it and withholds the scaffolding: more lords with their own loyalties and objectives, a map you can get comprehensively lost in, and a much greater chance of putting a dozen hours into a position that turns out to be unwinnable.
This is the standard shape of an 8-bit sequel and it is worth naming, because the pattern recurs across this Vault. The people who buy a sequel are, by definition, people who finished or at least mastered the original — a self-selected audience of experts. Designing for them produces a game that is better on its own terms and narrower, and the chart position is the market registering exactly that.
Kick Off 3 is the same lesson learnt the opposite way round: changing what made the original distinctive instead of intensifying it.