The Lords of Midnight ended with Doomdark the Witchking dead. In its sequel his daughter, Shareth the Heartstealer, Empress of the Icemark, takes her revenge by luring Luxor’s son Morkin into the frozen north. Luxor the Moonprince, Rorthron the Wise and a new character, Tarithel the Fey, who is to marry Morkin, ride through the Gate of Varenorn to bring him back. Mike Singleton kept the landscaping routines that drew the first game’s views and built a bigger, less predictable world around them. CRASH gave it ten out of ten, and its readers voted it straight to number 1 in the magazine’s Adventure chart.
Fast facts
- Author: Mike Singleton. Publisher: Beyond. £9.95, 48K Spectrum; later also for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC.
- Released: the end of 1984.
- Scale: 6,000 locations, 2,000 more than the first game, and 128 characters, against 32.
- Winning: several grades of victory, from rescuing Morkin to destroying Shareth and bringing everyone home.
- CRASH: ten out of ten in its Adventure Trail pages, issue 13, February 1985.
- Sinclair User: Gilbert Factor 9 (out of 10), February 1985.
A bigger, busier land
Sinclair User announced in October 1984 that the game would be on sale at the end of that month. It came out a little later: CRASH’s Christmas issue reported that help for Midnight players was “on the way, with the release of follow up Doomdark’s Revenge”.
The Icemark lies north of the Land of Midnight. Singleton explained it to Sinclair User for its 1985 Annual: the land was “divided between five races”, Shareth’s men in the far north-east and giants, dwarves, Fey and barbarians elsewhere, and “all are independent and may fight each other”. There was no single enemy army to defeat. Luxor had to win allies by diplomacy, and a race might want an object or a small quest done first. The first game had no women in it because of memory; this one had Shareth and Tarithel, which meant adding a gender to every character and new words to describe them.
The player starts with three characters, Luxor, Rorthron and Tarithel, and looks through their eyes in any of eight directions. CRASH’s review found that recruiting was much harder than in Lords of Midnight. Each lord had “his own lieges, hatreds and personality — reckless or cowardly, greedy or worthy, brave or treacherous”, and the review described Tarithel recruiting a Fey lord who then killed her. Personal Computer Games noted wolves, ice trolls and dragons that moved about instead of staying put. The screen changed colour through the day, from red at dawn to blue at night, and for the first time a character could go underground, into tunnels lit by flickering torches.
Fitting it in
The Lords of Midnight had left Singleton, he said, “about 3 bytes spare”, and Doomdark’s Revenge needed room for a far bigger world. He told CRASH in March 1985 how he found it. The first game had kept armies, characters and objects in tables of different formats, each needing “its own little routine for access”. In the sequel all the tables shared one format and one routine. Each character’s starting position was stored as a single location number instead of two coordinates. The text was compressed again: both games built their descriptions from a vocabulary of about 250 words with different endings, but where Midnight stored letters in five-bit blocks, Doomdark’s Revenge had room for “a byte per letter, which is a great luxury!” The routines that drew the pictures did not change.
The game still took six weeks longer than Singleton had planned. “As the original deadline was approaching I was pulling out all the stops and working till two or three in the morning,” he said. “So finishing Doomdark’s Revenge was a real grind.”
How it was received
CRASH’s Adventure Trail gave it ten for atmosphere and ten overall, and rated its difficulty as “more difficult than Lords of Midnight”. “Doomdark’s Revenge is assured a huge following and deservedly so,” it said. “It has improved on its predecessor in all the right ways.” John Gilbert in Sinclair User found more than 128 characters, faster drawing, and a mix of strategy and adventure that “surpasses everything that has gone before in both markets, and that summing up includes even Lords of Midnight”. He gave it a Gilbert Factor of 9. Steve Cooke in Personal Computer Games made it one of the month’s PCG Hits and ended: “go out, buy it, load it up, and spend hours, days, weeks, perhaps even months playing it.”
Not everyone was as keen. Keith Campbell, reviewing it for Computer and Video Games’ Book of Adventure in March 1985, gave it 7. He thought it “of the same high standard as Midnight” but “a little ‘samey’”, wondered whether the novelty would wear off before the trilogy was finished, and complained that the map on the back of the booklet “cannot really be described as a map at all”; a proper poster map cost £1.95 extra. Singleton himself came to see a flaw. Talking to CRASH in 1987 about the planned third game, he said: “I think that was one of the faults of Doomdark’s — it took too long to get into.”
The game also appeared for the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC. ACE listed all three versions at £9.95 in its strategy buyers’ guide in December 1987, gave it an ACE rating of 940, and called it “certainly a worthy successor”.
In the charts
CRASH‘s charts were readers’ charts, built from votes for the games people were playing, and a game could be in more than one (see Reading the charts).
- February 1985: new in the Hotline Top 50 at 42, and “leapt straight in at number one” in the Adventure chart.
- March 1985: 3 in the Hotline Top 50, one place above Lords of Midnight, after “a massive 39 places” climb, and still 1 in the Adventure chart.
- April and May 1985: 5 in the Hotline and 1 in the Adventure chart.
- March 1986: back up to 9 in the Hotline Top 30, more than a year after release.
- December 1987: 6 in both the Adventure Top 20 and the new Strategy Top 10.
- March 1988: 4 in the Strategy Top 10 and 5 in the Adventure Top 20.
In February 1988 CRASH printed a reader’s statistics for its charts from issues 1 to 46. They showed that Doomdark’s Revenge had spent four issues at number 1 in the Adventure chart, tied for third place with Melbourne House’s Lord of the Rings. That December CRASH noted that Lords of Midnight was still in the Adventure chart “along with the sequel”.
What came next
Singleton planned a third part, The Eye of the Moon, which he said would be bigger again, set south of the Land of Midnight, with Morkin searching for a jewel that could see the future. It was never finished; by the end of 1988 CRASH described it as “almost permanently shelved”. Chris Wild’s company Chilli Hugger, which released a new version of The Lords of Midnight in 2012, publishes the code and data for its versions of the games on GitHub, and the repository covers Doomdark’s Revenge as well (secondary source).
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 31, October 1984: preview (“available on the Spectrum at the end of October 1984”) and competition.
- CRASH issue 12, January 1985: chart commentary on the release.
- CRASH issue 13, February 1985, pp. 98–100: Adventure Trail review (ten out of ten; six thousand locations; the five races; four commands; the victories); Hotline and Adventure chart commentary.
- Sinclair User issue 35, February 1985, pp. 32–33: John Gilbert’s review, Spectrum Software Scene (Gilbert Factor 9).
- Personal Computer Games issue 15, February 1985, pp. 28–29: Steve Cooke’s review (PCG Hit).
- Computer and Video Games issue 41, March 1985, Book of Adventure supplement: Keith Campbell’s review (personal rating 7).
- CRASH issue 14, March 1985, pp. 85–94: Roger Kean’s interview with Mike Singleton (the data tables, text compression, six weeks late, The Eye of the Moon); p. 50: Hotline Top 50 and Adventure chart.
- CRASH issue 15, April 1985, and issue 16, May 1985: Hotline and Adventure charts.
- Sinclair User Annual 1985: Chris Bourne’s profile of Mike Singleton (2,000 more locations; 128 characters against 32; the five races; female characters).
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986: Hotline Top 30.
- CRASH issue 41, June 1987, pp. 43–46: profile of Mike Singleton (“it took too long to get into”).
- ACE issue 3, December 1987: strategy buyers’ guide (ACE rating 940; Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad versions).
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, pp. 112–113: Strategy Top 10 and Adventure Top 20.
- CRASH issue 49, February 1988: reader’s chart statistics (four issues at number 1 in the Adventure chart).
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988: Strategy Top 10 and Adventure Top 20.
- CRASH issue 59, December 1988: Lords of Midnight and its sequel still in the Adventure chart; Eye of the Moon “almost permanently shelved”.
- Chilli Hugger, “The-Lords-Of-Midnight” repository, GitHub (web, secondary): “All data regarding The Lords of Midnight games. Including Doomdark’s Revenge and The Citadel.” https://github.com/ChilliHugger/The-Lords-Of-Midnight