Most adventure games of 1985 gave the player monsters to beat and puzzles to solve. Dun Darach gave the player a city to live in. Cuchulainn, the Irish hero of Gargoyle’s Tir Na Nog, arrives in a maze of named streets full of shops, banks, gambling houses and pickpockets, and the way to his goal runs through buying, selling, saving and stealing. Sinclair User’s Richard Price compared it to arriving somewhere foreign, “tired, broke, edgy and with nowhere to stay”, and called it “a city which is alive and fascinatingly complex”. CRASH gave it 97%.
Fast facts
- Authors: Greg Follis and Roy Carter, for Gargoyle Games.
- Released: summer 1985 on the 48K ZX Spectrum, at £9.95, in a large box with a booklet and a rough map of the city. An Amstrad CPC version followed later in 1985.
- Place in the series: a prequel to Tir Na Nog (1984), set in Cuchulainn’s lifetime.
- Reviews: CRASH 97%; Sinclair User “Absolutely recommended”.
Loeg and the sorceress
The story in CRASH’s review runs like this. Cuchulainn and his charioteer Loeg are riding home after a battle against the men of Connacht, in which a Connacht prince was killed. At a wayside inn a beautiful woman, Skar, asks for help mending a broken axle, and Loeg goes out with her. When Cuchulainn follows, both have gone, one of his horses lies dead and there is only “a hint of ghostly girlish laughter” on the wind. Skar is a sorceress allied to Connacht. She has taken Loeg to the secret city of Dun Darach in revenge for the prince’s death.
How the city works
Tir Na Nog had been about exploring a landscape and solving object puzzles. CRASH saw the main difference in Dun Darach as interaction: trading with shopkeepers and brokers, and prising information out of the city’s ten main characters, each with their own likes and dislikes.
Each shop displays what its keeper buys and sells, and at what price. Pay, and the goods are yours. Or pick them up and walk out: some goods can be stolen that way, but the dearest, such as the thieves’ licence, lock the door behind you until you pay or put them back. Pickpockets roam the streets and will take your money and many of your goods if you bump into them, unless you belong to the Thieves’ Guild. Money in the bank is safe, and earns 1% a day, with days and nights marked by the torches on the street walls. Deposit rooms store goods for a fee, portals move you across the city for a fee, and gambling houses take bets on two spinning dice.
The streets are named and the doors numbered, which made mapping possible, and Sinclair User found a map “essential”. Galleries of pictures carried Gargoyle’s punning clues. CRASH recalled one from Tir Na Nog, an N and an egg, because “N’s lay eggs”. Price thought the city less abstract than Tir Na Nog’s afterworld, and found it “all too easy to neglect your true quest in favour of exploring and hustling”. Gargoyle acknowledged a debt to the fantasy writers Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock.
The graphics used the same system as Tir Na Nog: a large, smoothly animated Cuchulainn in the centre of the screen, with a “camera” that could be turned to show either side of the street. CRASH’s reviewers were surprised that it had no attribute problems even when coloured characters crossed each other. “How Gargoyle packed so much into 48K I will never know,” one wrote. Cuchulainn cannot die in Dun Darach. He can only be robbed and conned.
In the readers’ charts
CRASH‘s charts were built from readers’ votes, not sales (see Reading the charts). Dun Darach entered the Hotline at number 9 in August 1985 and rose to number 5 in October and November. In the Adventure Top 30 it went straight in at number 1 in September 1985.
It stayed in the Adventure chart for two years, well into the reign of Gargoyle’s next adventure, Heavy on the Magick. It was number 3 in January and March 1986, and still at 16 in November 1986 and at 16 again in June 1987.
Sources
- CRASH issue 18, July 1985, pp. 16–17: review (the story, the shops and brokers, pickpockets and the Thieves’ Guild, the bank, deposit rooms, portals, gambling houses, galleries, the camera view, the three reviewers’ comments; overall 97%).
- Richard Price, Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985: review (“more a prequel than a sequel”; “tired, broke, edgy”; Leiber and Moorcock; “Absolutely recommended”).
- Amstrad Action issue 1, October 1985: the Amstrad CPC version.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (Dun Darach, 97%, issue 18).
- CRASH charts: issue 19, August 1985 (Hotline, 9); issue 20, September 1985 (Hotline, 6; Adventure, 1); issue 21, October 1985 (Hotline, 5; Adventure, 7); issue 22, November 1985 (Hotline, 5; Adventure, 3); issue 24, January 1986 (Adventure, 3); issue 26, March 1986 (Adventure, 3); issue 34, November 1986 (Adventure, 16); issue 41, June 1987 (Adventure, 16).