In a role-playing game the player raids the dungeon. In Dungeon Keeper the player runs it. Bullfrog’s idea, as Edge put it in 1996, was to take the familiar premise, “hero raids dungeon, battles evil creatures and steals treasure”, and reverse it: “the player is the dungeon keeper, the evil creatures are his minions and the heroic adventurers his enemies.” What had begun as “a neat little extension of the god sim genre” took nearly three years to finish, and by the time Edge reviewed it in June 1997 it had become Peter Molyneux’s farewell to the company he had co-founded. The copyright notice on Edge’s review copy had a question mark after the “1997”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Bullfrog Productions, Guildford.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts.
- Design: Peter Molyneux; lead programmer Simon Carter; engine by Glenn Corpes.
- Released: mid-1997 for PC (MS-DOS), £39.99 in the UK and $49 in the US.
- Multiplayer: two players by modem, two to four on a local network.
- Reception: Edge 9/10; PC Gamer (UK) 95%; number one in PC Gamer’s UK chart in the summer of 1997.
- Sequel: Dungeon Keeper 2 (1999).
Building a dungeon
A game begins with the Dungeon Heart, the keeper’s source of power, and a few imps. The imps dig out passages and rooms from the rock, mine gold and claim the ground for their master. The gold pays for rooms, and Edge described how each one leads to the next: a treasure room to store the gold, lairs where monsters sleep, a hatchery to feed them (the food is chickens), training rooms, libraries for research, workshops to build doors and traps, and prisons for disobedient monsters or captured heroes. Computer Gaming World counted 14 kinds of room in all, and called the result “SimCity in Hell”.
The rooms decide who comes to work for the keeper. Computer and Video Games explained that warlocks arrive once there is a library, and research new spells and rooms in it; bile demons, “gigantic blubber-monsters”, set to work in the workshop; mistresses appear only after a torture chamber has been built, because they enjoy visiting it. A graveyard, Edge noted, spawns vampires once enough bodies have been buried, and training could turn demon spawn into dragons. The Horned Reaper, a creature Les Edgar later described as “a seven-foot red bloke, with two big horns”, often needed “special care”, Computer Gaming World warned.
Each monster has its own needs and dislikes, and some races fight each other if left in the same lair. The keeper’s cursor is a clawed hand that picks creatures up and drops them wherever they are needed. It can also slap them. A slap makes an imp work faster, Edge found, but stronger creatures “demand respect”, and paying them from the treasure room works better. C&VG thought this was the real game: “Dungeon Keeper isn’t primarily a wargame”. When the team took the project back into development in December 1995, it said, the focus became “the creation of a working eco-system”.
The keeper can also cast Possession and see the dungeon through a creature’s eyes, in Edge’s words taking “direct Doom-style first-person control”. The view changes with the creature: a dragon’s is clouded by smoke and a fly sees the world through compound eyes. The game drew its world in 3D polygons and its creatures as sprites, from a viewpoint that Computer Gaming World said could be “freely rotated, zoomed, and panned”.
Reception
Edge gave it nine out of ten and called it “easily the most atmosphere-drenched and minutely detailed god sim to date”, and “a masterpiece that again epitomises everything that’s good about computer rather than console gaming”. It singled out the controls: with self-explanatory icons, context-sensitive commands and tutorial levels, the game could be played “without referring to the weighty manual”. PC Gamer gave it 95%. In PC Gamer’s UK chart for August 1997 it was number one, and it stayed there the following month, with EA’s FIFA Soccer Manager in second place.
In the United States, Chris Lombardi of Computer Gaming World praised “the most unique game in years; stylish, multifaceted, and as deep as the pits of Hell”, but had reservations. The computer opponents were weak in attack and planning; it was not, he wrote, that the game’s AI was “especially bad, it’s just typically bad”, and the 20 scenarios leaned on puzzles. Multiplayer was limited to a modem or a local network, “the standard – considered progressive, even – three years ago, when Bullfrog began development”, with no support for internet play.
The tone was part of the appeal. Computer Gaming World described the keeper as “a vile lord of an underground domain who is intent on destroying all that is cute and happy in the world”. Asked by Edge in 1999 whether games like it did harm, Bullfrog co-founder Les Edgar called it “very much tongue in cheek”: the intention, he said, “was to build on the Dungeons & Dragons theme using some slightly weird Bullfrog humour”.
Molyneux’s last Bullfrog game
C&VG reported in July 1997 that Dungeon Keeper was to be Molyneux’s last game in charge of Bullfrog, and that EA had already signed up the first game of his new company. Edge later reported that he finished it working from his house, before founding Lionhead Studios. The Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux entries tell that story.
Dungeon Keeper 2
Bullfrog made the sequel without him. PC Zone visited in 1999 and found a team of about 50, with Syndicate’s designer Sean Cooper leading the designers. Its producer, Nick Goldsworthy, said they had set out to “just update Keeper” and realised within three months that “there’s a lot more we can do here”. The creatures were now 3D polygon models instead of pre-rendered sprites. Combat changed, because creatures dropped from the hand were now stunned for a moment. There was a story mission by mission, and a mode called My Pet Dungeon for building without fighting. Dungeon Keeper 2 came out in the summer of 1999, and PC Zone gave it 94%. Edge took it as more evidence that there was life at Bullfrog after Molyneux. A third game was planned, but PC Gamer reported in September 2000 that Dungeon Keeper 3 had been cancelled.
The 2014 mobile game
The name returned in 2014 as a free-to-play game for iOS and Android devices, made by EA’s Mythic studio. Digging and building ran on timers that players could skip by spending gems, a currency bought with real money. In July 2014 the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled that an EA email promoting the game as free had been misleading. The timers, it found, were “beyond that which would be reasonably expected by players”, and the advert did not mention in-app purchases. EA’s chief executive, Andrew Wilson, told Eurogamer: “We misjudged the economy.” EA had closed Mythic’s studio in Fairfax, Virginia, that May.
Legacy
Looking back in 2001, Edge thought Dungeon Keeper had managed “to stay true to the basic ethos of the god sim”; the god games entry places it in that line. It also stayed in the memory of players who became designers. Before Minecraft, Markus Persson had been working on a base-building game, and he wrote in 2009 that he had thought of “adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper”.
Sources
- Edge issue 31, April 1996: Dungeon Keeper preview (the reversed RPG premise; Simon Carter as lead programmer).
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Dungeon Keeper review (the copyright notice; almost three years; the rooms and creatures; Possession; nine out of ten).
- Computer and Video Games issue 188, July 1997: Dungeon Keeper review (£39.99; back into development in December 1995; warlocks, bile demons, mistresses, dragons); news (Molyneux’s last game at Bullfrog).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 46, August 1997, and issue 47, September 1997: the official PC Gamer top twenty (Dungeon Keeper at number one; FIFA Soccer Manager second); issue 47’s buyer’s guide gives the issue 44 review score of 95%.
- Computer Gaming World issue 159, October 1997: review by Chris Lombardi ($49; system requirements; multiplayer; 14 room types; 20 scenarios).
- Edge issue 74, August 1999: Dungeon Keeper 2 review; Les Edgar interview.
- Edge issue 76, October 1999: feature on Guildford’s developers (Molyneux finishing Dungeon Keeper at home).
- PC Zone issue 77, June 1999: Dungeon Keeper 2 feature by Charlie Brooker, with Nick Goldsworthy.
- PC Zone issue 81, October 1999: chart listing Dungeon Keeper 2 with its review score, 94%.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 88, September 2000: budget re-release of Dungeon Keeper; Dungeon Keeper 3 cancelled.
- Edge Special Collector’s Edition, 2001: Dungeon Keeper and the god sim.
- Edge issue 107, February 2002: Glenn Corpes on writing the Dungeon Keeper engine.
- Markus Persson, “The origins of Minecraft”, The Word of Notch, 30 October 2009 (web). Archived at https://blog.omniarchive.net/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecraft/
- “EA shuts down Mythic Entertainment”, Game Developer, 29 May 2014 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/ea-shuts-down-mythic-entertainment
- “Dungeon Keeper remake ‘misjudged the economy’, EA CEO Wilson admits”, MCV/Develop, 26 June 2014, reporting Eurogamer’s interview (web, secondary). https://mcvuk.com/business-news/mobile/dungeon-keeper-remake-misjudged-the-economy-ea-ceo-wilson-admits/
- “ASA bans EA’s Dungeon Keeper ad for claiming game is free”, MCV/Develop, 2 July 2014 (web, secondary). https://mcvuk.com/business-news/asa-bans-eas-dungeon-keeper-ad-for-claiming-game-is-free/
- “UK regulator rules ‘free’ Dungeon Keeper ad was misleading”, Engadget, 2 July 2014 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2014-07-02-uk-regulator-rules-free-dungeon-keeper-ad-was-misleading.html