Dungeon Master | Code Like It's 198x

Most role-playing games on home computers waited for you: in Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale a fight paused while you chose each character’s move. Dungeon Master, which FTL Games released for the Atari ST in December 1987, did not wait. Its monsters walked the corridors whether you were looking or not, your torch burned lower as you stood thinking, and your four champions grew hungry and thirsty as the minutes passed. “There is no stopping to figure out a move,” Computer Gaming World told its readers in April 1988. “Everything is constantly moving and the clock always runs.”

Everything was done with the mouse, too: you clicked arrows to walk, clicked a weapon to swing it, and picked up a rock to throw it at a door, where it bounced off “with a satisfying ‘clunk’”, as ST Action put it. British reviewers, some of whom had seen demonstrations a year earlier, were won over. Computer + Video Games opened its review: “Every now and again a computer game comes along and changes the way we think about games. Dungeon Master is one of those games.”

Fast facts

Developer: FTL Games of San Diego. Doug Bell and Dennis Walker wrote about 90 per cent of the program; Andy Jaros drew the art; Mike Newton wrote the tools, including the Dungeon Construction Set; Wayne Holder, who owned FTL, worked out the digitised sound and, Bell said, contributed many of the ideas behind the interface.
Released: Atari ST, 15 December 1987 in the United States; in Britain, through Mirrorsoft, in spring 1988 for about £25.
The dungeon: 14 levels, the last of them a dragon’s lair.
Party: four champions chosen from 24 imprisoned in mirrors in the Hall of Champions.
Conversions: Commodore Amiga (late 1988), Sharp X68000, PC, FM Towns, NEC PC-9801, Super Nintendo, and a reworked version, Theron’s Quest, for the PC Engine.
Sequels: Chaos Strikes Back (1989), which ran without the original, and Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep (1993 in Japan, 1995 elsewhere).

From Crystal Dragon to Dungeon Master

Doug Bell and Andy Jaros met at the University of California, where they played Ultima and Wizardry on Jaros’s Apple II. “I thought I could write a better game than Ultima,” Bell told Retro Gamer in 2007. The pair set up a company called PVC Dragon, named after the plastic wallets floppy disks were kept in, and started an Apple II role-playing game called Crystal Dragon. When their money ran low they moved to San Diego and joined Wayne Holder’s FTL, which took them on in 1983.

The Atari ST changed the plan. FTL ported its Apple II game SunDog: Frozen Legacy to the new machine first, then went back to Crystal Dragon, now called Dungeon Master, on hardware that did not force them to squeeze everything into 64K. Bell began with a proof of concept that drew the dungeon from back to front, then spent three weeks learning C and rewrote the dungeon code in it, because Pascal was too slow. The team released a demo in May 1985 and meant to finish that year. Around September they decided they had “the potential to create a landmark game” and kept going for two more years.

The finished game fitted on one single-sided 360K floppy disk and ran in the 520ST’s memory. Bell said that expanded, the game came to about 1.6MB, and a memory manager kept the graphics compressed until they were needed. “I think it’s safe to say that no game ever got as much onto a 360K floppy disk or into the Atari 520ST’s memory as Dungeon Master,” he said.

Playing it

You enter as the apprentice of the Grey Lord, whose search for the Power Gem has split him in two and let loose his evil half, Lord Chaos. Your job is to find the Firestaff at the bottom of the dungeon. First you walk the Hall of Champions, examine the heroes frozen in its mirrors and bring four of them back, either resurrected with their skills intact or reincarnated as new characters.

After that the game becomes a matter of keeping them alive. Each champion has health, stamina and mana, needs food and water, and carries what you put in their hands and backpack. Torches burn out. A dead champion leaves a pile of bones that you can carry to an altar and bring back to life, if you can find one before your own light fails. Characters improve by doing: ACE noted that their abilities rose “with practice”, and Computer Gaming World that one champion could gain levels as a fighter, ninja, priest and wizard at once. Some monsters could be eaten once killed.

Magic worked like a language. Scrolls taught spells as sequences of runes, and you cast one by clicking the runes in a panel. The first rune set the power, from Lo, Um, On and Ee up to Pal and Mon; the rest came from three further rows of six, for element, form and alignment. Spells were written down, not listed on screen, so players kept notes. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer suggested setting up a spell’s runes before a fight so that it could be cast with one click when needed.

Sound mattered as much as the pictures. The clank of chains gave away secret doors, and “there is nothing more unnerving during game play than the sound of a trap you just set off”, Computer Gaming World wrote. Bell said the fear in the game came from its novelty: until then there had not been “a real-time 3D dungeon game with the level of graphics and sound in Dungeon Master”.

That qualification matters. Monsters had already hunted players in real time in a first-person dungeon: Tandy’s Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge for the Color Computer, described in 1983 as a game where the creatures “move about the Dungeon tracking you in real time. Even if you stop, they don’t.” What Dungeon Master added was a whole party, detailed pictures, digitised sound and a mouse to drive them.

Reception

The British magazines reviewed it in the spring of 1988. The Games Machine reported that it had arrived “after two years of playtesting”, with “at least 800K” of data. ST Action gave it 90 per cent in its first issue and told readers to “buy this game today and ‘wind up’ a Spectrum owner”. ACE gave it 949 out of 1,000, found the graphics “wonderfully drawn and coloured” though the sound sparse, and thought it would “puzzle and entertain you for a long time”. Computer + Video Games’s reviewer admitted to having spent 40 hours on it “without a hint of boredom”. In the United States, Antic called it “so revolutionary it immediately pulls ahead of the competition and sets standards for judging future releases”.

It sold. In March 1989 Mirrorsoft said it had sold 40,000 copies on the ST since launch and 10,000 of the Amiga version, which at first needed a megabyte of memory; a version for the 512K Amiga 500 was due at the end of that month. Dragon magazine later put its first-year sales at 40,000. Bell’s own estimate, reported by Retro Gamer and The Digital Antiquarian, was that at one point sales passed half of all the STs in use.

Afterwards

FTL planned Dungeon Master as the first of many scenarios. The first, Chaos Strikes Back, came out in 1989 as a stand-alone game. “One of my regrets is that we got so busy doing ports of the game that we didn’t end up creating enough scenarios,” Bell said. Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep took years, appeared in Japan in 1993 and elsewhere in 1995, and was FTL’s last game; the company closed in 1996. Japan kept the series going with Dungeon Master Nexus, made by Victor Interactive for the Sega Saturn in 1998.

Other publishers followed its lead. Retro Gamer listed Westwood’s Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore, Mindscape’s Captive, Sega’s Shining in the Darkness and Mirrorsoft’s own Bloodwych among the games that tried to repeat its formula. “To some degree, Eye of the Beholder became Dungeon Master on the PC,” said SSI’s producer Chuck Kroegel (see Western RPG and Westwood Studios).

Released source code

FTL’s original source code has not been released by its authors or rights holders. Fans rebuilt the game from its program code instead: Paul R. Stevens reverse-engineered Chaos Strikes Back and in 2001 released his version, CSBWin, with its source code, and in 2014 Christophe Fontanel began a reverse-engineering project covering Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back.

Not to be confused with

Crystal Computing’s The Dungeon Master, a ZX Spectrum program by Graham Stafford advertised in 1983, which helped players run their own tabletop role-playing games. It has nothing to do with FTL’s game, which was never released for the Spectrum.

Sources

Damien McFerran, “The Making of Dungeon Master”, Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, pp. 30–33: interview with Doug Bell (PVC Dragon, Crystal Dragon, joining FTL in 1983, the team and its roles, Pascal to C, the May 1985 demo, the 360K disk and 1.6MB, “real-time 3D dungeon game”, the conversions, the imitators, Chaos Strikes Back, Dungeon Master II, FTL’s closure in 1996, Dungeon Master Nexus).
Hosea Battles Jr, “In the Eye of a Beholder! A Look at FTL’s Dungeon Master”, Computer Gaming World issue 46, April 1988, pp. 18–19: real time, the champions and classes, spell symbols, sound and secret doors, $39.95, Doug Bell and Dennis Walker.
ST Action volume 1 issue 1, May 1988, pp. 58–59: review, FTL via Mirrorsoft, £24.99, one disk and a 44-page booklet, the thrown rock, overall 90 per cent.
Andy Smith, ACE issue 8, May 1988, pp. 54–55: review, Atari ST £24.99, 14 levels, graphics 9, audio 6, ACE rating 949.
Computer + Video Games issue 78, April 1988, p. 92: review, Mirrorsoft, Atari ST, £24.95; “changes the way we think about games”; 40 hours of play.
The Games Machine issue 5, April 1988, pp. 64–65: review, FTL Games/Mirrorsoft, two years of playtesting and “at least 800K” of data.
Antic volume 7 issue 1, May 1988, p. 63: “New ST Entertainments”, Dungeon Master as “so revolutionary”.
ACE issue 30, March 1990, p. 77: “The Ultimate Dungeon Master Guide, Part Two” (the rune rows, the Dragon level as level 14).
New Atari User issue 31, January 1988, p. 67: mail-order advertisement listing Dungeon Master (FTL) for the ST as “coming soon”.
ST/Amiga Format issue 9, March 1989, pp. 7–8: Mirrorsoft’s exclusive UK rights; its sales claim of 40,000 ST and 10,000 one-megabyte Amiga copies; the 512K Amiga 500 version due at the end of March, £24.95.
AmigaWorld November 1988, p. 31 (Amiga version still in development at press time) and December 1988, p. 28 (listed at $39.95).
Linda Miller, “The Dungeons of Daggorath”, TRS-80 Microcomputer News volume 5 issue 8, August 1983, pp. 46–47: creatures tracking the player “in real time”.
Crystal Computing advertisement, Your Computer, December 1983, p. 230: The Dungeon Master for the Spectrum 48K, by Graham Stafford, £7.50.
Jimmy Maher, “Dungeon Master, Part 1: The Making of”, The Digital Antiquarian, 11 December 2015 (web, secondary): the US release on 15 December 1987, the team’s roles, Bell’s estimate of more than half the ST installed base, Mirrorsoft’s European distribution. https://www.filfre.net/2015/12/dungeon-master-part-1-the-making-of/
Sandy Petersen, “Eye of the Monitor”, Dragon issue 200, December 1993, p. 73 (as cited by Wikipedia, “Dungeon Master (video game)”; web, secondary): 40,000 copies in its first year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(video_game)
Wikipedia, “Dungeon Master (video game)” (web, secondary): the CSBWin and 2014 reverse-engineering projects.
Retro Gamer issue 43, 2007, pp. 82–85: Chuck Kroegel on Eye of the Beholder (see the Western RPG entry).