Game 86: Dungeon of Death (1979)

This is the best you get for a main screen.

Every few weeks, Irene has some kind of computer glitch that causes me to run Malwarebytes on her laptop and clean off a dozen viruses, unwanted toolbars, and other bits of malware. Meanwhile, I'm downloading .rar files from suspicious-looking Eastern European web sites, and I manage to stay clean. I have no idea what she clicks on.

It was deep in the recesses of one of these sites that I managed to find a copy of Dungeon of Death, the second of two games released solely for the Commodore PET. MobyGames said that it was a version of DND, and they're right. Specifically, it's an inferior version. It's not any mystery why this platform doesn't cause a lot of hearts to glow with nostalgia.

The history of DND is a bit confusing, and there's a lot of conflicting information floating about the web. The best I can piece together from various sites, Barton's Dungeons and Desktops, and my own experience playing the games is as follows:

The original dnd (called The Game of Dungeons on its title screen) was programmed for the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign back in 1975 by a team of students led by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. I reviewed it almost a year ago. As one of the first handful of CRPGs, it was reasonably advanced for its time. At some point, Purdue University student Daniel Lawrence was exposed to it, took the game's code, added his own innovations, and reprogrammed it for the TOPS-10 operating system on the DEC mainframe at Purdue. After he graduated, Lawrence saw commercial potential in the game and reprogrammed it as Telengard (1982; also available for the PET). But by then, dozens of variants had been floating around and traded as freeware. A version called DND showed up for DOS in 1984, another called Caverns of Zoarre in 1984, and Heathkit DND in 1985 (I reviewed them all in one early posting). There's a bunch more listed on a site called "The Unofficial DND Home Page," but be careful: much of the history given on this page is suspect (for one thing, they have Dungeon of Death as a 1982 game).

Analogous screenshots from the original PLATO dnd (top), Dungeon of Death (second), Telengard (third), and Heathkit DND (bottom)

Today, it's tough to see what made this line of games so popular, but the simple fact is that at the time, there wasn't much else available. We've seen how primitive games like Beneath Apple Manor, Dungeon Campaign, and Dungeon could be. The DND line, by contrast, featured:

• Characters with multiple attributes, including experience and levels
• Randomly-placed treasures and encounters within a randomly-generated dungeons
• A selection of spells
• Fun random non-combat encounters, such as chests, pits, teleporters, altars, fountains, and thrones

It would take some time before other games--Wizardry, the Ultima series, Rogue--caught up to this level of sophistication. Until they did, DND was the best example anyone had of Dungeons & Dragons-style attributes, combats, and treasure, and it makes sense that the game was so thoroughly copied and traded.  

Dungeon of Death is one of the earliest dnd variants, developed independently by C. Gordon Walton after he had a chance to play the PLATO dnd. It is also thus one of the few extant games in the dnd line that didn't come from a Daniel Lawrence version.

The objective of Dungeon of Death is to descend to the twelfth level of a dungeon and recover the Holy Grail from the lair of Smaug the Dragon (sigh). As you travel, you find random piles of gold, potions, chests, and of course random encounters with the game's monsters, which include vampires, dragons, rust monsters, balrogs, rock trolls, black wizards, "evil men," ringwraiths, demons, and Death himself.

Facing a rock troll with no sword but some other advantages.

Combat consists of  choosing to fight, evade, cast a spell, drop all your gold and run, or surrender. If you fight or cast a spell, the game simply informs you whether you won or lost; you don't see the underlying calculations or rolls. Losing doesn't necessarily mean dying, although it usually leaves you fairly close to death. When you "win," you generally take no loss of hit points (labeled "power").

Chester staggers about blind, with no sword. He will not last much longer.

 
The port illustrates the limitations of the Commodore PET platform. It's hard to imagine an uglier and cruder version of the game. As you can see, the "map" on which you move the characters is miniscule, and the "graphics" are hardly deserving of the term. (There is no sound.) In contrast to some of the variants that randomly generated their dungeons, Dungeon of Death uses a fixed dungeon layout. The encounters are random as you move around the dungeon--indeed, you can just go back and forth between two squares and keep finding monsters and gold--but to progress, you need to find a notch in the outer wall that leads to a set of stairs.

Chester contemplates going to Level 3 (stairs in the notch to the south).

The version I was able to find also has fixed character attributes. You always start the game as an elf and always have the same strength, agility, and wisdom scores. The manual, however, shows different characters with different scores, so I don't really know how these are set or altered.

Oddly, the early encounters (at least in the version I downloaded) are also fixed. No matter which way you step from the beginning, you find 38 gold. On your second step, you always find 65 more gold and encounter a vampire. The third step always brings another 57 gold an an "evil man." Only after that does some level of randomness appear.

Encountering a chest.

Other things about the game seem buggy. "Evade" hardly ever works. My gold level rolled over on me a couple of times to 0, and with one character froze at 13,974, never increasing no matter how much I found.

There are some small innovations with the encounters and combats. For instance:

• Chests can be trapped with explosions, blindness, or curses, or can contain shields, armor, magic maces (why maces in particular, I don't know), cubes of power, or lucky rings.
• Found potions include the usual poison and strength, but also an "astral form" potion that strips you of your items (including weapons) but greatly increases your spell power; a "spell storing" potion that gives you unlimited maximum magic spells; and a "polymorph" potion that changes you into a different character.
• Monsters have some special attacks, strengths, and weaknesses. Particularly annoying are Rust Monsters, which destroy your armor and weapons.
• Monsters have various resistances to different spells. The manual includes a table that gives the figures. Vampires are vulnerable to "fireball" but resist "sleep"; Rock Trolls are easily "charmed." Unfortunately, you start out with only three spells and only gain them back when you go up and down stairs, so you have to be very conservative with them.

About to Dispel Death.

After I played the game for a few hours, a pattern became clear. You encounter the same monsters on every level, but they get harder (they "level up") as you descend. The monsters don't really seem to vary in difficulty by type; a balrog is the same as an "evil man." At the outset of the game, you have a slight advantage over monsters on Level 1, and if you can find a suit of armor, a magic mace, or some other bonus, you'll reliably win against them every time. To succeed at higher levels, you need either more bonuses or higher character levels. Repeat all the way down to Level 12 and the Holy Grail. You need to save spells for Rust Monsters or they'll destroy your sword and armor.

Unfortunately, it would take unimaginable hours playing to get all the way down to that level. After more than 70 combats at an average of 10 experience points each, I still hadn't made character level 2 when I decided to give up. I would have liked to win it--and to be perhaps the only player online to have done so--but I didn't want to invest the hours.

Dungeon of Death was published by Instant Software of Peterborough, New Hampshire, which is about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get. The developers are given on MobyGames as C. Gordon Walton and John Polasek, but the name "Wayne Green" appears in the manual. Instant Software is credited with only one other game--1978's Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio, a strategy game that you really have to read to understand. In a comment below, Walton says that he was inspired by the PLATO Game of Dungeons (dnd) but didn't have the source code to work from, so he ended up programming it from scratch for this platform.

C. Gordon Walton achieved legitimate fame in gaming circles in the following decades. As an Electronic Arts and Bioware executive, he appears on the credits of 21 games after Dungeon of Death, including Ultima IX, Star Wars: Galaxies, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. His entry on Wikipedia indicates that "he played his first computer game in 1977 on the PLATO system," which essentially solves the mystery: I'd bet the rest of my hair that that game was dnd. I've been trying to contact him to verify, but no luck yet.

I am not in any way sad to be finishing the last of the two Commodore PET games. Based on my experience with it, I don't understand how Commodore remained viable in the age of the Apple II. But I'm glad I played it: there's hardly any information online about Dungeon of Death, and I like when my blog can fill in gaps like this.

Later edit: It's hard to tell because Blogger mangled the user name, but developer Gordon Walton commented below. I made some edits based on his comments.

*****

Further reading: Posts on the entire DND line: The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1975); The Game of Dungeons (aka "dnd," 1975); Telengard (1982); Caverns of Zoarre (1984); DND (1984); and the Heathkit DND (1985). For a discussion of Lawrence and plagiarism, see this account by one of The Game of Dungeons's original authors.