[Review] Dungeon Master (PC, 1992)

I recently described Dungeon Master to some friends as being (in my opinion) one of the greatest games ever. I should try and support that claim...

For starters...

Dungeon Master was initially released on the Atari ST in 1987, followed by the Commodore Amiga, leaving the PC waiting until 1992 until its release (I have seen mention of a 1989 release on the PC in the US - being UK based, I cannot confirm this myself). The downside to such a wait was that it had been overshadowed in the meantime - games taking inspiration such as the Bloodwych (1989), Captive (1990), and most notably the Eye of the Beholder series (1990 onwards) had already been released, and the standards of what to expect had been raised earlier in 1992 by Ultima Underworld.

In many ways, it was released on the PC far too late. However, it also says a great deal that all this time later I still find it playable.

The basics

The game is at heart a dungeon crawler - you begin as a disembodied spirit, reviving and controlling a team of (up to) four adventurers who all preceded you into in the dungeon, before falling prey to the dangers therein and being trapped in mirrors as trophies by the dungeon's master Lord Chaos.

The dungeon itself is viewed first person, using a tile-based grid and 90 degree flick scrolling. While this was pretty standard for the time - the Wizardry series (1981 onwards), Bard's Tale series (1985 onwards) and Might and Magic series (1986 onwards) all used this and had established themselves as the inspiration for many others - Dungeon Master added huge levels of interactivity. Doors could be opened by clicking small switches, heavy objects could be left on floor panels, dropped items were recognisable on the floor and could be returned to later, and secret doors could be tested for by "knocking" (clicking) on sections of wall.

However, the game's main claim for being ground-breaking wasn't this detail - it was due to also being played in real time. By removing the usual allowance for thinking about your next turn for as long as was needed, the game created a sense of tension. Lighting could burn out, resting could allow monsters to find and attack you, and sources of both food and water had to be established before starvation finished the job the dungeon's inhabitants were starting. It also meant that stopping and listening to the environment was a good idea - the sound of doors closing in the distance behind you, monsters walking around, traps firing, and switches getting triggered could provide clues as to what to expect. It was, in short, offering far more immersion than games had given before.

Don't go alone

When building your team, each character can be either resurrected (retaining the generally low levels they've acquired in the game's four professions) or reincarnated (starting as a blank slate, although the levels forsaken also give them slightly higher starting stats), although in the longer term this is of less importance compared to how easy they may be to improve. There is no traditional level system - every character can ultimately use every piece of equipment, cast every spell and create every potion, and the four professions (fighter, ninja, priest and wizard, fulfilling pretty much the standard roles you'd expect in a CRPG) can be improved concurrently.

Experience is a hidden statistic in the game - you are never shown how much work you have done, or how close to improving you are - although it is raised through practice rather than success. If you chose to stand in an empty corridor and swing a sword around, you would slowly improve as a fighter, and it is not improbable that the first level or two of the priest and wizard professions are gained without actually successfully casting anything...

Magic is cast by using basic runes - the symbolic meaning of them is given in the manual, allowing you to experiement with effects, although scrolls explicitly listing key spells are also found lying around as you progress. The combinations usually follow a certain logic - [power] + [fire] creates a small amount of light, while [power] + [fire] + [movement] throws a fireball ahead of you. As all runes are accessable from the very start of the game, it also means that as long as you have the mana needed, you can use the combinations you learned in previous runs as you play through again - not quite legacy play, but certainly a way of speeding the earlier section of the dungeon.

Where it goes right

As well as fighting monsters, establishing safe areas to rest, and finding how to restock food and water all creating a sense of living in the dungeon, the detail of the dungeon allows for varying traps and puzzles - most as simple as variations on "find the key for this door" or "avoid the fireballs being thrown from the wall", although others could be more cunning, such as needing to walk around a room in certain directions to be allowed to progress, or walking across a floor where every step opened and closed pits around you.

The game also expects you to return to earlier sections regularly - the seventh level was only completely opened after working all the way down to the twelth, the layout of some areas changes as you progress, and opening up the two staircases giving easier ways of returning to higher levels felt like important progress.

Where it goes wrong

Obviously, by modern standards the game looks and sounds primative - though even for the time, the animation was quite limited. There are few sound effects - though the minimalism arguably adds to the atmosphere - and the only music is on the starting screen.

Some of the ways of handling the interface were also less than fluid - on picking up an item, you needed to open a separate screen to drop it in your inventory, which could often be an issue if it was grabbed while running from a monster or standing in a cloud of poisonous fog. Though again, this could also add to the tension and anticipation of a game being played in real-time - having to wait for the right moment to act.

Legacy

Dungeon Master had two official sequels - Chaos Strikes Back (1989 - essentially a stand-alone add-on disk, though only for the Atari ST and Amiga versions) and Dungeon Master 2 (1995).

More importantly, Dungeon Master is one of the key games when looking at the industry today. It was  named as being "a glimpse of the future" by Paul Neurath, one of the designers of Ultima Underworld, which also created a real-time dungeon but moved it into free movement rather than flick-scrolling; this led to other 3D world RPGs, most obviously titles like the Elder Scrolls series (1994 to present). However, Ultima Underworld also inspired John Carmack and John Romero to create Catacomb 3D (1991) and Wolfenstein 3D (1992), before moving onto Doom (1993) and setting up the first-person shooter genre as we know it today.

Following that path back, Dungeon Master played its part (although perhaps one not as immediately recognisable as Ultima Underworld) in setting up some of the most widely marketted and recognisable games ever, such as the Halo series (2001 to present) and Call of Duty series (2003 to present).

Far more importantly, it's still a very fun game in its own right, if you can forgive some of the signs of aging.

[Note (13/7/2011): as mentioned before, computer failure at home has left me unable to update here consistantly - when sorted, I'll return to this piece and add screenshots to illustrate what I'm saying]