The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

February 18th, 2005

Dungeon Master — 18 years on…

{title}A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across the Dun­geon Mas­ter Encyc­lo­pe­dia site whilst ran­domly surf­ing. It brought back some good memor­ies of being com­pletely hooked on this game when I was about 15 (16 years ago now). Whilst hav­ing a look through this site I noticed, to my delight, there was an OS X down­load. With great anti­cip­a­tion, tinged with “am I going to regret this?”, I down­loaded the app. 

i’m now hooked. Again. 

{title}Dun­geon Mas­ter is just such a clas­sic. If you’ve not played it before you prob­ably won’t fully com­pre­hend when i’m so enthu­si­astic about the game. It is pretty much per­fect, in the same way Pac­man is per­fect — the game­play is everything. Even when this was released, in 1987, the graph­ics weren’t all that great at all. 

I had an Amiga, so my Atari ST own­ing friends were goign about this game for a couple of years before I could get my hands on it. When I did, I pretty much kissed good­bye to a couple of months of my life. Even now, when play­ing the game, I still remem­ber the UI really well, or is it because the UI is so incred­ibly intu­it­ive? The only stum­bling block for me at the moment is the spells — I can only rem­emebr Health potion, Light and Fire­ball (note to self: print out spell list) 

{title}So, maybe it’s just me, but dis­cov­er­ing and enjoy­ing this game after soooo many years is really refreshing. 

Who else played this? Was is really the most talked about com­puter game for a while?

6 Responses to “Dungeon Master — 18 years on…”

  1. badly dubbed boy said on: February 19th, 2005 at 3:30 pm

    I went to a newly-married friend’s house this year, and his wife couldn’t wait to show me this new game that she’d excitedly dis­covered and couldn’t stop play­ing. It was Dun­geon Master. 

    Alas, I just can’t get into things with spells, potions and the like. Using com­puter hacks sci-fi/cyberpunk-stylee, now that’s a dif­fer­ent thing!

  2. neon said on: February 21st, 2005 at 8:03 pm

    wow

    you reminded me of this clas­sic I have also played for many months and was really liv­ing in the dun­geon world of its own 

    it was great times of my child­hood, along with eyes of beholder, wiz­ardry and others 

    but the DM1 was the king, the game­play is really the best 

    hmmm i am check­ing the DM encyc­lo­pe­dia now and it seems i am hooked again, omg i am going to play this night :)) 

    thanks very much for sharing 

    btw try to play with 1 per­son only, quite hard at the begin­ning, but he will get all the exper­i­ence points and will boost very quickly and will be expert in all the pro­fes­sions, quite funny than :)

    and there’s also the java ver­sion of Chaos Strikes Back, hard as hell for me, never beaten even the first worms :))

  3. Mark Boulton said on: February 28th, 2005 at 10:46 pm

    I know what you mean about those worms in Chaos Strikes Back, and those massive rats! Nice rat meat though — fills you right up!

  4. andy miles said on: April 1st, 2005 at 6:13 pm

    i down­loaded this game a week ago and my girl­friend hates me play­ing it !!!

    i used 2 play this all the time when i was younger

    define­tely the best game of its time 

    i even remembered the old 144 fire­balls

    !!!

    scary stuff! but need 2 find map sites!!

  5. Adam said on: April 4th, 2005 at 11:47 am

    Dude, this was the main game on my Atari that I played for YEARS! 

    I have that sink­ing feel­ing im about to fall back­ward in time and get swal­lowed up by it. 

    Wasnt Goth­mog the best char­ac­ter name? 

    <sinks slowly into the abyss of DM>

  6. andy29x said on: January 13th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    I played this on my ST and Amiga when i was about 11/12 in 1987/88 and i was hooked but i never got passed level 9 as it was the giant rat level and just around the corner of the start of that level was a rat breed­ing room and i got scared togo round there and get eaten late at night lol but hav­ing just got the game again im now gonna bat­ter ‘em good…i never got to play chaos strikes back so am look­ing for­ward to play­ing that and see how it matches up

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