Dungeon Master

aka: Crystal Dragon
Moby ID: 834

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Dungeon Master appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

CDTV version

Amongst many Dungeon Master was ported to the Amiga CDTV but this version was never completed because FTL could not obtain reliable information from Commodore about save-game options. This version would have had additional animation and sound.

Development

In 1981 Andy Jaros and Doug Bell founded their own development studio called "PVC Dragon" and started working on the game called Crystal Dragon. It was supposed to be influenced by Ultima series but with a hope of being a "much better game" (as stated Doug Bell in Retro Gamer Issue 34). The game was developed in Pascal on Apple II. After two years of programming, due to financial problems, they decided to find shelter under the wings of another development company. In 1983 the team joined FTL for a temporary period of time in order to get the game to a working state. When Atari ST was announced, FTL decided to halt all the works on the Apple II version of the game and port all the code to Atari ST which was "much more capable computer than the Apple and better suited for Crystal Dragon." The idea was to release the game for the debut of the new 16-bit machine at the beginning of 1985. However doing both, porting from Apple II to Atari ST and completing the game, which was still work-in-progress, was impossible to make it on time, so they decided to port to Atari ST a different game of FTL - SunDog: Frozen Legacy which was about to be released on Apple II. This move bought them some time to get an experience of coding on Atari ST and they could resume working on Crystal Dragon. By this time the game was renamed to Dungeon Master and all the code was ported from Pascal to C. It was basically ready to be released at the end of 1985 and was previewed in a demo version released in May 1985, however they decided to expand the initial scope of the game and postponed the premiere to 1987. The game was fitted on a single-sided diskette 360 kB in size however the uncompressed data would take 1.6 MB.

Dungeon Master was ported later to other platforms. The first port was on Amiga in 1988 followed by AppleIIGS and FM Towns (1989), Sharp X68000 and PC-98 (1990), SNES (1991) and finally MS-DOS and PC-Engine (1992).

DOS version

The DOS version contains some individual marks: it has an extra animation at the end of the game and plays music in the starting screen.

PC-Engine version

PC-Engine version of the game deviated from the original title in number of ways. It was subtitled Theron's Quest and instead of one big dungeon it was split into seven small dungeons, each of which contained puzzles and maps from original Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. The biggest change was in the introduction in an anime style that told the story of a teenage boy named Theron proving his worth by defending an evil force. The player has to play always as Theron and is able to hire only three additional champions. Your three companions lose all their skills and items after completing each dungeon. Theron also loses all his items, but not his skills. Another change is possibility to make saves only after completing the dungeon.

Speaker

In the United States FTL released an sound adapter along with Dungeon Master. It connected to the computer's joystick port and plugged into any speaker or amplifier to add digital sound to the Dungeon Master game. Built into the device was a 9-pin joystick adapter.

Awards

  • ACE
    • October 1988 (issue #13) - Included in the Top-100 list of 1987/1988 (editorial staff selection)
    • February 1991 (issue #41) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time, section Role-Playing Games (editorial staff choice)
  • Amiga Power
    • May 1991 (Issue #00) - #16 in the "All Time Top 100 Amiga Games"
  • Computer Gaming World
    • October 1988 (Issue #52) - Special Artistic Achievement Award
    • November 1989 (Issue #65) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #49 on the "150 Best Games of All Time" list
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #63 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • Power Play
    • Issue 01/1989 - Best Role Playing Game in 1988
  • Retro Gamer
    • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #34 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • ST Format
    • May 1990 (Issue #10) - Included in the list "ST Format's 30 Kick-Ass Classics"
    • August 1991 (Issue #25) – #2 Top Atari ST Classic Games (Editorial staff vote)
    • January 1993 (issue #42) – #4 in '50 finest Atari ST games of all time' list

Information also contributed by Macintrash, PCGamer77, Rantanplan, The Real DJ and Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe.

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Trivia contributed by Chris Martin, Patrick Bregger, mailmanppa, Jo ST, FatherJack.