Dungeon Keeper

aka: DK1, Dungeon Keeper: Evil is Good
Moby ID: 156
Windows Specs

Description official descriptions

Dungeon Keeper takes real-time strategy into a fantasy setting. You command a dungeon and its hellish minions, and must take them to glory against the hated good guys. You must use your gold to build a fortress and weapons to attack.

As well as being able to rotate the 3D view, and control the light source, you can enter the direct viewpoints of your men, to see life through their eyes (one character's mode goes into black and white for this).

Spellings

  • 地下城守护者 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 地城守護者 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

150 People (116 developers, 34 thanks) · View all

Design
Project Leader
Lead Programming
Lead Artist
Programming
Support Art
Engine Design
Navigation System
Music
Sound
Lead Level Design
Testing Manager
Associate Producer
Network Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 90% (based on 33 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 139 ratings with 6 reviews)

It's good being evil

The Good
Dungeon Keeper is an interesting mix of war game and building Sim. Careful planning is the only thing between your success in crushing the ubiquitous forces of light and loosing to an army of pixies. Different units interact differently with one another, some forming tight bonds while other will try to kill and/or eat each other lending an extra dimension past the castle building and trap laying. The Sacrifices in the temple are a great additional way to gain special minions and the temples themselves are amusing as you are the "god" featured in them. The multiplayer support makes for fun times and great LAN parties while breathing extra life into this game.

The Bad
The graphics never have been the greatest and look very dated by today's standards, though the Gold Edition does come with an upgrade to fix this. First-person controls are difficult to use at times and it is easy to become disoriented while using them. This is a problem as there are parts of the game that require first-person interaction to be able to complete them.

The Bottom Line
Dungeon Keeper is a great game for those tired of the same old good guys always win war game or for those looking for an interesting twist on an old genre. Despite the rough first player controls (that you won't need most of the time) and aging graphics, it's still a wonderful game full of tongue-in-cheek humor for fans of both war games and Sims.

Windows · by lamoxlamae (3) · 2008

It's good to be bad. Really, really good.

The Good
Back in 1997 when I got Dungeon Keeper as a present, I was spoiled on first person shooters, so the concept of managing a bunch of hellions was somewhat foreign to me. Yet from the time I booted this up and got a few dungeons in, I was hooked. DK is a weird marriage of a managerial simulation and that old Atari Game, Gauntlet. Except instead of running around killing monsters, you own the monsters, build the maze, and kill the good dudes.

Each level plops you in a dark, dank underground room, where a giant heart beats, gold glistens on the floor, and a few little brown guys with sacks scurry around waiting for orders. These fellows will build your dungeon, you have to carve rooms out of the rock wall with them and then have them build the room. They also mine gold out of the rock as well, if there is gold in said rock. They take the gold back to your heart, or your treasury which you will require after a certain amount of space is taken up by your gold. Then you will have to capture a portal, and build a sleeping quarter and kitchen for the hellspawn about to pop out of that portal. There are many different types of hellspawn, and some have special needs. Warlocks require you to build a library so they can study spells. Brute like imps and goblins will need a training room to hone their skills (Although all your minions use the training room, but some require it more than others) and gain levels. Each minion acts differently, and sometimes the minions will even begin to conflict with each other, meaning you have to set them straight. Example: One level you need spiders and you need flies, but the problem is if you don't keep them in line, the spiders will eat the flies. You have to keep an eye on minions, and some require high maintenance.

The graphics, for the time, were great. The sprites are crystal clear, and suffer no pixelation at all. The world looked good, even if each area looks somewhat bland and samey. It was also unique and fun to possess your minions to get a first person view of the world, the game looked great then, and you really felt like you were in the shoes of your minion. Naturally, you got to toy with their unique skills. Possess a fly, and you can fly all around the world and scout. Possess a warlock, and you can fling spells at your foes. Each minion gains levels and learns new abilities, which helps the immersion factor, although I kind of wished you'd get the ability to keep a minion into another level.

Multiplayer is fun, and has you competing with another dungeon keeper to destroy each other and take full control of the dungeon.

While the objectives never change through a replay, the game has a fair amount of replay value due to its addictive style and the fact that each level can be tweaked to your liking and you can face each challenge at your own pace. Its easy to pick the game up and play, and the learning curve is quite good. While it may take a few minutes to get a knack for the interface and controls, you'll likely get all the basics on the first level, and as the game reveals more advanced tricks and mechanics, they will only take seconds to learn. However, the game still has a steady difficulty. It is one of those instances where the game is easy to learn, but tough to master.

The Bad
While the graphics are relatively good for the time, they can be somewhat tiresome on the eyes due to texture warping and an over-usage of brown, muddy colours. It can be jarring to play this game for a few hours and then shut it off to be blinded by how bright your computers desktop is.

The sound, while decent, is lacking in oomph, and there is no music. Sometimes your dungeon will be a little too silent for comfort.

While the game is quite fun to play, it can get a bit repetitive, and sometimes you'll also find yourself impatient to reach goals you've already achieved in previous dungeons. The game tries its best to give unique goals, but sometimes it'll repeat itself and it'll feel like more of a chore than it should. Also, the game can be relatively easy if you simply pick up a bunch of demons and drop them in front of the foe at the end of each level. You don't have to do that, but sometimes it becomes habitual.

While the multiplayer is pretty fun, setting up a game is very hard to do. The game only supports LAN, and it uses an outdated net code that modern computers no longer support. If you can get a dummy driver to work, you can usually set up a LAN game but this can be annoying to do and sometimes takes too long, and because dummy drivers don't truly work the same way games sometimes crash in the middle of a heated battle.



The Bottom Line
Dungeon Keeper is still to this day a very fun game. No other game plays quite like it, and in a way that makes it fascinating considering that you can look for years and never find another game that is quite like Dungeon Keeper. Some may compare newer games such as Evil Genius" and the recent Overlord to Dungeon Keeper, but in truth, those games still aren't quite like the unique feel of DK - and neither are they nearly as fun, although Evil Genius is an alright game, but that is a different review. If you can find this game in a bargain bin or on an internet store, pick it up! It may be hard to get started up on Vista, but I am sure it is possible, and I am sure there are still fans out there who will make a patch. This game is a classic, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009

A trip down into the heart of evil

The Good
Some games have a pretty face with fancy graphics and all the latest 3D buzzwords, but when I am looking to have a relationship with a game, I generally look at one thing as most important, personality. Dungeon Keeper is literally bursting at the seams with personality. The game wallows in it's own evil with emphatic glee. You get to play the bad guy/girl for once and enjoy all of its guilty evil pleasures. Workers not going fast enough, give them a slap with your 'hand of evil.' Want to explore your filfty cavarens yourself, posess the body of one of your minions and go exploring in a first person view. A really cool feature of this is the fact that each species of minion has a different view point. By an imp and you are half the size of everyone. Be a Hellhound and see everything in black and white. Besides this personality and style, the game had decent graphics, nice sound and really fun game play.

The Bad
I would have liked a more open -ended gameplay mode. One that you could just build a foul dungeon and have to fight off the different heros that would attack you. The current levels are very much limited because most have a fixed supply of gold. Another issue is that the ability to pick up and drop your creatures any where, while very convient and good part of the game, limits fighting to dropping all of your minions at one spot and letting them have at it. Also the first person perspective while fun only has limited usage in the game.

The Bottom Line
Dungeon Keeper is SimCity in He*l with a lot of other genres thrown in. Think of Diablo, but being Diablo: laying out your dungeon, commanding your hoard of imps to dig out the rock to create a cesspool of evil, fighting the good pure knights that dare enter your domain, and taking control of the realm to bring about misery. It's all evil fun. Your minions have minds of there own though. You need to make your dungeon the penthouse of dastardly depravity and corruption to attract the horrid beasts. You can then drop them into different rooms to assign them task, but they leave to rest, and eat, or if they get bored or angry. Keeping your minions happy is a key element to the game. The only way you can make them do exactly what you want them to is to literally jump into there minds with the pocession spell.

Graphically the game was slightly behind the times even when it was released (due to a 3 year development time). In the normal isometric mode you can zoom and pan freely and the graphics though low resolution look ok (640X480 is the highest resolution). The sound is very good. The game runs fast on the reccommend system.

All in all, a highly reccommend game for those who want to be a bastard. Great fun.

DOS · by Andrew Grasmeder (221) · 2000

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
has been published by EA, not Tec Toy? Henning Knopp (38) May 11, 2020
Additional credits? Pseudo_Intellectual (66274) Feb 23, 2017

Trivia

1001 Video Games

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

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Jason Musgrave:

On a personal note, at the Software Etc. that I was working at when this came out, the manager felt the tagline of "Evil is Good" may offend some people (we were connected to a Barnes & Noble bookstore) and purposely placed the price tag over the word "Evil" on every box. The result was that the box would read; "Dungeon Keeper.... is Good".

Avatar

The arch-enemy of Dungeon Keeper is the Avatar from the Ultima line of games, specifically his in-game appearance from Pagan: Ultima VIII. In the official hint guide for the game, under the profiles for the Avatar "Lord of the Land", the graphic for him is the same used in the introduction of Ultima Online. (The same visage was also used in Ultima IX: Ascension).

Creatures

Each creature has a different style of sight in first-person view. For example the fly has a insect like hex shape, and the hellhound sees in black and white.

Development

Dungeon Keeper is probably one of the most anticipated games which Bullfrog has worked over three years for its development. It was first shown to the public in the spring of 1995 but was released just before the summer of 1997. Dungeon Keeper was also the last Bullfrog game Peter Molyneux had worked on. He then left Bullfrog and founded its own company called Lionhead Studios.

Extras

In the CD-ROM of Dungeon Keeper, some goodies in the goodies directory can be found.

German version

In the German version all specific torture animations were replaced with the generic tent animation.

Monk

The chanting monks seem to sing "norske svin", which is Danish for "Norwegian bastards".

References

One of the most expensive spells in the game is the one that penetrates an opponent's reinforced walls, called Destroy Walls. When you cast the spell the advisor's voice said, "Penitenziagite." This sounds a little like "penetrate" but is in fact an extremely obscure reference to Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose. "Penitenziagite" was the rallying cry of a (real) heretical 14th-century band of monks who murdered wealthy churchmen on the grounds that Jesus had commanded poverty.

Soundtrack

All of the music for Dungeon Keeper, including the opening movie sequence, are available on the game CD as Redbook Audio.

Awards

  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #42 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #47 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/1998 - The "Haste Makes Waste" Award

Information also contributed by Andrew Grasmeder, Ernest Adams, Indra was here, Maw, Jason Musgrave and PCGamer77

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Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 156
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by doj.

Macintosh added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: Accatone, CaesarZX, Paulus18950, Cantillon, Rola, Patrick Bregger, Plok, FatherJack.

Game added June 9, 1999. Last modified March 6, 2024.