Dungeon Master

aka: Crystal Dragon
Moby ID: 834
Atari ST Specs
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Description official descriptions

Dungeon Master is a role-playing game where the player selects four adventurers and descend into the depths of the dungeon. The gameplay is reminiscent of the 3D dungeon crawl type of role-playing games popularized by Wizardry and The Bard's Tale. However, unlike these games, Dungeon Master features real-time combat, which requires the player to click on the opponent in order to execute an attack. Another notable aspect of the game is its growth system: instead of gathering experience points and leveling up, characters improve by repeatedly using the same action. Spellcasting involves selecting and combining symbols, which can be arranged as rune sequences. The game also allows the player to directly interact with objects in the game world through a point-and-click interface.

Spellings

  • ダンジョン・マスター - Japanese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Atari ST version)

7 People

Program Design
Visual Design
Audio
Prologue
Cover Painting

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 37 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 158 ratings with 7 reviews)

One of the greatest early computer RPGs.

The Good
A well-balanced and engrossing CRPG. Dungeon walls with real texture, terrifying monsters appearing around a corner. Challenging environmental puzzles involving doors, switch plates, traps, and much more. Unique spell system that players learn by finding spell scrolls and experimenting.

The Bad
An amusing bug allowed resistance items (e.g. fire resistance) to stack to a point where spells did negative damage... Except that they used unsigned arithmetic, so a small negative number turned into a huge positive one. The better you're equipped, the faster you die. This is almost a positive - It's the most terrifying RPG I've played. Another bug could cause the game to freeze in the endgame if you used items in almost the correct way to win. However, these are rare exceptions in a mostly very solid program.

The Bottom Line
Any aspiring RPG designer needs to play and study Dungeon Master. Players who think that a CRPG can't approach the tabletop experience should play DM and be amazed. Dungeon Master is a truly great game, and I wouldn't mind playing it again today.

Atari ST · by Corey Cole (36) · 2023

The reason I bought my memory expansion for the Amiga 500 in 1989

The Good
This game was, at the time of it´s release, absolutely incredible. Awesome. Unbelievable. You haven´t seen something like that before! I saw the game at a friend, and i knew: I wanted to play this game at home, too. So I upgraded my Amiga with another 512KB memory (which was quite expensive at that time, at least for a 16 year old) - just to be able to play it. DM was one of the first Amiga games that required 1MB to run. When inserting the memory expansion, I ruined the 68000 CPU, so I had to open my Amiga the first time. Finally I replaced the CPU and was able to play DM. I played through it in about a month - and didn´t regret a second. I just LOVED the game. BTW, the PC version of it was done by Psygnosis and released as late as 1992. Still a good game, but at this time not the sensation it was back in 1989. Or, to be more exact, in 1988, when the first version was released for the Atari ST. For ST and Amiga followed with "Chaos Strikes Back", which was very hard - and therefore never solved by me. Dungeon Master 2: Legend of Skullkeep was released many years later in 1995 - but it was just an average rpg, only worth of notice cause there weren´t that many new rps in this year.

The Bad
Hm. The Amiga version had a very tough copy protection and didn´t support harddisks. This was not important in 1989, but it bothers me now. The PC version works fine from hd.

The Bottom Line
The game was the first 3D real-time role playing game, later followed by Eye of the Beholder or games like Captive, Knightmare, Xenomorph, Abandoned Places or Black Crypt. DM is, IMHO, better than all the games mentioned above! It was not only the game that created the genre, it was, and still is, one of the best games ever.

DOS · by Ungi (2) · 2000

Hiding behind the sofa at the age of 9.

The Good
My Dad wouldn't let me play on his Atari ST back in 1987, but to be honest I had my Commodore 64 so I didn't care... then he bought Dungeon Master!

In the evening, my sister and I would watch as he opened strange doors and battled with mysterious creatures. When it all got a bit much, for example his first encounter with a Screamer, we would take cover behind the chair. I have vivid memories of watching the whole story unfold (although not actually playing myself), from selecting characters in the Hall of Champions through to defeating Chaos himself. It was much more entertaining than being dumped in front of the TV every night, and quite frankly it scared the s*** out of me!

The silence in this game is deafening - long periods of nothing, then suddenly a roar or a scream which makes you jump out of your skin... Now THAT I do remember!



The Bad
Having nightmares about Screamers (I was only 9!)

The Bottom Line
You have to try and imagine what this was like back in 1987 - there was nothing to compare it to. The scariest thing I'd ever played was 'Atic Atac' on the Spectrum. It was a total gaming revolution that surpassed everything else in terms of sheer atmosphere and tension. Superb.

DOS · by J B (2) · 2001

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
PC release date? Pseudo_Intellectual (66274) Jun 16, 2015

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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  • MobyGames ID: 834
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Chris Martin.

Sharp X68000 added by Rola. PC-98, Apple IIgs, FM Towns added by Terok Nor. SNES, Amiga, Atari ST added by Rantanplan.

Additional contributors: xcom1602, Pseudo_Intellectual, Patrick Bregger, mailmanppa, Rik Hideto, Jo ST, FatherJack.

Game added February 7, 2000. Last modified March 27, 2024.