Chagunitzu

Covermount release

This game was included in Big Blue Disk #44.

Development

Keith Schuler talks about Chagunitzu:

chagunitzu was supposed to be "Temple of the Kings", and was basically a word I made up after staring at a "Chichen Itza" poster all year long in the language lab at my high school. If memory serves, Chichen Itza has a "Temple of the Warriors" in it, and this temple is what I imagined chagunitzu looked like.

So, my inspiration for chagunitzu came from these primary sources: 1. Commercials for The Legend of Zelda on TV (I didn't own a NES) inspired me to have top down temples to explore. 2. Playing Boulderdash inspired me to have puzzles based on pushing boulders, and the fireflies in that game became the spiders in mine. And 3. The really cool looking poster in my language lab inspired me to base the game on an Aztec pyramid, with an Indiana Jones type of character exploring it.

I was just a high school kid making a video game, though, so I didn't research anything. A quick web search reveals that Chichen Itza isn't even Aztec, it is Mayan. Oops!

Information also contributed by Demian Katz