RSS

Tag Archives: dungeon master

Life on the Grid

I’ve long been interested in the process by which new games turn into new gaming genres or sub-genres.

Most game designers know from the beginning that they will be working within the boundaries of an existing genre, whether due to their own predilections or to instructions handed down from above. A minority are brave and free enough to try something formally different from the norm, but few to none even of them, it seems safe to say, deliberately set out to create a new genre. Yet if the game they make turns into a success, it may be taken as the beginning of just that, even as — and this to me is the really fascinating part — design choices which were actually technological compromises with the Platonic ideal in the designer’s mind are taken as essential, positive parts of the final product.

A classic example of this process is a genre that’s near and dear to my heart: the text adventure. Neither of the creators of the original text adventure — they being Will Crowther and Don Woods — strikes me as a particularly literary sort. I suspect that, if they’d had the technology available to them to do it, they’d have happily made their game into a photorealistic 3D-rendered world to be explored using virtual-reality glasses. As it happened, though, all they had was a text-only screen and a keyboard connected to a time-shared DEC PDP-10. So, they made do, describing the environment in text and accepting input in the form of commands entered at the keyboard.

If we look at what happened over the ten to fifteen years following Adventure‘s arrival in 1977, we see a clear divide between practitioners of the form. Companies like Sierra saw the text-only format as exactly the technological compromise Crowther and Woods may also have seen, and ran away from it as quickly as possible. Others, however — most notably Infocom — embraced text, finding in it an expansive possibility space all its own, even running advertisements touting their lack of graphics as a virtue. The heirs to this legacy still maintain a small but vibrant ludic subculture to this day.

But it’s another, almost equally interesting example of this process that’s the real subject of our interest today: the case of the real-time grid-based dungeon crawler. After the release of Sir-Tech’s turn-based dungeon crawl Wizardry in 1981, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the ideal next step would be: a smooth-scrolling first-person 3D environment running in real time. Yet that was a tall order indeed for the hardware of the time — even for the next generation of 16-bit hardware that began to arrive in the mid-1980s, as exemplified by the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. So, when a tiny developer known as FTL decided the time had come to advance the state of the art over Wizardry, they compromised by going to real time but holding onto a discrete grid of locations inside the dungeon of Dungeon Master.

Gamers of today have come to refer to dungeon crawls on a grid as “blobbers,” which is as good a term as any. (The term arises from the way that these games typically “blob” together a party of four or six characters, moving them in lockstep and giving the player a single first-person — first-people? — view of the world.) The Dungeon Master lineage, then, are “real-time blobbers.”

By whatever name, this intermediate step between Wizardry and the free-scrolling ideal came equipped with its own unique set of gameplay affordances. Retaining the grid allowed you to do things that you simply couldn’t otherwise. For one thing, it allowed a game to combine the exciting immediacy of real time with what remains for some of us one of the foremost pleasures of the earlier, Wizardry style of dungeon crawl: the weirdly satisfying process of making your own maps — of slowly filling in the blank spaces on your graph paper, bringing order and understanding to what used to be the chaotic unknown.

This advertisement for the popular turn-based dungeon crawl Might and Magic makes abundantly clear how essential map-making was to the experience of these games. “Even more cartography than the bestselling fantasy game!” What a sales pitch…

But even if you weren’t among the apparent minority who enjoyed that sort of thing, the grid had its advantages, the most significant of which is implied by the very name of “blobber.” It was easy and natural in these games to control a whole party of characters moving in lockstep from square to square, thus retaining another of the foremost pleasures of turn-based games like Wizardry: that of building up not just a single character but a balanced team of them. In a free-scrolling, free-moving game, with its much more precise sense of embodied positioning, such a conceit would have been impossible to maintain. And much of the emergent interactivity of Dungeon Master‘s environment would also have been impossible without the grid. Many of us still recall the eureka moment when we realized that we could kill monsters by luring them into a gate square and pushing a button to bash them on the heads with the thing as it tried to descend, over and over again. Without the neat order of the grid, where a gate occupying a square fills all of that square as it descends, there could have been no eureka.

So, within a couple of years of Dungeon Master‘s release in 1987, the real-time blobber was establishing itself in a positive way, as its own own sub-genre with its own personality, rather than the unsatisfactory compromise it may first have seemed. Today, I’d like to do a quick survey of this popular if fairly brief-lived style of game. We can’t hope to cover all of the real-time blobbers, but we can hit the most interesting highlights.


Bloodwych running in its unique two-player mode.

Most of the games that followed Dungeon Master rely on one or two gimmicks to separate themselves from their illustrious ancestor, while keeping almost everything else the same. Certainly this rule applied to the first big title of the post-Dungeon Master blobber generation, 1989’s Bloodwych. It copies from FTL’s game not only the real-time approach but also its innovative rune-based magic system, and even the conceit of the player selecting her party from a diverse group of heroes who have been frozen in amber. By way of completing the facsimile, Bloodwych eventually got a much more difficult expansion disk, similar to Dungeon Master‘s famously difficult Chaos Strikes Back.

The unique gimmick here is the possibility for two players to play together on the same machine, either cooperatively or competitively, as they choose. A second innovation of sorts is the fact that, in addition to the usual Amiga and Atari ST versions, Bloodwych was also made for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and Sinclair Spectrum, much more limited 8-bit computers which still owned a substantial chunk of the European market in 1989.

Bloodwych was the work of a two-man team, one handling the programming, the other the graphics. The programmer, one Anthony Taglione, tells an origin story that’s exactly what you’d expect it to be:

Dungeon Master appeared on the ST and what a product it was! Three weeks later we’d played it to death, even taking just a party of short people. My own record is twelve hours with just two characters. I was talking with Mirrorsoft at the time and suggested that I could do a DM conversion for them on the C64. They ummed and arred a lot and Pete [the artist] carried on drawing screens until they finally said, “Yes!” and I said, “No! We’ve got a better design and it’ll be two-player-simultaneous.” They said, “Okay, but we want ST and Amiga as well.”

The two-player mode really is remarkable, especially considering that it works even on the lowly 8-bit systems. The screen is split horizontally, and both parties can roam about the dungeon freely in real time, even fighting one another if the players in control wish it. “An option allowing two players to connect via modem could only have boosted the game’s popularity,” noted Wizardry‘s designer Andrew Greenberg in 1992, in a review of the belated Stateside MS-DOS release. But playing Bloodwych in-person with a friend had to be if anything even more fun.

Unfortunately, the game has little beyond its two-player mode and wider platform availability to recommend it over Dungeon Master. Ironically, many of its problems are down to the need to accommodate the two-player mode. In single-player mode, the display fills barely half of the available screen real estate, meaning that everything is smaller and harder to manipulate than in Dungeon Master. The dungeon design as well, while not being as punishing as some later entries in this field, is nowhere near as clever or creative as that of Dungeon Master, lacking the older game’s gradual, elegant progression in difficulty and complexity. As would soon become all too typical of the sub-genre, Bloodwych offered more levels — some forty of them in all, in contrast to Dungeon Master‘s twelve — in lieu of better ones.

So, played today, Bloodwych doesn’t really have a lot to offer. It was doubtless a more attractive proposition in its own time, when games were expensive and length was taken by many cash-strapped teenage gamers as a virtue unto itself. And of course the multiplayer mode was its wild card; it almost couldn’t help but be fun, at least in the short term. By capitalizing on that unique attribute and the fact that it was the first game out there able to satiate eager fans of Dungeon Master looking for more, Bloodwych did quite well for its publisher.


Captive has the familiar “paper doll” interface of Dungeon Master, but you’re controlling robots here. The five screens along the top will eventually be used for various kinds of telemetry and surveillance as you acquire new capabilities.

The sub-genre’s biggest hit of 1990 — albeit once again only in Europe — evinced more creativity in many respects than Bloodwych, even if its primary claim to fame once again came down to sheer length. Moving the action from a fantasy world into outer space, Captive is a mashup of Dungeon Master and Infocom’s Suspended, if you can imagine such a thing. As a prisoner accused of a crime he didn’t commit, you must free yourself from your cell using four robots which you control remotely. Unsurprisingly, the high-tech complexes they’ll need to explore bear many similarities to a fantasy dungeon.

The programmer, artist, and designer behind Captive was a lone-wolf Briton named Tony Crowther, who had cranked out almost thirty simple games for 8-bit computers before starting on this one, his first for the Amiga and Atari ST. Crowther created the entire game all by himself in about fourteen months, an impressive achievement by any standard.

More so even than for its setting and premise, Captive stands out for its reliance on procedurally-generated “dungeons.” In other words, it doesn’t even try to compete with Dungeon Master‘s masterful level design, but rather goes a different way completely. Each level is generated by the computer on the fly from a single seed number in about three seconds, meaning there’s no need to store any of the levels on disk. After completing the game the first time, the player is given the option of doing it all over again with a new and presumably more difficult set of complexes to explore. This can continue virtually indefinitely; the level generator can produce 65,535 unique levels in all. That should be enough, announced a proud Crowther, to keep someone playing his game for fifty years by his reckoning: “I wanted to create a role-playing game you wouldn’t get bored of — a game that never ends, so you can feasibly play it for years and years.”

Procedural generation tended to be particularly appealing to European developers like Tony Crowther, who worked in smaller groups with tighter budgets than their American counterparts, and whose target platforms generally lacked the hard drives that had become commonplace on American MS-DOS machines by 1990. Yet it’s never been a technique which I find very appealing as anything but a preliminary template generator for a human designer. In Captive as in most games that rely entirely on procedural generation, the process yields an endless progression of soulless levels which all too obviously lack the human touch of those found in a game like Dungeon Master. In our modern era, when brilliant games abound and can often be had for a song, there’s little reason to favor a game with near-infinite amounts of mediocre content over a shorter but more concentrated experience. In Captive‘s day, of course, the situation was very different, making it just one more example of an old game that was, for one reason or another, far more appealing in its own day than it is in ours.


This is the screen you’ll see most in Knightmare.

Tony Crowther followed up Captive some eighteen months later with Knightmare, a game based on a children’s reality show of sorts which ran on Britain’s ITV network from 1987 until 1994. The source material is actually far more interesting than this boxed-computer-game derivative. In an early nod toward embodied virtual reality, a team of four children were immersed in a computer-generated dungeon and tasked with finding their way out. It’s an intriguing cultural artifact of Britain’s early fascination with computers and the games they played, well worth a gander on YouTube.

The computer game of Knightmare, however, is less intriguing. Using the Captive engine, but featuring hand-crafted rather than procedurally-generated content this time around, it actually hews far closer to the Dungeon Master template than its predecessor. Indeed, like so many of its peers, it slavishly copies almost every aspect of its inspiration without managing to be quite as good — much less better — at any of it. This lineage has always had a reputation for difficulty, but Knightmare pushes that to the ragged edge, in terms of both its ridiculously convoluted environmental puzzles and the overpowered monsters you constantly face. Even the laddish staff of Amiga Format magazine, hardly a bastion of thoughtful design analyses, acknowledged that it “teeters on unplayably tough.” And even the modern blogger known as the CRPG Addict, whose name ought to say it all about his skill with these types of games, “question[s] whether it’s possible to win it without hints.”

Solo productions like this one, created in a vacuum, with little to no play-testing except by a designer who’s intimately familiar with every aspect of his game’s systems, often wound up getting the difficulty balance markedly wrong. Yet Knightmare is an extreme case even by the standards of that breed. If Dungeon Master is an extended explication of the benefits of careful level design, complete with lots of iterative feedback from real players, this game is a cautionary tale about the opposite extreme. While it was apparently successful in its day, there’s no reason for anyone who isn’t a masochist to revisit it in ours.


Eye of the Beholder‘s dependence on Dungeon Master is, as the CRPG Addict puts it, “so stark that you wonder why there weren’t lawsuits involved.” What it does bring new to the table is a whole lot more story and lore. Multi-page story dumps like this one practically contain more text than the entirety of Dungeon Master.

None of the three games I’ve just described was available in North America prior to 1992. Dungeon Master, having been created by an American developer, was for sale there, but only for the Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIGS, computers whose installed base in the country had never been overly large and whose star there dwindled rapidly after 1989. Thus the style of gameplay that Dungeon Master had introduced was either completely unknown or, at best, only vaguely known by most American gamers — this even as real-time blobbers had become a veritable gaming craze in Europe. But there was no reason to believe that American gamers wouldn’t take to them with the same enthusiasm as their European counterparts if they were only given the chance. There was simply a shortage of supply — and this, as any good capitalist knows, spells Opportunity.

The studio which finally walked through this open door is one I recently profiled in some detail: Westwood Associates. With a long background in real-time games already behind them, they were well-positioned to bring the real-time dungeon crawl to the American masses. Even better, thanks to a long-established relationship with the publisher SSI, they got the opportunity to do so under the biggest license in CRPGs, that of Dungeons & Dragons itself. With its larger development team and American-sized budget for art and sound, everything about Eye of the Beholder screamed hit, and upon its release in March of 1991 — more than half a year before Knightmare, actually — it didn’t disappoint.

It really is an impressive outing in many ways, the first example of its sub-genre that I can honestly imagine someone preferring to Dungeon Master. Granted, Westwood’s game lacks Dungeon Master‘s elegance: the turn-based Dungeons & Dragons rules are rather awkwardly kludged into real time; the environments still aren’t as organically interactive (amazingly, none of the heirs to Dungeon Master would ever quite live up to its example in this area); the controls can be a bit clumsy; the level design is nowhere near as fiendishly creative. But on the other hand, the level design isn’t pointlessly hard either, and the game is, literally and figuratively, a more colorful experience. In addition to the better graphics and sound, there’s far more story, steeped in the lore of the popular Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Personally, I still prefer Dungeon Master‘s minimalist aesthetic, as I do its cleaner rules set and superior level design. But then, I have no personal investment in the Forgotten Realms (or, for that matter, in elaborate fantasy world-building in general). Your mileage may vary.

Whatever my or your opinion of it today, Eye of the Beholder hit American gamers like a revelation back in the day, and Europe too got to join the fun via a Westwood-developed Amiga port which shipped there within a few months of the MS-DOS original’s American debut. It topped sales charts in both places, becoming the first game of its type to actually outsell Dungeon Master. In fact, it became almost certainly the best-selling single example of a real-time blobber ever; between North America and Europe, total sales likely reached 250,000 copies or more, huge numbers at a time when 100,000 copies was the line that marked a major hit.

Following the success of Eye of the Beholder, the dam well and truly burst in the United States. Before the end of 1991, Westwood had cranked out an Eye of the Beholder II, which is larger and somewhat more difficult than its predecessor, but otherwise shares the same strengths and weaknesses. In 1993, their publisher SSI took over to make an Eye of the Beholder III in-house; it’s generally less well-thought-of than the first two games. Meanwhile Bloodwych and Captive got MS-DOS ports and arrived Stateside. Even FTL, whose attitude toward making new products can most generously be described as “relaxed,” finally managed to complete and release their long-rumored MS-DOS port of Dungeon Master — whereupon its dated graphics were, predictably if a little unfairly, compared unfavorably with the more spectacular audiovisuals of Eye of the Beholder in the American gaming press.


Black Crypt‘s auto-map.

Another, somewhat more obscure title from this peak of the real-time blobber’s popularity was early 1992’s Black Crypt, the very first game from the American studio Raven Software, who would go on to a long and productive life. (As of this writing, they’re still active, having spent the last eight years or so making new entries in the Call of Duty franchise.) Although created by an American developer and published by the American Electronic Arts, one has to assume that Black Crypt was aimed primarily at European players, as it was made available only for the Amiga. Even in Europe, however, it failed to garner much attention in an increasingly saturated market; it looked a little better than Dungeon Master but not as good as Eye of the Beholder, and otherwise failed to stand out from the pack in terms of level design, interface, or mechanics.

With, that is, one exception. For the first time, Black Crypt added an auto-map to the formula. Unfortunately, it was needlessly painful to access, being available only through a mana-draining wizard’s spell. Soon, though, Westwood would take up and perfect Raven’s innovation, as the real-time blobber entered the final phase of its existence as a gaming staple.


Black Crypt may have been the first real-time blobber with an auto-map, but Lands of Lore perfected the concept. Like every other aspect of the game, the auto-map here looks pretty spectacular.

Released in late 1993, Westwood’s Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was an attempt to drag the now long-established real-time-blobber format into the multimedia age, while also transforming it into a more streamlined and accessible experience. It comes very, very close to realizing its ambitions, but is let down a bit by some poor design choices as it wears on.

Having gone their separate ways from SSI and from the strictures of the Dungeons & Dragons license, Westwood got to enjoy at last the same freedom which had spawned the easy elegance of Dungeon Master; they were free to, as Westwood’s Louis Castle would later put it, create cleaner rules that “worked within the context of a digital environment,” making extensive use of higher-math functions that could never have been implemented in a tabletop game. These designers, however, took their newfound freedom in a very different direction from the hardcore logistical and tactical challenge that was FTL’s game. “We’re trying to make our games more accessible to everybody,” said Westwood’s Brett Sperry at the time, “and we feel that the game consoles offer a clue as to where we should go in terms of interface. You don’t really have to read a manual for a lot of games, the entertainment and enjoyment is immediate.”

Lands of Lore places you in control of just two or three characters at a time, who come in and out of your party as the fairly linear story line dictates. The magic system is similarly condensed down to just seven spells. In place of the tactical maneuvering and environmental exploitation that marks combat within the more interactive dungeons of Dungeon Master is a simple but satisfying rock-paper-scissors approach: monsters are more or less vulnerable to different sorts of attacks, requiring you adjust your spells and equipment accordingly. And, most tellingly of all, an auto-map is always at your fingertips, even automatically annotating hidden switches and secret doors you might have overlooked in the first-person view.

Whether all of this results in a game that’s better than Dungeon Master is very much — if you’ll excuse the pun! — in the eye of the beholder. The auto-map alone changes the personality of the game almost enough to make it feel like the beginning of a different sub-genre entirely. Yet Lands of Lore has an undeniable charm all its own as a less taxing, more light-hearted sort of fantasy romp.

One thing at least is certain: at the time of its release, Lands of Lore was by far the most attractive blobber the world had yet seen. Abandoning the stilted medieval conceits of most CRPGs, its atmosphere is more fairy tale than Tolkien, full of bright cartoon-like tableaux rendered by veteran Hanna-Barbera and Disney animators. The music and voice acting in the CD-ROM version are superb, with none other than Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame acting as narrator.

Sadly, though, the charm does begin to evaporate somewhat as the game wears on. There’s an infamous one-level difficulty spike in the mid-game that’s all but guaranteed to run off the very newbies and casual players Westwood was trying to attract. Worse, the last 25 percent or so is clearly unfinished, a tedious slog through empty corridors with nothing of interest beyond hordes of overpowered monsters. When you get near the end and the game suddenly takes away the auto-map you’ve been relying on, you’re left wondering how the designers could have so completely lost all sense of the game they started out making. More so than any of the other games I’ve written about today, Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, despite enjoying considerable commercial success which would lead to two sequels, feels like a missed opportunity.


Real-time blobbers would continue to appear for a couple more years after Lands of Lore. The last remotely notable examples are two 1995 releases: FTL’s ridiculously belated and rather unimaginative Dungeon Master II, which was widely and justifiably panned by reviewers; and Interplay’s years-in-the-making Stonekeep, which briefly dazzled some reviewers with such extraneous bells and whistles as an introductory cinematic that by at least one employee’s account cost ten times as much as the underwhelming game behind it. (If any other anecdote more cogently illustrates the sheer madness of the industry’s drunk-on-CD-ROM “interactive movie” period, I don’t know what it is.) Needless to say, neither game outdoes the original Dungeon Master where it counts.

At this point, then, we have to confront the place where the example I used in opening this article — that of interactive fiction and its urtext of Adventure — begins to break down when applied to the real-time blobber. Adventure, whatever its own merits, really was the launching pad for a whole universe of possibilities involving parsers and text. But the real-time blobber never did manage to transcend its own urtext, as is illustrated by the long shadow the latter has cast over this very article. None of the real-time blobbers that came after Dungeon Master was clearly better than it; arguably, none was ever quite as good. Why should this be?

Any answer to that question must, first of all, pay due homage to just how fully-realized Dungeon Master was as a game system, as well as to how tight its level designs were. It presented everyone who tried to follow it with one heck of a high bar to clear. Beyond that obvious fact, though, we must also consider the nature of the comparison with the text adventure, which at the end of the day is something of an apples-and-oranges proposition. The real-time blobber is a more strictly demarcated category than the text adventure; this is why we tend to talk about real-time blobbers as a sub-genre and text adventures as a genre. Perhaps there’s only so much you can do with wandering through grid-based dungeons, making maps, solving mechanical puzzles, and killing monsters. And perhaps Dungeon Master had already done it all about as well as it could be done, making everything that came after superfluous to all but the fanatics and the completists.

And why, you ask, had game developers largely stopped even trying to better Dungeon Master by the middle of the 1990s? [1]If one takes the really long view, they didn’t, at least not forever. In 2012, as part of the general retro-revival that has resurrected any number of dead sub-genres over the past decade, a studio known as Almost Human released Legend of Grimrock, the first significant commercial game of this type to be seen in many years. It got positive reviews, and sold well enough to spawn a sequel in 2014. I’m afraid I haven’t played either of them, and so can’t speak to the question of whether either or both of them finally managed the elusive trick of outdoing Dungeon Master. As it happens, there’s no mystery whatsoever about why the real-time blobber — or, for that matter, the blobber in general — disappeared from the marketplace. Even as the format was at its absolute peak of popularity in 1992, with Westwood’s Eye of the Beholder games selling like crazy and everything else rushing onto the bandwagon, an unassuming little outfit known as Blue Sky Productions gave notice to anyone who might have been paying attention that the blobber’s days were already numbered. This they did by taking a dungeon crawl off the grid. After that escalation in the gaming arms race, there was nothing for it but to finish whatever games in the old style were still in production and find a way to start making games in the new. Next time, then, we’ll turn our attention to the great leap forward that was Ultima Underworld.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of April 1987, February 1991, June 1991, February 1992, March 1992, April 1992, November 1992, August 1993, November 1993, October 1994, October 1995, and February 1996; Amiga Format of December 1989, February 1992, March 1992, and May 1992; Questbusters of May 1991, March 1992, and December 1993; SynTax 22; The One of October 1990, August 1991, February 1992, October 1992, and February 1994. Online sources include Louis Castle’s interview for Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes podcast and Matt Barton’s interview with Peter Oliphant. Devotees of this sub-genre should also check out The CRPG Addict’s much more detailed takes on Bloodwych, Captive, Knightmare, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II, and Black Crypt.

The most playable of the games I’ve written about today, the Eye of the Beholder series and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, are available for purchase on GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 If one takes the really long view, they didn’t, at least not forever. In 2012, as part of the general retro-revival that has resurrected any number of dead sub-genres over the past decade, a studio known as Almost Human released Legend of Grimrock, the first significant commercial game of this type to be seen in many years. It got positive reviews, and sold well enough to spawn a sequel in 2014. I’m afraid I haven’t played either of them, and so can’t speak to the question of whether either or both of them finally managed the elusive trick of outdoing Dungeon Master.
 
 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Pirate’s Life for Me, Part 3: Case Studies in Copy Protection

Copy-protection schemes, whether effected through software, a combination of software and hardware, or hardware alone, can and do provide a modicum of software protection. But such schemes alone are no better forms of security than locks. One with the appropriate tools can pick any lock. Locks only project the illusion of protection, to both the owner and the prospective thief.

Our focus on copy protection is the primary reason why our industry’s software-protection effort has come under skeptical scrutiny and intense attack. Many users now consider the copy-protection scheme to be just an obstacle to be overcome en route to their Congressionally- and self-granted right to the backup copy.

Dale A. Hillman
President, XOR Software
1985

An impregnable copy-protection scheme is a fantasy. With sufficient time and effort, any form of copy protection can be broken. If game publishers didn’t understand this reality at the dawn of their industry, they were given plenty of proof of its veracity almost as soon as they began applying copy protection to their products and legions of mostly teenage crackers began to build their lives around breaking it.

Given the unattainability of the dream of absolute protection, the next best thing must be protection that is so tough that the end result of a cracked, copyable disk simply isn’t worth the tremendous effort required to get there. When even this level of security proved difficult if not impossible to achieve, some publishers — arguably the wisest — scaled back their expectations yet further, settling for fairly rudimentary schemes that would be sufficient to deter casual would-be pirates but that would hardly be noticed by the real pros. Their games, so the reasoning went, were bound to get cracked anyway, so why compound the loss by pouring money into ever more elaborate protection schemes? Couldn’t that money be better used to make the game themselves better?

Others, however, doubled down on the quixotic dream of the game that would never be cracked, escalating a war between the copy-protection designers who developed ever more devious schemes and the intrepid crackers of the scene, the elite of the elite who staked their reputations on their ability to crack any game ever made. In the long term, the crackers won every single battle of this war, as even many of the publishers who waged it realized was all but inevitable. The best the publishers could point to was a handful of successful delaying actions that bought their games a few weeks or months before they were spread all over the world for free. And even those relative successes, it must be emphasized, were extremely rare. Few schemes stood up much more than a day or two under the onslaught of the scene’s brigade of talented and highly motivated crackers.

Just as so many crackers found the copy-protection wars to be the greatest game of all, far more intriguing and addictive than the actual contents of the disks being cracked, the art of copy protection — or, as it’s more euphemistically called today, digital-rights management or DRM — remains an almost endlessly fascinating study for those of a certain turn of mind. Back in the day, as now, cracking was a black art. Both sides in the war had strong motivations to keep it so: the publishers because information on how their schemes worked meant the power to crack them, and the crackers because their individual reputations hinged on being the first and preferably the only to crack and spread that latest hot game. Thus information in print on copy protection, while not entirely unheard of, was often hard to find. It’s only long since that wild and woolly first decade of the games industry that much detailed information on how the most elaborate schemes worked has been widely available, thanks to initiatives like The Floppy Disk Preservation Project.

This article will offer just a glimpse of how copy protection began and how it evolved over its first decade, as seen through the schemes that were applied to four historically significant games that we’ve already met in other articles: Microsoft Adventure for the TRS-80, Ultima III for the Apple II, Pirates! for the Commodore 64, and Dungeon Master for the Atari ST. Sit back, then, and join me on a little tour through the dawn of DRM.

Microsoft Adventure box art

The release of Microsoft Adventure in late 1979 for the Radio Shack TRS-80 marks quite a number of interrelated firsts for the games industry. It was the first faithful port of Will Crowther and Don Woods’s perennial Adventure, itself one of the most important computer games ever written, to a home computer. It accomplished this feat by taking advantage of the capabilities of the floppy disk, becoming in the process the first major game to be released on disk only, as opposed to the cassettes that still dominated the industry. And to keep those disks from being copied, normally a trivially easy thing to do in comparison to copying a cassette, Microsoft applied one of the earliest notable instances of physical copy protection to the disk, a development novel enough to attract considerable attention in its own right in the trade press. Byte magazine, for instance, declared the game “a gold mine for the enthusiast and a nightmare for the software pirate.”

Floppy Disk

The core of a 5¼-inch floppy disk, the type used by the TRS-80 and most other early microcomputers, is a platter made of a flexible material such as Mylar — thus the “floppy” — with a magnetic coating made of ferric oxide or a similar material, capable of recording the long sequences of ones and zeroes (or ons and offs) that are used to store all computer code and data. The platter is housed within a plastic casing that exposes just enough of it to give the read/write head of the disk drive access as the platter is spun.

The floppy disk is what’s known as a random-access storage medium. Unlike a cassette drive, a floppy drive can access any of its contents at any time at a simple request from the computer to which it’s attached. To allow this random access, there needs to be an organizing scheme to the disk, a way for the drive to know what lies where and, conversely, what spaces are still free for writing new files. A program known as a “formatter,” which must be run on every new disk before it can be used, writes an initially empty framework to the disk to keep track of what it contains and where it all lives on the disk’s surface.

In the case of the TRS-80, said surface is divided into 35 concentric rings, known as “tracks,” numbered from 0 to 34, with track 0 lying at the outer margin of the disk and track 34 closest to the inner ring. Each track is subdivided along its length into 10 equal-sized sectors, each capable of storing 256 bytes of data. Thus the theoretical maximum capacity of an entire disk is about ((256 * 10 * 35) / 1024) 87 K.

Figure 1

Figure 1 (click to expand)

Figure 1 shows the general organization of the tracks on a TRS-80 disk. Much of this is specific to the TRS-80’s operating system and thus further down in the weeds than we really need to go, but a couple of details are very relevant to our purposes. Notice track 18, the “system directory.” It’s just what its name would imply. The entire track is reserved to be the disk’s directory service, a list of all the files it contains along with the track and sector numbers where each begins. The directory is placed in the middle of the disk for efficiency’s sake. Because it must be read from every time a file is requested, having it here minimizes the distance the head must travel both to read from the directory and, later, to access the file in question. For the same reason, most floppy-disk systems try to fill disks outward from the directory track, using the farthest-flung regions only if the disk is otherwise full.

The one exception to this rule in the case of the TRS-80 as well as many other computers is the “boot sector”: track 0, sector 0. It contains code, stored outside the filesystem described in the directory, which the computer will always try to access and execute on boot-up. This “bootstrap” code tells the computer how to get started loading the operating system and generally getting on with things. There isn’t much space here — only a single sector’s worth, 256 bytes — but it’s enough to set the larger process in motion.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the layout of an individual disk sector. This diagram presumes a newly formatted disk, so the “dummy data” represents the sector’s 256 bytes of available storage, waiting to be filled. Note the considerable amount of organizing and housekeeping information surrounding the actual data, used to keep the drive on track and aware at all times of just where it is. Again, there’s much more here than we need to dig into today. Relevant for our purposes are the track and sector numbers stored near the beginning of each sector. These amount to the sector’s home address, its index in the directory listing.

Microsoft Adventure introduces a seeming corruption into the disk’s scheme. Beginning with track 1 — track 0 must be left alone so the system can find the boot sector and get started — the tracks are numbered not from 1 to 34 but from 127 to 61, in downward increments of 2. The game’s bootstrap inserts a patch into the normal disk-access routines that tells them how to deal with these weirdly numbered tracks. But, absent the patch, the normal TRS-80 operating system has no idea what to make of it. Even a so-called “deep” copier, which tries to copy a disk sector by sector rather than file by file to create a truly exact mirror image of the original, fails because it can’t figure out where the sectors begin and end.

If one wants to make a copy of a protected program, whether for the legal purpose of backing it up or the illegal one of software piracy, one can take either of two approaches. The first is to find a way to exactly duplicate the disk, copy protection and all, so that there’s no way for the program it contains to know it isn’t running on an original. The other is to crack it, to strip out or ignore the protection and modify the program itself to run correctly without it.

One of the first if not the first to find a way to duplicate Microsoft Adventure and then to crack it to boot was an Australian teenager named Nick Andrew (right from the beginning, before the scene even existed, cracking already seemed an avocation for the young). After analyzing the disk to work out how it was “corrupted,” he rewrote the TRS-80’s usual disk formatter to format disks with the alternate track-numbering system. Then he rewrote the standard copier to read and write to the same system. After “about two days,” he had a working duplicate of the original disk.

But he wasn’t quite done yet. After going through all the work of duplicating the disk, the realization dawned that he could easily go one step further and crack it, turn it into just another everyday disk copyable with everyday tools. To do so, he wouldn’t need his modified disk formatter at all. He needed only make a modification to his customized copier, to read from a disk with the alternate track-numbering system but write to a normal one. Remove the custom bootstrap to make Adventure boot like any other disk, and he was done. This first “nightmare for the software pirate” was defanged.

Ultima III

Released in 1983, Ultima III was already the fourth commercial CRPG to be written by the 22-year-old Richard Garriott, but the first of them to be published by his own new company, Origin Systems. With the company’s future riding on its sales, he and his youthful colleagues put considerable effort into devising as tough a copy-protection scheme as possible. It provides a good illustration of the increasing sophistication of copy protection in general by this point, four years after Microsoft Adventure.

Apple II floppy-disk drives function much like their TRS-80 equivalents, with largely only practical variations brought on by specific engineering choices. The most obvious of the differences is the fact that the Apple II writes its data more densely to the disk, giving it 16 256-byte sectors on each of its 35 tracks rather than the 10 of the TRS-80. This change increases each disk’s capacity to ((256 * 16 * 35) / 1024) 140 K.

Ultima III shipped on two disks, one used to boot the game and the other to load in data and to save state as needed during play. The latter is a completely normal Apple II disk, allowing the player to make copies as she will in the name of being able to start a fresh game with a new character at any time. The former, however, is a different story.

The game’s first nasty trick is to make the boot disk less than half a disk. Only tracks 0 through 16 are formatted at all. Like the TRS-80, the Apple II expects the disk’s directory to reside in the middle of the disk, albeit on track 17 rather than 18. In this case, though, track 17 literally doesn’t exist.

But how, you might be wondering, can even a copy-protected disk function at all without a directory? Well, it really can’t, or at least it doesn’t in this case. Again like the TRS-80, the beginning of an Apple II disk is reserved for a boot block. The Ultima III bootstrap substitutes alternative code for a standard operating-system routine called the “Read Write Track Sector” routine, or, more commonly, the “RWTS.” It’s this routine that programs call when they need to access a disk file or to do just about any other operation to a disk. Ultima III provides an RWTS that knows to look for the directory listing not on track 17 but rather on track 7, right in the middle of its half-a-disk. Thus it knows how to find its files, but no one else does.

Ultima III‘s other trick is similar to the approach taken by Microsoft Adventure in theory, but far more gnarly in execution. To understand it, we need to have a look at the structure of an Apple II sector. As on the TRS-80, each sector is divided into an “address field,” whose purpose is to keep the drive on track and help it to locate what it’s looking for, and a “data field” containing the actual data written there. Figures 3 and 4 show the structure of each respectively.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 4

Don’t worry too much about the fact that our supposed 256 bytes of data have suddenly grown to 342. This transformation is down to some nitty-gritty details of the hardware that mean that 256 logical bytes can’t actually be packed into 256 bytes of physical space, that the drive needs some extra breathing room. A special encoding process, known as Group Code Recording (GCR) on the Apple II, converts the 256 bytes into 342 that are easily manipulable by the drive and back again. If we were really serious about learning to create copy protection or how to crack it, we’d need to know a lot more about this. But it’s not necessary to understand if you’re just dipping your toes into that world, as we’re doing today.

Of more immediate interest are the “prologues” and “epilogues” that precede and trail both the address and data fields. On a normal disk these are fixed runs of numbers, which you see shown in hexadecimal notation in Figures 3 and 4. (If you don’t know what that means, again, don’t worry too much about it. Just trust me that they’re fixed numbers.) Like so much else here, they serve to keep the drive on track and to reassure it that everything is kosher.

Ultima III, however, chooses other numbers to place in these spaces. Further, it doesn’t just choose a new set of fixed numbers — that would be far too easy — but rather varies the expected numbers from track to track and even sector to sector according to a table only it has access to, housed in its custom RWTS. Thus what looks like random garbage to the computer normally suddenly becomes madness with a method behind it when the computer has been booted from the Ultima III disk. If any of these fields don’t match with what they should be — i.e., if someone is trying to use an imperfect copy —  the game loads no further.

It’s a tough scheme, particularly for its relatively early date, but far from an unbreakable one. There are a couple of significant points of vulnerability. The first is the fact that Ultima III doesn’t need to read and write only protected disks. There is, you’ll remember, also that second disk in a standard format. The modified RWTS needs to be able to fall back to the standard routine when using that second disk, which is no more readable by the modified routine than the protected disk is by the standard. It relies on the disk’s volume number to decide which routine to use: volume 1 is the first, protected disk; volume 2 the second, unprotected (if the volume number is anything else, it knows somebody must be up to some sort of funny business and just stops entirely). Thus if we can just get a copy of the first disk in an everyday disk format and set its volume number to 2, Ultima III will happily accept it and read from it.

But that “just” is, of course, a tricky proposition. We would seemingly need to write a program of our own to read from a disk — or rather from half of a disk — with all those ever-changing prologue and epilogue fields. That, anyway, is one approach. But, if we’re really clever, we won’t have to. Instead of working harder, we can work smarter, using Ultima III‘s own code to crack it.

One thing that legions of hackers and crackers came to love about the Apple II was its integrated machine-language monitor, which can be used to pause and break into a running program at almost any point. We can use it now to pause Ultima III during its own boot process and look up the address of its customized RWTS in memory; because all disk operations use the RWTS, it is easily locatable via a global system pointer. Once we know where the new RWTS lives, we can save that block of memory to disk for later use.

Next we need only boot back into the normal system, load up the customized RWTS we saved to disk, and redirect the system pointer to it rather than the standard RWTS. Remember that the custom RWTS is already written to assume that disks with a volume number of 1 are in the protected format, those with a volume number of 2 in the normal format. So, if we now use an everyday copy program to copy from the original, which has a volume number of 1, to a blank disk which we’ve formatted with a volume number of 2, Ultima III essentially cracks itself. The copy operation, like all disk operations, simply follows the modified system pointer to the new RWTS, and is never any the wiser that it’s been modified. Pretty neat, no? Elegant tricks like this warm any hacker’s heart, and are much of the reason that vintage cracking remains to this day such an intriguing hobby.

Pirates!

Ultima III‘s copy protection was clever enough in its day, but trivial compared to what would start to appear just a year or so later as the art reached a certain level of maturity. As the industry itself got more and more cutthroat, many of the protection schemes also got just plain nasty. The shadowy war between publisher and pirate was getting ever more personal.

A landmark moment in the piracy wars was the 1984 founding of the Software Publishers Association. It was the brainchild of a well-connected Washington, D.C., lawyer named Ken Wasch who decided that what the industry really needed was a D.C.-based advocacy group and that he, having no previous entanglements within it, was just the neutral party to start it. The SPA had a broad agenda, from gathering data on sales trends from and for its members to presenting awards for “software excellence,” but, from the perspective of the outsider at any rate, seemed to concern itself with the piracy problem above all else. Its rhetoric was often strident to the point of shrillness, while some of its proposed remedies smacked of using a hydrogen bomb to dig a posthole. For instance, the SPA at one point protested to Commodore that multitasking shouldn’t be a feature of the revolutionary new Amiga because it would make it too easy for crackers to break into programs. And Wasch lobbied Congress to abolish the user’s right to make backup copies of their software for personal archival purposes, a key part of the 1980 Software Copyright Act that he deemed a “legal loophole” because it permitted the existence of programs capable of copying many forms of copy-protected software — a small semi-underground corner of the software industry that the SPA was absolutely desperate to eliminate rather than advocate for. The SPA also did its best to convince the FBI and other legal authorities to investigate the bulletin-board systems of the cracking scene, with mixed success at best.

Meanwhile copy protection was becoming a business in its own right, the flip side to the business of making copying programs. In place of the home-grown protection schemes of our first two case studies, which amounted to whatever the developers themselves could devise in whatever time they had available, third-party turnkey protection systems, the products of an emerging cottage industry, became increasingly common as the 1980s wore on. The tiny companies that created the systems weren’t terribly far removed demographically from the crackers that tried to break them; they were typically made up of one to three young men with an encyclopedic knowledge of their chosen platforms and no small store of swagger of their own. Their systems, sporting names like RapidLok and PirateBusters, were multifaceted and complex, full of multiple failsafes, misdirections, encryptions, and honey pots. Copy-protection authors took to sneaking taunting messages into their code, evincing a braggadocio that wouldn’t have felt out of place in the scene: “Nine out of ten pirates go blind trying to copy our software. The other gets committed!”

Protection schemes of this later era are far too complex for me to describe in any real detail in an accessible article like this one, much less explain how people went about cracking them. I would, however, like to very briefly introduce RapidLok, the most popular of the turnkey systems on the Commodore 64. It was the product of a small company called the Dane Final Agency, and was used in its various versions by quite a number of prominent publishers from early 1986 on, including MicroProse. You’ll find it on that first bona fide Sid Meier classic, the ironically-titled-for-our-purposes Pirates!, along with all of their other later Commodore 64 games.

The protection schemes we’ve already seen have modified their platforms’ standard disk formats to confuse copy programs. RapidLok goes to the next level by implementing its own custom format from scratch. A standard Commodore 64 disk has 17 to 21 sectors per track, depending on where the track is located; a RapidLok disk has 11 or 12 much larger sectors, with the details of how those sectors organize their data likewise re-imagined. Rapidlok also adds a track to the standard 35, shoved off past the part of the disk that is normally read from or written to. This 36th track serves as an encrypted checksum store for all of the other tracks. If any track fails the checksum check — indicating it’s been modified from the original — the system immediately halts.

Like any protection scheme, RapidLok must provide a gate to its walled garden, an area of the disk formatted normally so that the computer can boot the game in the first place. Further, writing to RapidLok-formatted tracks isn’t practical. The computer would need to recalculate the checksum for the track as a whole, encrypt it, and rewrite that portion to the checksum store out past the normally accessible part of the disk — a far too demanding task for a little Commodore 64. For these reasons, Rapidlok disks are hybrids, partially formatted as standard disks and partially in the protected format. Figure 5 below shows the first disk of Pirates! viewed with a contemporary copying utility.

Figure 5

Figure 5

As the existence of such a tool will attest, techniques did exist to analyze and copy RapidLok disks in their heyday. Among the crackers, Mitch of Eagle Soft was known as the RapidLok master; it’s his vintage crack of Pirates! and many other RapidLok-protected games that you’ll find floating around the disk-image archives today. Yet even those cracks, masterful as they were, were forced to strip out a real advantage that RapidLok gave to the ordinary player, that was in fact the source of the first part of its name: its custom disk format was much faster to read from than the standard, by a factor of five or six. Pirates who chose to do their plundering via Mitch’s cracked version of Pirates! would have to be very patient criminals.

But balanced against the one great advantage of RapidLok for the legitimate user was at least one major disadvantage beyond even the obvious one of not being able to make a backup copy. In manipulating the Commodore 64 disk drive in ways its designers had never intended, RapidLok put a lot of stress on the hardware. Drives that were presumably just slightly out of adjustment, but that nevertheless did everything else with aplomb, proved unable to load RapidLok disks, or, almost worse, failed intermittently in the middle of game sessions (seemingly always just after you’d scored that big Silver Train robbery in the case of Pirates!, of course). And, still worse from the standpoint of MicroProse’s customer relations, a persistent if unproven belief arose that RapidLok was actually damaging disk drives, throwing them out of alignment through its radical operations. It certainly didn’t sound good in action, producing a chattering and general caterwauling and shaking the drive so badly one wondered if it was going to walk right off the desktop one day.

The belief, quite probably unfounded though it was, that MicroProse and other publishers were casually destroying their customers’ expensive hardware in the name of protecting their own interests only fueled the flames of mistrust between publisher and consumer that so much of the SPA’s rhetoric had done so much to ignite. RapidLok undoubtedly did its job in preventing a good number of people from copying MicroProse games. A fair number of them probably even went out and bought the games for themselves as an alternative. Whether those sales were worth the damage it did to MicroProse’s relations with their loyal customers is a question with a less certain answer.

Dungeon Master

No discussion of copy protection in the 1980s could be complete without mentioning Dungeon Master. Like everything else about FTL’s landmark real-time CRPG, its copy protection was innovative and technically masterful, so much so that it became a veritable legend in its time. FTL wasn’t the sort of company to be content with any turnkey copy-protection solution, no matter how comprehensive. What they came up with instead is easily as devious as any dungeon level in the game proper. As Atari ST and Amiga crackers spent much of 1988 learning, every time you think you have it beat it turns the tables on you again. Let’s have a closer look at the protection used on the very first release of Dungeon Master, the one that shipped for the ST on December 15, 1987.

3 1/2 inch floppy disk

With the ST and its 68000-based companions, we’ve moved into the era of the 3½-inch disk, a format that can pack more data onto a smaller disk and also do so more reliably; the fragile magnetic platter is now protected beneath a rigid plastic case and a metal shield that only pulls away to expose it when the disk is actually inserted into a drive. The principles of the 3½-inch disk’s operation are, however, the same as those of the 5¼-inch, so we need not belabor the subject here.

Although most 3½-inch drives wrote to both sides of the disk, early STs used just one, in a format that consisted of 80 tracks, each with 9 512-byte sectors, for a total of ((512 * 9 * 80) / 1024) 360 K of storage capacity. The ST uses a more flexible filesystem than was the norm on the 8-bit machines we’ve discussed so far, one known as FAT, for File Allocation Table. The FAT filesystem dates back to the late 1970s, was adopted by Microsoft for MS-DOS in 1981, and is still in common use today in a form known as FAT32; the ST uses FAT12. The numerical suffix refers to the number of bits allocated to each file’s home address on the disk, which in turn dictates the maximum possible capacity of the disk itself. FAT is designed to accommodate a wide range of floppy and hard disks, and thus allows the number of tracks and sectors to be specified at the beginning of the disk itself. Thanks to FAT’s flexibility, Dungeon Master can easily bump the number of sectors per track from 9 to 10, a number still well within the capabilities of the ST’s drive. That change increases the disk’s storage capacity to ((512 * 10 * 80) / 1024) 400 K. It was only this modification, more a response to a need for just a bit more disk space than an earnest attempt at copy protection, that allowed FTL to pack the entirety of Dungeon Master onto a single disk.

Dungeon Master‘s real protection is a very subtle affair, which is one of the keys to its success. At first glance one doesn’t realize that the disk is protected at all — a far cry from the radical filesystem overhaul of RapidLok. The disk’s contents can be listed like those of any other, its individual files even read in and examined. The disk really is a completely normal one — except for track 0, sectors 7 and 8.

Let’s recall again the two basic methods of overcoming copy protection: by duplicating the protection on the copy or by cracking the original, making it so that you don’t need to duplicate the protection. Even with a scheme as advanced as RapidLok, duplication often remained an option. Increasingly by the era of Dungeon Master, though, we see the advent of schemes that are physically impossible for the disk drives on the target machines to duplicate under any circumstances, that rely on capabilities unique to industrial-scale disk duplicators. Nate Lawson, a reader of this blog who was hugely helpful to me in preparing this article, describes good copy protection as taking advantage of “asymmetry”: “the difference between the environment where the code is executed versus where it was produced.” The ultimate form of asymmetry must be a machine on the production side that can write data in a format that the machine on the execution side physically cannot.

Because FTL duplicated their own disks in-house rather than using an outside service like most publishers, they had a great deal of control over the process used to create them. They used their in-house disk duplicator to write an invalid sector number to a single sector: track 0, sector 8 is labeled sector 247. At first blush, this hardly seems special; Microsoft Adventure, that granddaddy of copy-protected games, had after all used the same technique eight years earlier. But there’s something special about this sector 247: due to limitations of the ST’s drive hardware that we won’t get into here, the machine physically can’t write that particular sector number. Any disk with a sector labeled 247 has to have come from something other than an ST disk drive.

Track 0, sector 7, relies on the same idea of hardware asymmetry, but adds another huge wrinkle sufficient to warm the heart of any quantum physicist. Remember that the data stored on a disk boils down to a series of 1s and 0s, magnetized or demagnetized areas that are definitively in one state or the other. But what if it was possible to create a “fuzzy” bit, one that capriciously varies between states on each successive read? Well, it wasn’t possible to do anything like that on an ST disk drive or even most industrial disk duplicators. But FTL, technology-driven company that they were, modified their own disk duplicator to be able to do just that. By cramming a lot of “flux reversals,” or transitions between a magnetic and demagnetized state, into a space far smaller than the read resolution of the ST disk drive, they could create bits that lived in a perpetually in-between state — bits that the drive would randomly read sometimes as on and sometimes as off.

Dungeon Master has one of these fuzzy bits on track 0, sector 7. When the disk is copied, the copy will contain not a fuzzy bit but a normal bit, on or off according to the quantum vagaries of the read process that created it.

Figure 6

Figure 6

As illustrated in Figure 6, Dungeon Master‘s copy-protection routines read the ostensible fuzzy bit over and over, waiting for a discordant result. When that comes, it can assume that it’s running from an original disk and continue. If it tries many times, always getting the same result, it assumes it’s running from a copy and behaves accordingly.

FTL’s scheme was so original that they applied for and were granted a patent on it, one that’s been cited many times in subsequent filings. It represents a milestone in the emerging art and science of DRM. Ironically, the most influential aspect of Dungeon Master, a hugely influential game on its own terms, might just be its fuzzy-bit copy protection. Various forms of optical media continue to use the same approach to this day.

With duplication a complete non-starter in the case of both this sector numbered 247 and the fuzzy bit, the only way to pirate Dungeon Master must be to crack it. Doing so must entail diving into the game’s actual code, looking for the protection check and modifying it to always return a positive response. In itself, that wasn’t usually too horrible; crackers had long ago learned to root through code to disable look-up-a-word-in-the-manual and code-wheel-based “soft” protection schemes. But FTL, as usual, had a few tricks up their sleeves to make it much harder: they made the protection checks multitudinous and their results non-obvious.

Instead of checking the copy protection just once, Dungeon Master does it over and over, from half-a-dozen or so different places in its code, turning the cracker’s job into a game of whack-a-mole. Every time he thinks he’s got it at last, up pops another check. The most devious of all the checks is the one that’s hidden inside a file called “graphics.dat,” the game’s graphics store. Who would think to look for executable code there?

Compounding the problem of finding the checks is the fact that even on failure they don’t obviously do anything. The game simply continues, only to become unstable and start spitting out error messages minutes later. For this reason, it’s extremely hard to know when and whether the game is finally fully cracked. It was the perfect trap for the young crackers of the scene, who weren’t exactly known for their patience. The pirate boards were flooded with crack after crack of Dungeon Master, all of which turned out to be broken after one had actually played a while. In a perverse way, it amounted to a masterful feat of advertising. Many an habitual pirate got so frustrated with not being able properly to play this paradigm-shattering game that he made Dungeon Master the only original disk in his collection. Publishers had for years already been embedding their protection checks some distance into their games, both to make life harder for crackers and to turn the copies themselves into a sort of demo version that unwitting would-be pirates distributed for them for free. But Dungeon Master used the technique to unprecedented success in terms of pirated copies that turned into sold originals.

Dungeon Master still stands as one of copy protection’s — or, if you like, DRM’s — relatively few absolutely clear, unblemished success stories. It took crackers more than a year, an extraordinary amount of time by their usual standards, to wrap their heads around the idea of a fuzzy bit and to find all of the checks scattered willy-nilly through the code (and, in the case of “graphics.dat,” out of it). After that amount of time the sales window for any computer game, even one as extraordinary as Dungeon Master, must be closing anyway. Writing about the copy protection twenty years later, Doug Bell of FTL couldn’t resist a bit of crowing.

Dungeon Master exposed the fallacy in the claims of both the pirates and the crackers. The pirates who would never have paid for the game if they could steal it did pay for it. Despite a steadily growing bounty of fame and notoriety for cracking the game, the protection lasted more than a year. And the paying customer was rewarded with not just a minimally invasive copy-protection scheme, but, just as importantly, with the satisfaction of not feeling like a schmuck for paying for something that most people were stealing.

As the developer of both Dungeon Master and the software portion of its copy protection, I knew that eventually the copy protection would be broken, but that the longer it held out the less damage we would suffer when it was broken.

Dungeon Master had a greater than 50-percent market penetration on the Atari ST—that is, more than one copy of Dungeon Master was sold for each two Atari ST computers sold. That’s easily ten times the penetration of any other game of the time on any other platform.

So what’s the lesson? That piracy does take significant money out of the pocket of the developer and that secure anti-piracy schemes are viable.

Whether we do indeed choose to view Dungeon Master as proof of the potential effectiveness of well-crafted DRM as a whole or, as I tend to, as something of an historical aberration produced by a unique combination of personalities and circumstances, it does remain a legend among old sceners, respected as perhaps the worthiest of all the wily opponents they encountered over the years — not just technically brilliant but conceptually and even psychologically so. By its very nature, the long war between the publishers and the crackers could only be a series of delaying actions on the part of the former. For once, the delay created by Dungeon Master‘s copy protection was more than long enough.

And on that note we’ll have to conclude this modest little peek behind the curtain of 1980s copy protection. Like so many seemingly narrow and esoteric topics, it only expands and flowers the deeper you go into it. People continue to crack vintage games and other software to this day, and often document their findings in far more detail than I can here. Apple II fans may want to have a look at the work of one “a2_4am” on Mastodon, while those of you who want to know more about RapidLok may want to look into the C64 Preservation Project‘s detailed RapidLok Handbook, which is several times the length of this article. And if all that’s far, far more information than you want — and no, I really don’t blame you — I hope this article, cursory as it’s been, has instilled some respect for the minds on both sides of the grand software-piracy wars of the 1980s.

(Sources: Beneath Apple DOS by Don Worth and Pieter Lechner; The Anatomy of the 1541 Disk Drive by Lothar Englisch and Norbert Szczepanowski; Inside Commodore DOS by Richard Immers and Gerald G. Newfeld; The Kracker Jax Revealed Trilogy; Commodore Power Play of August/September 1985; Kilobaud of July 1982; New Zealand Bits and Bytes of May 1984; Games Machine of June 1988; Transactor 5.3; 80 Microcomputing of November 1980; Byte of December 1980; Hardcore Computist #9 and #11; Midnite Software Gazette of April 1986. Online sources include Nick Andrew’s home page, the aforementioned C64 Preservation Project, and The Dungeon Master Encyclopedia. See also Jean Louis-Guérin’s paper “Atari Floppy Disk Copy Protection.” Information on the SPA’s activities comes from the archive of SPA-related material donated to the Strong Museum of Play by Doug Carlston, first fruit of my research here in Rochester.

My huge thanks to Nate Lawson for doing something of a peer review of this article prior to publication!)

 
 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dungeon Master, Part 2: The Playing of

Dungeon Master

Like any cagey revolutionary, Dungeon Master doesn’t lay all its cards on the table when we first meet it. When the curtain goes up — or, rather, when the iron gate opens — on its first level, we might think we’re just in for a Wizardry with better graphics and the luxury of a mouse-driven interface. Because this first level is entirely deserted, it’s not immediately obvious that the game is even running in real time, much less what a huge difference that quality is ultimately going to make to the experience. And because we can’t do anything at this point other than move around, it’s also not immediately obvious just what an interactive sort of dungeon we’ve just entered.

Dungeon Master

Still, there are already oddities, not least of which is the fact that we’ve been dropped into the game proper so very abruptly, without going through any of the usual rigmarole of rolling up characters or answering an old gypsy’s questions. Dungeon Master‘s fictional conceit has it that we are a sort of wandering spirit, whose first task must be to take charge of — possess? — up to 4 of the 24 characters found frozen in amber here in the first level’s so-called “Hall of Champions.” The characters in the Hall, supposedly adventurers who earlier tried to penetrate the dungeon and were rewarded with death for their efforts, provide a rare opportunity for FTL to let their hair down and toss a little pop culture into an otherwise almost aggressively austere game. In naming and drawing the characters we can choose from, FTL drew them from fictions like Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and their own previous game Sundog. They also included real-world figures like the Viking explorer Leif Eriksson and, because they were mostly young men with young men’s interests, 1975 Playboy Playmate Azizi Johari. Andy Jaros went fairly crazy with these portraits, making a whole “construction kit” for different combinations of bodies, facial features, and clothing. “Every female character,” remembers tools programmer Mike Newton wryly, “had a number of brassieres she could wear.”

Dungeon Master

The team was tempted to include Jaros’s construction kit along with a much more traditional character-creation process in the game itself. Wayne Holder remembers a “big schism” in his team between people “who just wanted to pick a character and get going” and those who wanted to laboriously roll their own, customizing every detail to their liking as in the CRPGs of yore. But, more than just being an inconvenience to new or impatient players, a character-creation process that took place outside of the dungeon would have worked against the sense of “you are there” immersion that was always the guiding philosophy of the game as a whole. Thus this casting of us as a wandering spirit in a Hall of Champions, an embodied part of the game’s world from the very first instant.

Dungeon Master

As a sop to those players that demanded more control, FTL made it possible to either “resurrect” or “reincarnate” each character. The former preserves the champion’s name and vital attributes, including a few levels in one or more of the disciplines (more on them momentarily); the latter preserves only her portrait, letting us rename her and develop her as we like from scratch. We’ll resurrect today, both because it’s easier and because it seems more in keeping with the spirit of the game, but the choice is up to each player. (Sorry, classic Playboy connoisseurs, but Azizi won’t make the cut today.)

Dungeon Master

With our party formed, the bits and pieces of the user interface get filled in. Running along the top we now see each of the members of our party along with what he’s carrying in his right and left hands, which doesn’t amount to much of anything at the moment. Three bar graphs show each character’s current hit points, stamina, and mana.

While the first of these is a very traditional metric, the second provides a good example of how Dungeon Master so often yet so subtly transcends the tabletop roots of previous CRPGs. When a character exerts himself — by fighting or by running about quickly, and especially by doing either whilst carrying a heavy load — his stamina drops, diminishing his effectiveness in combat and slowing him down. He can regain stamina only by resting or through magical means. Weaker characters naturally fatigue more quickly than stronger ones. This mechanic would be impossible to replicate on the tabletop; the amount of bookkeeping required would have defied even the most pedantic of human Dungeon Masters. On the computer, however, it works a treat.

As for the last graph, showing mana… let’s hold off on that for right now, as we will the panel of spell runes found to the right, just below the draggable icons representing the party’s current walking arrangement. Below the spell-casting panel are the buttons we press to make each character take a swing or a throw or a shot, as the case may be, at a monster, and below them the buttons we press to move about.

Now let’s right-click on one of the characters along the top of the screen to see some more of Dungeon Master‘s new ideas…

Dungeon Master

Here we see the debut of the soon-to-be ubiquitous “paper-doll” approach to character inventory in CRPGs. We can just drag what we like onto the body, into the hands, into the various packs and pockets. (Apparently old Wuuf, like Donald Duck, is a let-it-all-hang-out, pants-free kind of guy.) Once again, all of this would be a nightmare for players of a tabletop RPG to keep track of, but it’s easy, intuitive, and natural for the player of a computer game. The most literally embodying aspect of Dungeon Master the first embodied CRPG, paper-doll inventories would go on to become one of the most obvious and omnipresent of all its legacies.

Dungeon Master

Clicking on the eye — note how it shifts its gaze when we do so, one of Dungeon Master‘s many subtle graphical touches — shows us the vital statistics of this character. The designers have tinkered a bit with the traditional core ability scores, removing useless stuff like Charisma to arrive at a set that hones in with relentless precision on Dungeon Master‘s priorities of killing monsters and mapping dungeons. This is not so surprising; games like the original Wizardry, which insisted on implementing a Dungeons and Dragons-style alignment system it had no idea what to do with, were already becoming the rarity of the field by 1987.

The big surprise that is revealed here is Dungeon Master‘s approach to character class — or, rather, its rejection of the very concept. Instead of each character having a single class which he shall hold forevermore, complete with associated arbitrary restrictions of Dungeons and Dragons like a cleric’s inability to use edged weapons and a magic user’s inability to wear armor, Dungeon Master offers four skill disciplines in which any character can advance at any time: fighter, ninja, wizard, and priest. Like in the real world, he just has to practice to get better at any of them. The old Dungeons and Dragons system, absurd as it was in so many ways, had long been a comfort blanket for CRPG players. In sweeping it all away, Dungeon Master must have felt shocking, perhaps uncomfortably so. But, soon enough, it felt bracing. Why should this computer game adhere to a system set up for an old tabletop game? Dungeon Master‘s system isn’t a universal framework of rules, as Dungeons and Dragons strives to be. It’s simply the best system of rules that FTL could devise for this particular game of dungeon delving and monster slaying. Discarding so much accumulated tradition and doing what was right for their game took boldness, even bravery. It took, in short, a willingness to look at Dungeons and Dragons and ask why.

Dungeon Master

We move on to the exit from the Hall of Champions, where we see the first of many pressure plates, usually visible but occasionally hidden, that litter the levels below. Stepping forward produces a click!, and the gate goes up in front of us. This serves as our introduction to the dungeon as a real, tactile place, a far cry from the wire-frame abstractions of Wizardry or even the full-color but static mazes of The Bard’s Tale. In addition to fighting monsters, much of our time will soon be spent tripping pressure plates, flipping switches, and pushing buttons to solve puzzles, avoid traps, and make progress. While dungeon crawls had had puzzles before, they had usually come in the form of set-piece riddles or abstract mapping challenges like spinners and teleports (all of which, never fear, Dungeon Master does have as well). This level of interaction, however, was unprecedented. It was largely inspired by, of all things, the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones dashes through a subterranean complex not all that far removed from this one, complete with many of the same sorts of very physical, very mechanical traps. (We can breathe a sigh of relief that giant rolling boulders were beyond even FTL’s abilities to implement.)

Dungeon Master

A couple of steps further we learn a yet greater appreciation for this dungeon as an embodied, interactive place. There’s an apple sitting on the ground before us. We can reach right into the scene to pick it up and drag it to one of our characters’ inventory — or, if we like, right to his mouth. CRPGs like Ultima — although, interestingly, not Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale — had been requiring characters to eat for many years by 1987, but their version of food had always been an abstract quantity to be gained and lost, little different from hit points. In Dungeon Master, food is — stop me if you’ve heard this word before — an embodied resource. We carry around apples, wedges of cheese, drumsticks to feed to our characters when they get hungry. We’ll also find that some monsters are edible, leaving behind neat “screamer slices,” “worm rounds,” or “dragon steaks” after we kill them. The different foodstuffs naturally fill us differently; a drumstick fills more than an apple. The idea that our characters can kill a monster and immediately start to chow down on it doesn’t make any sense, of course (at least if the character isn’t a dog like old Wuuf). Neither does finding a perfectly preserved apple sitting incongruously in the middle of a dungeon, or for that matter the dozens of monsters populating each level below this one with no identifiable food source of their own. Realistic this game is not. But Dungeon Master is a more immersive sort of artificial experience, and that makes all the difference — the difference between a scary campfire story and a visit to a haunted house.

Dungeon Master

A few steps further we find a torch we can pull off the wall and take. We’d best do so because light, whether generated by torches or magic, is a precious resource in every level after the first. Thanks to the comparatively generous color palettes of the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, Dungeon Master is able to dim the environment gradually and realistically as a torch begins to sputter or a spell begins to run out, rather than making vision an all-or-nothing affair as in earlier games.

There’s also a water skin lying on the floor waiting to be filled as soon as we can find a fountain; water is yet another precious resource that we need to manage carefully. And there’s something else lying on the floor in front of us: our first spell scroll.

Dungeon Master

This, then, brings us to Dungeon Master‘s hugely original and hugely influential magic system, what has come to be called “rune-based” magic. Rather than being chosen from lists or entered via code names that also serve as thinly veiled copy protection, spells in Dungeon Master are built from combinations of runes, from two to four of them depending on the spell’s complexity. The first always dictates the spell’s power; those that follow can include an “elemental influence” (like water, air, or fire); a “form” (like a spider, a wing, or a spear); and a “class” or “alignment” (like a fighter or a wizard, or good or evil). We cause our characters to cast spells by entering their runes using the panel at the right of the screen. We need the manual to figure out that the rune “FUL” described in the scroll corresponds to the one representing fire — a natural choice for a light spell. (Did someone say something about thinly veiled copy protection?)

At the beginning of the game we don’t know a single spell, but as we work our way through the dungeon our repertoire will steadily increase as we find scrolls like this one. We can play through the entire game quite successfully just using the spells that we find on scrolls. Yet the real genius of the system is that it also lets us experiment on our own to find new spells before we find their scrolls — possibly even to find spells that are never described via scrolls. It’s a great example of one of Dungeon Master‘s more underrated qualities: its combination of mercy and possibility. It will give us all the spells we really need, but at the same time it doesn’t keep us from experimenting on our own.

Casting each rune demands mana, which increases as our characters gain levels. Each new spell also demands practice. When we first learn a new spell, we should expect each character to be able to cast it only at the lowest power levels, and even then we’re often told that a character “needs more practice.” Work with it a while, let our character get comfortable with it, and he can start to cast it in more potent forms.

Now we start down the stairs to Level 2 — the first “real” level with real monsters, where things really start to get interesting…

Dungeon Master

Down here, where we are no longer alone, Dungeon Master‘s innovative use of sound becomes clear for the first time. We can hear through walls and doors the other creatures that populate the level moving about. If we’re playing on an Amiga, the sounds they make are positioned in a realistic stereo soundscape. It’s as creepily unnerving as it is, we’ll soon learn, tactically useful. But it’s also a sign of hidden depths to Dungeon Master that set it apart from the dungeon crawls that came before in ways that may not be so immediately obvious. As Wayne Holder puts it, “Everything, everywhere, was being simulated all the time.” (“Because we weren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it any other way!” deadpans Doug Bell in response.) That level-encompassing simulation is the source of the sounds. Contrast this with the approach of Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. Their dungeons are static places consisting of perhaps a few set encounters that are activated when the party steps on the right square, and lots and lots of random encounters that occur according to the old “wandering monster” rules of tabletop Dungeon and Dragons: each step brings a percentage chance of encountering a randomized group of monsters, leading to such twistings of the fabric of space as a fight with 396 berserkers in The Bard’s Tale in a room the size of a closet. Dungeon Master, a computer game that respects its computerness, doesn’t need to fall back on old tabletop techniques.

Reinforcing the strange disconnect in games like Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale between the mazes you map and the monsters you fight is the fact that these are heavily modal programs: there’s a travel mode where you explore and map the mazes, a combat mode where you fight monsters, other modes for resting and training and shopping. One could describe these games as not holistic programs at all, but rather a collection of specialized applications glued together, passing data back and forth to one another as needed. Modal software was explicitly rejected by the new paradigm of computing that was ushered in at Xerox PARC and later embraced so wholeheartedly by the Apple Macintosh and its 68000-based rivals the ST and Amiga. Separate modes, so the thinking went, were distancing and confusing, making it too easy to get “lost” inside a program. Better to have one consistent window on an application, with everything available all the time and all commands always working the same: one program, one user, one unified experience.

Dungeon Master shows what that kind of thinking can mean when applied to a game. There is no separation between walking around in the dungeon and fighting monsters; it all takes place there in the same view, through the same interface. Not only does this closing of the software’s seams add more immediacy, it also adds oceans more tactical depth to the whole experience. Groups of monsters can sneak up behind us, can trap us, can be cut off using doors or pits while we rest our characters and let their precious mana recharge. And thanks to the fact that “everything, everywhere, is being simulated,” we can actually clear a level of all monsters (if it doesn’t contain a magical portal that spawns them infinitely, that is) and know that it’s a safe haven to return to forevermore. In their ways these innovations represent as big a leap over what had come before as does Dungeon Master‘s more celebrated real-time nature. Because of them, and despite the artificiality of so many of the game’s mechanics, every level feels like a real space.

Dungeon Master

So, we turn right after coming down the stairs and open the gate there to meet and fight our first monster at last — a mummy. It always comes as a moment of revelation to the new Dungeon Master player when she realizes, whether here or later on, that she can use the dungeon itself to aid her cause by slamming a gate down on a monster’s head even as her characters bash away at it. If you’ve been playing lots of older CRPGs — or, for that matter, plenty of newer ones — it requires a real adjustment in thinking to understand that this dungeon is a thoroughly interactive, manipulable place, and that that reality places countless new tools at your disposal.

Dungeon Master

Combat in Dungeon Master is nerve-wracking in a way that it had never really been before, right from the moment that that first mummy unexpectedly screams at you. In addition to fighting whatever is in front of you, you’re constantly worried about what might be sneaking up behind, trying to avoid getting crushed between two groups of monsters, looking always to spot tactical deathtraps and safe havens alike. The first time you take refuge in a closed room only to be surprised by a monster that can open doors for itself is a terrifying experience in its own right. Just the scurrying noises coming through the walls are enough to fill you with dread when your party is weak and cut off from safety.

Monsters have a variety of strengths and weaknesses, move at different speeds, pursue different tactics. While you can go toe to toe with some, others can only be bested by striking quickly and backing away, again and again — just don’t back into a dead-end corridor! Or you can dispatch them by luring them over trap doors and pulling the rug out from under them by means of a nearby switch, or by using other tricks; the possibilities offered by this mechanistic dungeon can seem almost endless.

There’s much more to be said about combat in Dungeon Master and its many tactical possibilities, but there are plenty of other places on the Internet to learn those things. Even better, you could play for yourself with no more preconceptions, and in the process develop your own techniques.

I do, however, want to say something more about the flip side to Dungeon Master‘s countless formal and technical innovations: its superb level design. I’m tempted to label this as the most remarkable single aspect of the game, simply because it never needed to be anything like this good for Dungeon Master to become a massive hit. Yet it’s key to the continued fascination the game still holds for so many today, long after all of the shiny innovations have become commonplace or been superseded entirely. If you were thinking that that mummy that’s positioned just inside a door that’s just waiting to come down on its head looks like more than coincidence, looks almost like the designers are consciously trying to teach you, organically and wordlessly… well, you’d be right. A couple more examples from the second level, the game’s training ground…

Dungeon Master

We come to a lock with the key lying just below, our introduction to the idea of finding keys and the locks in which they fit in order to open up ever more areas of the dungeon.

Dungeon Master

And above is our introduction to the idea of pressure-plate puzzles. Right now we’re standing on one that just opened the gate ahead; stepping on the one just in front of us will close it again. We obviously need to make a little detour to the right to avoid closing the door. These sorts of puzzles will get much, much more complicated as we work our way downward, but Dungeon Master makes sure we understand the general idea before it hits us with the rough stuff.

And so it goes as we explore the second level. Dungeon Master patiently and enjoyably teaches us the mechanics that will serve as the raw materials for all of the puzzles and challenges to come: buttons, levers, secret doors, teleports, pits. There’s even a door with no key that we need to physically bash through to remind us again that this dungeon is a tactile, embodied, interactive place. In a game of today, this would be smart, progressive design. In a game of 1987… well, this is amazing. Nobody was designing games like this at that time. Visionary as Dungeon Master is in so many ways, it was the enlightened, player-focused level design that stunned me most when I recently played it again, more than 25 years removed from my first encounter.

But if you think that means that Dungeon Master is an easy or trivial game, think again. The difficulty ramps up steadily, level by level. I’ve often heard Dungeon Master characterized as a two-part experience, the first half gradually teaching you the survival skills you’ll need by the time you get to the hardcore later levels.

Still, all of the levels remain masterfully designed in their own ways. Most of them have a theme or a personality all their own. Few Dungeon Master veterans ever forget the theme-park level with its six mockingly titled subsections; the level full of re-spawning giant worms; the level you have to backtrack through half the dungeon to actually enter; the level that’s largely a single huge cavern full of wandering ghosts. The contrast with The Bard’s Tale, whose dungeons felt not so much designed as thrown together by some automated algorithm, could hardly be more stark. The early games of the Wizardry series generally did better in this department, but Dungeon Master nevertheless offers the best level design yet seen in a CRPG. As hardcore as it can get, it continues at the same time to stay away from the really petty stuff that sinks so many old-school games. There are usually more of those precious keys than you actually need, meaning it’s possible to miss a few and still finish the game. And, while there are plenty of secret areas, those that you’re least likely to find are also those least likely to be essential. A commenter to my earlier article about The Faery Tale Adventure, responding to my criticism that it’s too hard to find your way around and know what to do in that game, noted — and rightly so — how rewarding the secret areas feel when you do find them, simply because they are so secret. Dungeon Master understands this, and fills its levels with Easter eggs for the lucky and the methodical. But, unlike The Faery Tale Adventure, it also understands the danger of making its pathways to victory too obscure. Let people win, then let them play again if they like and see what new things they can discover.

Indeed, Dungeon Master must be one of the most replayable CRPGs ever that’s not a roguelike, with a thriving cult of players who even today play again and again, setting new challenges for themselves: play with only one character; play with the weakest characters in the Hall of Champions; advance each character in only one discipline; use only spells in combat; use no spells in combat. There’s no story to be impatiently clicked through, no cut scenes to wait for, just the game. Long after they know all of the levels by heart, many continue to find them almost infinitely rewarding to revisit. Dungeon Master remains one of the most-played games of its vintage, thanks not least to lots of loving ports and remakes that make it widely and easily accessible to anyone with access to a computer.

That said, by far its most off-putting aspect for the modern player must be the need to map. This area is one where Dungeon Master is notably not so merciful. Most of its levels are huge, rambling places, especially by contrast with the compact layouts of blessedly regular size that characterized Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. They present a huge challenge for the would-be pencil-and-graph-paper mapper; you never know where you begin a level or how far it’s likely to run in any given direction, meaning you find your map constantly running off one side or another of the paper and yourself starting all over again. Drawing and redrawing maps doubtless consumed a big chunk of the tens or even hundreds of hours so many people spent on Dungeon Master back in the day. A complete collection, a fully mapped 14-level dungeon, represented a major achievement in itself, a prize to be treasured — and sometimes to be sold as part of the rich cottage industry that sprang up around the game. Nowadays, of course, you can find maps of all the levels all over the Internet. I recommend that those of you not ready to devote hours to mapping by hand download a set — preferably without any other hints — and use them rather than foregoing Dungeon Master entirely. It’s an anachronistic way to play, one that unavoidably diminishes some of the mystery and thus some of the experience, but the game is rich enough that it still has plenty to offer.

Others, both now and even back then, will likely be put off by the aesthetic minimalism that is such a defining trait of Dungeon Master. It’s a game that focuses all its energy relentlessly toward its one goal of being the best, most immersive tactical dungeon crawl possible, and excises absolutely everything else. That can, even for a fan like me, make it feel a little sterile. Tellingly, most of Dungeon Master‘s successors chose to build on it not by improving on any of its own priorities, but by adding layers of lore and story. Something like Eye of the Beholder, which clutters up the template with the same awkward Dungeons and Dragons mechanics that Dungeon Master so proudly rejects, could never be called a better pure game design than its predecessor. But, depending on your own priorities, such a lovably shaggy shamble, bursting at the seams with the lore of the Forgotten Realms, might very well offer a better game experience. For my own part, I must confess that the tactical dungeon crawl itself isn’t really my favorite cuppa, which may do much to explain why Dungeon Master is pretty much the only game of its type I’ve ever felt the need of.

While everyone must decide for herself whether she loves it, Dungeon Master can only be respected as one of the most innovative and influential CRPGs of all time. Real-time play; mode-less play; the paper-doll inventory system; rune-based magic; granular lighting; the replacement of character class by disciplines… the list just goes on. Every CRPG of today has a little Dungeon Master in it. And, outside its own genre’s ghetto, Dungeon Master‘s influence on gaming at large has also been enormous. We’ll be continuing to chart that influence, and thus to pay this progenitor of so much its due homage, as we continue to work our way through history.


 

(If you’re interested in experiencing this blend of shocking innovation and shockingly good design today, you can download something called CSBwin, a cycle-perfect port of Dungeon Master and its less welcoming sequel Chaos Strikes Back to Windows, OS X, and Linux. The only problem with this version is that bugaboo of so much retro-gaming, the aspect ratio. CSBwin maps the oblong pixels of the ST and Amiga directly onto the square pixels of modern machines, meaning the display appears horizontally stretched in comparison with the original. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but something to be aware of.

You can also experience the game via emulator. I recommend the Amiga version 3.6 of the game, a later re-release that stripped away the legendarily gnarly copy protection that continues to be a problem to this day; there are still lots of incomplete cracks floating around out there. You can download a whole swathe of Amiga versions and versions for other platforms as well from the same site.

And, regardless of how you play, you’ll need the manual.)

 
51 Comments

Posted by on December 18, 2015 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: , , ,

Dungeon Master, Part 1: The Making of

FTL

After the first Ultima and Wizardry games debuted within months of one another in 1981, dizzying formal or technical leaps were few and far between in the realm of the CRPG for the next half-decade. Richard Garriott steadily expanded on Ultima I‘s decidedly limited scope of possibility with each new iteration of his series, but never came close to abandoning the basic structure that made an Ultima an Ultima. In terms of technology and interface — theme and content were a different matter — the Ultima series was all evolution, not revolution; anyone who’s played any of Ultima II through Ultima V will immediately recognize Ultima I as an earlier, rougher swathe cut from the same cloth. Sir-Tech, meanwhile, did far less work than Garriott on their own defining classic Wizardry, content to simply pump out iteration after iteration of the same game.

If Sir-Tech’s particular brand of sloth was almost incomprehensible, in the broader strokes the Ultima and Wizardry developers’ decision to stick with their provably enjoyable, commercially successful approaches is hardly surprising. What’s much more so is how slavishly most other CRPGs chose to model themselves after one or the other. One only had to glance at mid-1980s hits like Questron or The Bard’s Tale to know where their ideas were coming from (for the record, Ultima and Wizardry respectively). Those games that did try to go their own way, like Shadowkeep with its unholy union of Wizardry-style dungeon delving to a Zork-style parser interface, made you wonder why they bothered, served only to make you appreciate the two proven CRPG templates all the more. It was as if those two pivotal early efforts had gotten so much right that there just wasn’t much innovation left to be done beyond tinkering at the margins. Questron and The Bard’s Tale were better games in some ways than their inspirations, offering better graphics and more to see and do, but they were, once again, evolutions, not revolutions. Where were the really bold and exciting new ideas?

They began to arrive only in the latter half of the decade, firstly in the form of The Faery Tale Adventure, the game I wrote about in my last article, and shortly thereafter in that of Dungeon Master, the one I want to write about today. Even in them, one can still see the old templates in the broad strokes. The Faery Tale Adventure, a free-roaming game of open-world exploration, quite clearly draws from the Ultima games with its selection of magical gems and totems, its overhead perspective, and its system of magical gates for traveling around its sprawling world. But just as much about it is entirely new: its day-to-night cycles (a year before Garriott nicked the idea for his own Ultima V); its free-scrolling movement; its action-based combat. Likewise, Dungeon Master is very much a tactical dungeon crawl in the best tradition of Wizardry.

But what a dungeon crawl it is! Having agreed to work from that very traditional premise, its developers gave themselves permission to innovate wildly within it and to question every assumption of its forefather. The result is as dramatic a leap beyond Wizardry as that game had been beyond the earliest proto-CRPGs like Temple of Apshai. Wizardry had brought with it a feeling that its developers had finally figured something out that the rest of the software world had been groping toward for some time — had gotten something fundamentally right at last. More than six years later, Dungeon Master arrived carrying much the same aura.

Indeed, Dungeon Master would prove to be almost too good at what it did, would have the same almost stultifying effect as earlier had Wizardry on the dungeon crawls that followed. It would seldom if ever be even equaled in the years immediately following its release, and wouldn’t be clearly bettered until something called Ultima Underworld dropped five long years further on. The dungeon crawl, it seemed, was just a quantum sort of genre.

Dungeon Master is such an important game that I feel I need two articles to do it justice. This first one will tell the story of its long gestation and birth and the huge rewards its parents finally reaped for their efforts. The second will delve into the game itself, to properly explain why it’s such an important entry in its field and why I consider it one of the most remarkable feats of its era.


 

The road to Dungeon Master begins more than six years before its eventual release, with, appropriately enough, those original Ultima and Wizardry games. Doug Bell and Andy Jaros were already good friends as well as undergraduates in chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, when Jaros was given an Apple II by his parents just in time for those seminal releases. The pair played them obsessively, and soon decided, much like thousands of others, that they could create a dungeon crawl just as good as Wizardry for themselves. They decided to call it Crystal Dragon; in a move that must have seemed hilariously clever to a couple of young chemists, they named the company they would form “PVC Dragon” to match. Bell would be the programmer, Jaros the artist, and they would share the role of designer.

The pair had big ambitions, incorporating themselves from the beginning and even managing to attract some investors. Emulating their hero, Wizardry programmer Robert Woodhead, they programmed their would-be Wizardry killer in Apple Pascal. They worked doggedly on it through their mutual graduation in 1983 and beyond. But, as Jaros puts it, “the money was always running out.” The pair had to accept that they couldn’t make the game all by themselves. “We sent six letters out to some software companies in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas,” remembers Jaros. “One of them got us in touch with Wayne Holder at FTL Games. The rest, as they say, is history.” In short, Bell and Jaros found themselves in Software Heaven.

Software Heaven was the name of the little company of several years standing that was owned and operated by Holder, a programmer a generation removed from the PVC Dragon boys. Holder and his company, known in its earliest years as Oasis Systems, had made their first money in the young software industry in 1981 through a program he called simply The Word, a spellchecker he had first developed to help his wife Nancy, an author of romantic fantasy and horror novels and an ever-helpful supporter of his own projects, in her work. Oasis/Software Heaven made quite a number of similar tools for writers in the years that followed. But already in 1982 conversations with an old college buddy named Bruce Webster, a dedicated player and amateur designer of games of both the analog and digital varieties, led Holder to diversify, to start a new division of his company to make games under Webster’s guidance. He named it “FTL Games” — FTL for “Faster Than Light.” It would, as we’ll soon see, prove to be a very ironic title.

The first and, as it would transpire, last game that Webster wrote for the new FTL has become something of a cult classic in its own right. Inspired by Webster’s Mormon faith, Sundog: Frozen Legacy is the story of a small group of space colonists adrift on the galactic frontier, whom you, a pilot with a little star freighter, must succor by trading for the goods they need to survive and expand. It was released in March of 1984 on the Apple II, whereupon its mixture of trading, space combat, and CRPG-type character mechanics yielded stellar reviews and respectable sales. Webster, however, had found the process of coding 80 to 90 percent of such a complex game all by himself unbelievably draining. Unable to face the prospect of another such project, he left FTL that fall, shortly after completing a version 2.0 of Sundog that fixed some bugs and added some new features.

Webster’s abrupt departure left Holder high and dry, with a successful game but no programmers to make a follow-up. Meanwhile the writing seemed to be on the wall for the other part of his business. His writing aids had done very well for him for a couple of years, but the serious productivity market was getting to be a tougher and tougher one for a small company, dominated as it now was by big names like Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, and Lotus, with big marketing budgets to match. While he would keep his hand in as a spellchecking expert for several years to come, often by writing pieces of the firmware for dedicated hardware word processors from companies like Magnavox, he was already coming to see his company’s long-term future as necessarily a games-oriented one if it was to have a long-term future at all. It was for this reason that he found these two bright young sparks Doug Bell and Andy Jaros, along with their CRPG in progress, so appealing. Their game was even coded in Pascal, the same language as Sundog. He signed PVC Dragon to not so much a development as a devouring deal, bringing Bell and Jaros in-house to become the nucleus of a new version of FTL. The initial plan was to finish up Crystal Dragon and get it out as quickly as possible, then move on to the next game. But very, very few things at FTL ever happened in quite such a tidy — or timely — way as that.

Crystal Dragon almost immediately proved a more complicated proposition than Holder had anticipated. Bell and Jaros had lots of ideas, but not all of them were practical on the little Apple II. For all the cockiness with which they had embarked on their Wizardry killer, they found themselves facing a problem well known to all too many other 8-bit CRPG developers: it just wasn’t clear how to dramatically improve on the Wizardry formula on such limited hardware.

When Jack Tramiel, newly installed owner of the post-videogame-crash Atari Computer, announced the 68000-based Atari ST line in dramatic fashion at the January 1985 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, Holder decided that they might just be able to dispense with said limited hardware. Like plenty of other pundits and industry figures, he felt sure that the ST, which in the terms of 1985 offered a staggering amount of computing power for the price, must become the mass-market successor to Tramiel’s earlier masterstroke the Commodore 64. Sundog had done quite well in the crowded, uncertain Apple II market. How well might the same game, with improved graphics and sound and a mousefied interface, do in the virgin territory of the ST? Determined to find out, Holder pulled Bell and Jaros off of their game and set them to work porting Sundog to the ST just as soon as he could get his hands on actual ST hardware.

Released in time for Christmas 1985 thanks to herculean efforts on everyone’s part, the re-imagined Sundog arrived to a still tiny base of ST users, but one that was absolutely starving for quality games for their new toys. It did very well, even better than the Apple II version despite the tiny fraction of potential customers the ST offered in comparison. The small-pond theory had worked brilliantly, cementing a loyalty to the ST that would lead them to create this oft-overlooked platform’s best-selling game of all time.

FTL turned back to Crystal Dragon, which they soon renamed to Dungeon Master — a name so obvious it was amazing that no one had yet claimed it. Now, however, it was to be rewritten from scratch on the ST. Thanks to the power of the ST, FTL should at last be able to explode the old Wizardry template without being slowly pulled back to the status quo by the limitations of the hardware. Key to the re-imagined Crystal Dragon from the beginning was that it should be a real-time experience, giving it a very different personality from the cool tactical challenge that is Wizardry. “The games at that point had all been turn-based and you could take as long as you wanted to think about what you were going to do next,” says Bell. “We knew we wanted to put the player under the pressure of time.” Wizardry‘s tiny window on its dungeons would be blown up to a view that filled at least half the screen. The player would no longer be isolated from the environment; she would be able to click directly on the world view to interact with the things — and creatures — in it. These new ideas, and the many more that would continue to spiral out from them for months to come, were part of an overarching determination to create an embodied CRPG experience. “How do you go from being a player to being ‘in’ a game?” asked Nancy Holder. Almost every new aspect of Dungeon Master exists as an answer to that question.

Dungeon Master the embodied experience: I've just reached directly into the world to hit the button and lower the door, which is no crushing the Blue Meanies beneath it.

Dungeon Master the embodied experience: I’ve just reached directly into the world to hit the button and lower the door, which is now crushing the Blue Meanies beneath it as it tries to close.

Dungeon Master on the ST first came to life before the ST Sundog had even made it into shops, as a proof of concept created by Bell to see whether the large pseudo-3D, first-person view would be possible. Bell used what’s known in graphics theory as a “painter’s algorithm” to draw each screen. The background was first pieced together jigsaw-style from separate sprites depicting walls, floor, ceiling, doors, etc. Objects and monsters that should appear over it were then sorted in order from farthest to nearest, and finally drawn in one by one, thus ensuring that those closer obscured those farther away. It worked, but the performance of the demo, which was still coded in Pascal, left something to be desired, even on the mighty ST. Bell therefore “spent three weeks learning C,” the native language of the ST’s operating system. The performance of the re-coded demo proved “better than expected.” Dungeon Master was a go.

Most of the FTL crew. The men are, from left: Mike Newton,

Some of the FTL crew. From left: Joe Holt, Deirdre Poelter, Mike Newton, Russ Boelhauf, Wayne Holder, Andy Jaros, and Sylvia Esposito.

With its founder and head himself a fine programmer, FTL was nothing if not a classic example of a purely technology-driven company. That can create a danger in the form of a tendency to continue iterating endlessly over the same project instead of just getting things finished and out the door. FTL would hardly be immune to that danger — in some fourteen years of existence they would manage to release exactly three original games and two sequels — but their obsessive perfectionism in executing all of their bold new ideas would nevertheless come to define Dungeon Master almost as much as the ideas themselves. Bell had chafed at the way that Sundog had been coded on the Apple II, and the form in which, pressed for time, he’d had to recreate it on the ST: as a big pile of hand-crafted, machine-specific code. Resources at FTL being limited, this approach would prevent them from ever porting it beyond those two platforms, despite the success it enjoyed there. Better, thought Bell and Wayne Holder alike, to first write a set of tools for writing Dungeon Master, along with an engine that could run the tools’ output on both current computers and those still to come. They could be loyal to the ST, but not to the point of stupidity. And the same tools could later, of course, be used to make more games as well as ports. “We knew,” says Wayne Holder, “that there was absolutely no chance of getting our money back with just one version of Dungeon Master. We had to set up a system that would serve as a foundation for later games.”

It was far from a new idea in game development, but few others of FTL’s era would take it quite as far as they did. A new programmer, Mike Newton, was hired just to work on the design tools. Applications like the Dungeon Construction Set, which let one design and populate an entire dungeon level from a unified GUI interface, grew into impressive feats in their own right. Equally impressive was the compression technology that FTL developed from scratch, which allowed them not only to run the game on Atari’s low-end 512 K 520 ST model but to ship it on a single single-sided disk; the entire game, code and graphics included, consumed less than 400 K on disk. Helping the cause greatly was the fact that the game, being virtually story-less until you arrive at the final showdown, needed contain very little text, a greedy eater of disk space.

The Dungeon Editor

The Dungeon Construction Set

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have already remarked certain parallels between the approach of Infocom and that of FTL — namely, the idea that the best tools are necessary to craft the best games. The comparison was not at all lost on Wayne Holder, who set out with the explicit goal of making his company the Infocom of the CRPG world, a comparison that also extended to heavily emphasizing testing and player feedback.

We set a high goal. We want to become in the field of role-playing games the counterpart to what Infocom has achieved in the field of text adventures: the best technically, who also have the best game designs and — contrary to Infocom — also the best graphics. Therefore we spent several months just working on polishing and improving/detailing the interaction for Dungeon Master. We let dozens of folks playtest, from complete pros to people who had never seen a computer nor dungeon before. We listened to every proposal and modified the user interface several times. We did think about things that do not appear in Dungeon Master at all, which we however will need in other RPGs, and have programmed them along the line, too. Now we have a complex development system that enables us to program relatively quickly RPGs with a user interface similar to Dungeon Master’s. And it won’t stop at fantasy titles alone. We are thinking about science-fiction games, detective stories, and about a couple of new things nobody has yet done.

The tricky, performance-sensitive code of the engine itself was created by Bell and another new hire, Dennis Walker, while Jaros continued in the role of artist, drawing his images on the ST using Activision’s Paintworks. Rounding out the little team was Wayne Holder, who oversaw the whole thing and also served as the de facto sound programmer, coaxing out of the machine’s limited sound chip some of the first examples of sampled audio to appear in an ST game. Far from a typical executive, he remained always intimately involved with the process of creation. “I think some of the biggest conceptual contributions were made by Wayne,” notes Bell, “particularly with regard to the user interface.” Nancy Holder was also on-hand to offer occasional insight and to write the accompanying fiction, something about a Grey Lord and a Firestaff that can be safely ignored until the climax, when you suddenly have to ask yourself what the hell just happened. To offer more story would have been to go against one of the guiding philosophies of the game. “I wanted people to have a lot of tall tales to tell when they’d finished the game,” says Wayne Holder. “And I wanted those tales to be unique. We are working toward the point where the story is scripted entirely by the player. We take you to the starting point, but from then on it’s up to you.” Perhaps more valuable than Nancy Holder’s story-making were her insights into the psychology of horror that lent the game tension and texture: “We tried to make it scary so that the player could feel engaged. We tried with background noises and all kinds of other things to make it creepy.”

FTL's greatest trade secret: Dungeon Master's C source code

FTL’s greatest trade secret: Dungeon Master‘s C source code.

The further the design progressed, the further it moved away from the structure of Wizardry, and with it from Wizardry‘s own inspiration of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. Instead of having a set class, characters can advance simultaneously in all four disciplines of fighter, wizard, ninja, and priest. Experience is earned not through killing monsters or accomplishing goals, but simply by practicing the skills in each discipline and thus getting better at them. Combat, taking place now in real time, is a much more frenzied, hectic affair, dependent as much on the player’s reflexes as the characters’ skills. I’ll have much more to say about these new ideas and many others in my next article, but suffice for now to say that, if Wizardry is Dungeons and Dragons adapted to the computer, Dungeon Master is a clean-slate re-imagining that takes only a handful of fundamental concepts — a dungeon to be delved, monsters to be fought, treasure to be collected, characters to be improved — as sacrosanct. Everything else is up for renegotiation. Bell sets great store by the fact that, while he and Jaros were hardcore aficionados of Dungeons and Dragons and previous CRPGs, the others at FTL had little to no experience with the genre. They continually asked why their game needed to abide by this or that more or less arbitrary tradition; such constant questioning “saved the game from being an extension of what had already been done.” Dungeon Master is a computer game through and through, its tabletop roots left far behind. Tellingly, it’s just as obviously a progenitor of Doom as it is a successor to Wizardry.


Of course, innovation on such a scale would take time even without FTL’s perfectionist tendencies. Dungeon Master was first discussed publicly at the Summer CES in June of 1986, to which FTL brought a very limited, non-interactive demo that’s mostly devoted to a lengthy text scroll full of purple prose. The brief glimpse we get of the game itself in action shows that, while the basic concept is in place, much of what’s been done needs further refinement. And there’s still more that would be seen in the finished game that’s yet to be even begun. The interface, for instance, is more cluttered than what we’d seen in the final game, the mouse pointer that in the shape of a disembodied hand would be your means of poking and prodding at the environment not there at all. And there’s not a single actual monster to be seen.

FTL’s original plan to make the game available in time for Christmas 1986 slipped and slipped. To keep the buzz alive, they regularly demonstrated the work in progress for ST user groups. “That was my method of knowing we were on the right track,” says Wayne Holder. “When we started showing the game, it was always invariably quiet, then the users would ask a ton of questions.” Dungeon Master was the most hotly anticipated piece of vaporware in ST circles for months on end.

Andy Jaros at his drafting table making art for Dungeon Master.

Andy Jaros at his drafting table making art for Dungeon Master.

In the end, Dungeon Master spent more than two years in active development. All that time was spent doing many of the things you might expect, adding features and puzzles and new types of monsters, but much was also spent paring back the design, honing in on what really mattered. Like most elegant designs, Dungeon Master is marked as much or more by the surface complexities it lacks as those it contains. For good reason has it long been a truism in software design that the best programs are usually those that appear the simplest on the surface. Wayne Holder proved to be the group’s Steve Jobs, with a knack for slicing through the cruft to arrive at what mattered. He demanded a game as easy and instinctive to use as a “screwdriver.” Doug Bell:

I was working on this complex system where you could look down at the floor and you could pick up things around you, and Wayne says, “Well, it’s right there, why can’t I just reach in and pick it up?” That was sort of a “well, yeah” moment. And Wayne was actually responsible for a lot of those moments. He would just come in and say, “Why don’t you do it that way?”

With Sundog out and doing well, FTL had a sustaining source of income through all the experimentation and refinement. The fourteen dungeon levels that make up the game, whose design was a joint effort on the part of the entire team, were refined just as obsessively as the technology and user interface. Dungeon Master got played constantly for months, first by the team themselves and their close friends, and then, near the end of the process, through a serious outside beta test, all in the name of getting that elusive balance between fun and frustration just right. (That said, you can never please everybody: one tester reportedly sent back a broken disk accompanied by the message, “Take this aggravating piece of shit and shove it up your ass.”)

The work paid off. As impressive as Dungeon Master is for its technical and formal innovations, it’s at least as impressive as a piece of pure design craft. It is, simply put, one superbly crafted CRPG, rivaled only by the first couple of Wizardry games among its predecessors in its sheer attention to detail. I will, once again, have much more to say on this front in my next article, but it’s important to note even here how rare it is to see such attention to design in a technical game-changer like Dungeon Master. Normally bold new gaming concepts are attached to somewhat wonky designs, to be shaped and refined by succeeding efforts; even Infocom’s early games had their share of lousy puzzles. But FTL, like Sir-Tech before them, hit a home run in their first at-bat.

David Darrow's Dungeon Master cover art became one of the most iconic of the 1980s. It was painted from photographics he took in his studio, with his wife playing the candelabra-holding spellcaster, Andy Jaros the thiefy character pulling on the torch, and a "really huge guy" from a local gym the barbarian fighter. It wasn't necessary to find a model for the fourth member of this party, whose bones lie neatly stacked at front left.

David Darrow’s Dungeon Master cover art has become some of the most iconic of its era. It was painted from photographs he took in his studio, with his wife playing the candelabra-holding spellcaster, Andy Jaros the squirrely fellow pulling on the torch, and a “really huge guy” from a local gym the barbarian fighter.

Dungeon Master slipped quietly into American stores on December 15, 1987, far too late to take advantage of the Christmas rush. Nor was it all that lavishly advertised. FTL seemed to have a certain sense of austerity baked into their very DNA, reflected equally by the modest advertising campaign as it was by the aesthetic minimalism of the game itself, which offered no music or other extraneous flashiness, just those things that really needed to be there.

But it didn’t matter. If ever a game was sellable by word of mouth, it was this one. Already in the February 1988 issue, the Michigan Atari Magazine was noting that “messages asking question and giving playing hints are appearing in unprecedented numbers on CompuServe and other information services, as well as local BBS systems.” Dungeon Master did staggeringly well right out of the gate, especially considering how small the installed base of STs really was. That same magazine noted that “Dungeon Master has become so popular, it took me several weeks to locate it in stock anywhere” — and this just two months after a very quiet release. FTL was positively overwhelmed by the demand, fighting for months a losing battle to ship games fast enough. They printed a sign to send to software dealers, saying “Yes! We have Dungeon Master!,” which they could hang in the window during those usually brief periods when that was indeed the case.

Wayne Holder personally copies Dungeon Master disks. FTL's state-of-the-art disk duplicator was key to their state-of-the-art copy protection...

Wayne Holder personally copies Dungeon Master disks. FTL’s state-of-the-art in-house disk duplicator, capable of copying 100 disks at a time, was key to their state-of-the-art copy protection.

Yes, the ST community went crazy for Dungeon Master, first in North America, soon enough in Europe, where it was packaged and distributed by the big British publisher Mirrorsoft. With the ST itself so much more popular overseas, more than two-thirds of Dungeon Master‘s eventual sales would be made through Mirrorsoft. To help them along, FTL funded full translations into German and French, still a relative rarity in the industry at that time. Doug Bell would have it that Dungeon Master sales at at least one point reached more than 50 percent of the total installed base of Atari STs — in other words, that more than one out of every two people with an ST had purchased Dungeon Master to play on it. While that seems a little unbelievable — especially given that, thanks to Jack Tramiels’s tight-lipped business practices, no one was ever quite sure how many STs were actually out there anyway — it’s a marker of Dungeon Master‘s insane popularity that it is indeed only a little unbelievable. During 1988 it really did seem that everyone who owned or had access to an ST was playing Dungeon Master. Its effect on their ranks can perhaps be compared only to the original Adventure, the game that famously stopped the institutional world of the PDP-10 dead for two weeks while everyone tried to solve it.

Helping Dungeon Master‘s commercial cause greatly was the game’s copy protection, which like just about everything else about it was innovative and technically state of the art, such that it would take months rather than the usual hours for a completely cracked version to emerge — an eternity on the calendar of the most notorious piracy demographic, the adolescent boy. Throughout those long months, the only way to play Dungeon Master was to buy a copy. A Dungeon Master original therefore became the only original game in quite a number of otherwise ill-gotten collections. The release of Dungeon Master marks one of the few occasions in the history of the software industry when copy protection clearly and incontrovertibly did do its job, generating tens if not hundreds of thousands of sales that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

The 68000 Wars hadn’t been going all that well for the ST following the release of the Commodore Amiga 500, superior in most technical respects to a similarly low-end ST and for the first time much too close for comfort in price. Amiga owners loved to taunt ST owners about the latter platform’s inferior graphics and sound and lack of multitasking and, now, its inferior sales as well. Hard as it may seem to believe that a single game could serve as a viable riposte to such comprehensive taunts, this one was so impressive that it made exactly that: “Yes, well, we have Dungeon Master!” There wasn’t much to be said by Amiga owners in response; everyone knew they wanted it, lusted after it, were jealous as hell.

But, soon enough, they got it, and ST owners lost their bragging rights again. FTL had designed their game engine to be portable from the beginning, and the Amiga, by far the computer most technically similar to the ST, was the obvious first target. The biggest stumbling block proved to be memory. The vast majority of Amigas out there at the time still had only 512 K, the same as the low-end ST for which Dungeon Master had originally been designed, but thanks to a more memory-hungry operating system FTL just couldn’t find a way to get the game running in that space. They made the painful decision to require a full 1 MB of memory, becoming the first prominent Amiga game to do so. The decision doubtless hurt sales to some extent, but such was Dungeon Master‘s burgeoning cult that it likely did just as much to drive sales of Amiga memory expansions. Just as Commodore’s own European subsidiaries had taken to packaging Amiga 500s with the latest hit games, at least one maker of RAM expansions, Tecno, acknowledged why their customers were really interested in their product by selling a sort of Dungeon Master playing kit that included the game in the same box as the memory expansion needed to play it. Many more games began to follow Dungeon Master‘s lead in demanding 1 MB, and by 1990 it had become the effective standard minimum.

Tecno AmiRAM

In return for their patience and their indulgence in expanded memory, Amiga owners were rewarded with bragging rights of their own over their ST rivals. While the graphics in the Amiga Dungeon Master remained unchanged, FTL had taken advantage of the Amiga’s superior sound hardware to enhance the experience: monsters moving about the rooms and corridors near your party were now heard in realistic stereo. Far from just a gimmick, the subtle stereo soundscape was a real boon to situational awareness, making Dungeon Master the first of the great headphone games.

Additional ports to the Apple IIGS and MS-DOS followed. Ever the tech-driven company, FTL designed their own “sound adapter” to package with Dungeon Master on the latter platform; it replaced the beeps and squeaks that were the only noises that PC clones could normally make with sampled digital sound effects, just like all the other platforms got to enjoy.

Dungeon Master

An entire cottage industry sprang up around this single game and its single fourteen-level dungeon that’s perhaps comparable only to the one that came to surround the original Wizardry. Companies sprouted like weeds out of garages and back offices to offer character editors, map editors, and, most of all, information: tactical hints on how best to combat the various monsters, maps of the dungeon levels and solutions to the many puzzles and traps found therein. At one time there were a dozen or so alternative hint books and hint disks duking it out with FTL’s own official volume. FTL themselves released the ultimate Dungeon Master lifestyle accessory, a CD — Dungeon Master: The Album — containing tunes inspired by the game, with tracks bearing titles like “Hall of Champions,” “The Adventure Begins,” and “Riddle Room.” The music had originated as embellishments to yet more ports, this time to various Japanese consoles and computers. Dungeon Master soon became a big hit in the Land of the Rising Sun as well, making it as close to a truly global phenomenon as it was realistically possible for a computer game to be in those days.

All this success prompted the inevitable legion of copycats hoping to get a piece of the same action. Some of them, like Westwood Associates’s Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore series, did indeed do very well for themselves, and are still remembered with considerable fondness today. To my mind, though, none ever quite matched the taut, minimalist elegance of the original. The first game of its kind, Dungeon Master is also probably the last that a student of gaming history really needs to play, until we get to Ultima Underworld, which replaces Dungeon Master‘s step-wise movement and pseudo-3D with a smoothly scrolling truly three-dimensional view and thereby revolutionizes the genre yet again. As Wayne Holder said a few years after Dungeon Master‘s release:

I haven’t really seen anything where they have done much more than follow in our footsteps. We expected to be imitated, and we figured that people would advance the state of the art, but it was amazing how many of the things we did got completely borrowed. The movement arrows on the screen, for example. We must have experimented with dozens of different combinations before arranging them the way we did. That’s really where your investment of time is, working out what works and what doesn’t. It’s amazing how many games I look at and see those same movement arrows.

Unfortunately, FTL proved to be like their competitors in that their own later efforts also pale in comparison to the first Dungeon Master. Making the game had been an exhilarating experience, but as draining as any other difficult artistic birthing. Comparisons to the world of film abound among the FTL alumni. Nancy Holder learned a new sympathy for movie directors, who, after finishing a movie, “sometimes take years before they direct another,” while Wayne Holder recalls “Robert Rodriguez’s comment that all he wanted to do when he made El Mariachi was to make enough money to make another film. He was not prepared for it to be successful, and I felt exactly like that.” Given FTL’s focus on technology almost for its own sake, and given that they already had a proven, hugely successful design on their hands, it was easy — perhaps a little too easy — to just focus on making all of the ports as good as they could be, on engineering gadgety distractions like that MS-DOS sound adapter. Wayne Holder’s claim in 1988 that the technology they’d developed for Dungeon Master would soon allow FTL to pump out four to six games every year sounded hugely overoptimistic even then, but FTL’s failure to serve up anything new at all for long, long stretches of time is nevertheless a little shocking. He often claimed that FTL had “several” titles in development using the Dungeon Master technology, among them an intriguing-sounding horror game that comes up in a number of interviews; it might just have marked the beginning of the survival-horror genre several years before Alone in the Dark. We also heard regularly of a science-fiction scenario, possibly a sequel to Sundog. Neither ever materialized; it appears there was quite a lot of wheel-spinning going on at FTL. Wayne Holder’s dream of making FTL the Infocom of CRPGs petered out in the face of their failure to actually, you know, make games. FTL became an Infocom that could never quite get past Zork.

Doug Bell notes the failure to build on Dungeon Master in a timely way as his greatest regret from his days with FTL: “We got so busy doing ports of the game that we didn’t end up creating enough scenarios.” Wayne Holder believes FTL’s single biggest mistake to have been not to have sold their in-house Dungeon Construction Set, quite a polished creation in its own right, and “let people create their own stuff. I was afraid it would dilute the whole cachet, and people would come up with tacky stuff, but people like to author stuff.” One can imagine an alternate timeline where FTL did what they so obviously most loved to do — work on technology — and let others make games with it. Ironically, some of the more ambitious Dungeon Master obsessives reverse engineered the data format and essentially did just that; as already mentioned, a number of dungeon editors of various degrees of utility were among the products of the third-party cottage industry spawned by Dungeon Master. None, however, had anything like the polish or clout to create a community for entirely new games running in the Dungeon Master engine. An official FTL Dungeon Construction Set might just have had both.

When it did arrive on the Atari ST two years after the original, the first semi-sequel felt a little anticlimactic and a little disappointing. Originally planned as a mere expansion pack and turned into a standalone game only at the last minute, Chaos Strikes Back ran under almost exactly the same engine as its predecessor, yet was considerably smaller. Even its box art featured the same picture as the original, cementing a difficult-to-avoid impression that FTL hadn’t exactly gone all-out to make it everything it could be. Perhaps worse, Chaos Strikes Back catered strictly to hardcore Dungeon Master veterans. It implemented nothing like the masterful learning curve of its predecessor, and stands today alongside Wizardry IV as one of the toughest, most nasty-for-the-sake-of-it CRPGs of its era. There are hardcore players that love it; I’ve seen the original Dungeon Master gleefully described as nothing more than an extended training ground for the real fun of Chaos Strikes Back. But, while making a hard-as-nails game may not be an illegitimate design choice on its own terms, it was a commercially problematic one. In being so off-putting to newcomers who might wish to jump aboard midstream, FTL was all but ensuring that every successive title in the series would sell worse than its predecessors. This marks the one unfortunate place where FTL blindly followed the lead of Sir-Tech and Wizardry instead of blazing their own trail.

What FTL themselves came to consider the first proper sequel, Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep, arrived only in 1994, almost seven years after the original. By now the Dungeon Master mania had long since died away, and FTL, for all those years a one-product company, was in increasingly dire straits as a result. The situation gave this belated release something of the feel of a final Hail Mary. And like most such, it didn’t work out. Rather astonishingly for a company that had built its reputation around technical innovation, Dungeon Master II was painfully outdated, still wedded to the old step-wise movement long after everyone else had gone to smooth-scrolling 3D environments in the wake of Ultima Underworld and Doom, the very titles the original Dungeon Master had done so much to inspire. It garnered lukewarm reviews and worse sales, and FTL went out of business in 1996.

The sun sets on FTL...

The sun sets on Software Heaven…

That, then, is that for the commercial history of FTL and Dungeon Master. Yet it doesn’t begin to do justice to the game itself as a work of enormous technical innovation, and as a great piece of game design on anyone’s terms. We’ll try to correct that failing next time, when we’ll do a little real-time dungeon delving together to hopefully see why everyone was making such a fuss back in 1988 — and, for that matter, why I’m continuing to do so today.

(Sources: Michigan Atari Magazine of February 1988;  Retro Gamer 10, 34, and 105; Power Play of April 1988 and March 1990; ST Action of November 1989 and June 1990; ACE of April 1990; Byte of November 1981 and July 1982; interview with Wayne Holder in Dungeon Master II: The Official Strategy Guide by Zach Meston and J. Douglas Arnold. The go-to place on the Internet for all things Dungeon Master is The Dungeon Master Encyclopedia, a rather staggering assemblage of technical and historical information, while Maury Markowitz’s interview with Bruce Webster fills in the story of FTL before Dungeon Master.)

 
49 Comments

Posted by on December 11, 2015 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: , , ,