Game 384: Catacombs (1981) and Dungeon (1979): Won!

Not many games can fit all of their vital instructions on the title screen.

     

Catacombs
United Kingdom
J. K. Greye Software (developer and original publisher); Melbourne House (U.S. publisher)
Released in 1981 for ZX81 and Timex TS1000
Date Started: 10 October 2020
Date Ended: 10 October 2020
Total Hours: 1
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 4
Ranking at Time of Posting: 1/392 (0%)

    

From a modern perspective, the most interesting thing about Catacombs is that it seems to have been copied from Brian Sawyer's Dungeon (1979) for the Commodore PET. In both games, you engage in exploration of a randomly-generated dungeon level, picking up gold and fighting off (or, more accurately, usually dying at the clutches of) randomly-generated monsters. Both titles ultimately owe their lineage to Beneath Apple Manor (1978), the famous pre-Rogue proto-roguelike, but Catacombs has more directly in common with Dungeon than Manor.

        

A typical Catacombs screen. An orc (O) guards treasure (£) in the room I (*) am about to enter. Food (F) and treasure (£) await me on the other side of the dungeon.

       

That said, neither game is worth talking about much. Both were released on tape for not-quite-yet-ready microcomputers, making their gameplay elements even more limited than Manor. Their lack of inventories makes neither game a full RPG under my definitions, and Catacombs even cuts the "experience" statistic that Dungeon offered.

           

A comparable screen from Dungeon.

        

This is my first experience with the ZX81, and it wasn't a pleasant one. I'm not sure if that's because of the platform, the game, or the emulator. I found that I have to be extremely careful about what keys I press, even when the screen suggests that you press "any key," because a lot of them dump you out of the program and into the command line. I found the keys unresponsive, and the emulator hung lots of times while loading the program.

After the introductory screen, the game goes black while it randomly generates the dungeon. Almost half the time, it never awakens from its coma and requires a reboot. In those cases where it does come back, your character, an asterisk, begins in a random room with a random amount of strength ranging from roughly 100 to 200. Strength is your only statistic, and it measures literal strength, hit points, and hunger. In service of that latter duty, it begins depleting at a rate of about 1 per second as soon as the game begins. You can find food to bump it back up, but in general not enough to make up for the amount of time it takes to find the food in the first place. I died far more often from depletion of strength from hunger than from actual combat.

    

The only commands are movement. You automatically fight monsters when you move into them and automatically pick up gold and food when you move on top of it. As for movement, here is the key cluster:

      

1 7 2

5   8

4 6 3 

       

The symbols next to the numbers are the justification for this insanity.

           

This seemingly insane arrangement actually has a bit of logic, as the numbers correspond with arrows and positional symbols in the ZX81 keyboard. That doesn't make it any easier to navigate, though, especially when the game doesn't respond to your keypresses about a third of the time. As you move, more of the dungeon becomes exposed via the "fog of war" effect common to roguelikes.

   

Starting positions of monsters like orcs, "minataurs," serpents, and dragons is part of the random generation. As you get close, they're represented by letters, and the game gives you their strength value. Once you step on their square or they step on yours, combat ensues. The monster and the character trade blows, with damage done each round commensurate with the difference between strength values. If you manage to kill the monster, you get a bump in strength.

        

Exchanging blows in combat.

      

There are two major factors that convince me the author was using Dungeon as a template. First, both games, in their random generation of levels, create rooms that are unconnected to other rooms by corridors. To reach them, you have to tunnel through the dungeon walls, at a greater cost of strength per round. Second, both games feature monsters that offer to go away for half your gold if you're in danger of dying from them. These two things seem too odd and specific to have been developed independently, and I don't think either was present in Manor.

   

Catacombs has a couple of other gameplay features that I found in the code though never experienced in the game itself. One is the occasional trap that requires you to guess a number between 1 and 5 to escape. The other is a phantom who offers to raise your strength for 100 gold pieces. There's also a warlock that appears to cast a spell that has a certain probability of killing you instantly.

           

Stuck in a trap.

       

In Dungeon, when you finish the level, you've finished the game, but Catacombs lets you find an exit from each level and carry your character to the next randomly-generated one. There is otherwise no way to win the game. You keep collecting gold and food and fighting until you inevitably get killed by a monster or hunger.

       

Exits let you start the whole futile process anew.

       

J. K. Greye was a 1980s developer and publisher of ZX81 and ZX Spectrum games, the most famous of which was probably 3D Monster Maze (1981), offered on some sites as the "first 3D game for home computers." John K. Greye himself seems to have written Catacombs. It was the developer's one attempt at an RPG.

         

Giant ants are the one enemy you don't face.

               

While I was in the process of researching and playing this game, I also fired up Dungeon to compare the elements. Comments on the original entry had included some commenters who argued that the game does have a winning condition--collecting all the gold--and that you can move between isolated rooms by tunneling through the empty space with the SHIFT key. I had previously tried this and found that SHIFT-move did nothing for me.

       

A long-awaited "win" of Dungeon (1979). The only way you can really tell it's a win is that there are no more letters "G."

       

I gave it another shot now and found that SHIFT-move does occasionally move you through walls. It's just very inconsistent. I discovered that if you get a running "charge" towards the wall, you're more likely to penetrate it than if you start from standing next to it, but otherwise I couldn't find any rhyme or reason. But with a little luck, I was able to get it to work long enough on one level to finish collecting all the gold and "win" the level. This causes the game to immediately stop, display your statistics, fill in the rest of the level map (if you haven't already), and ask if you want to play again. Since the same things happen if you die, it's not much of a "win," but I'll happily take the statistic.