Game 388: Dungeon Escape (1980)

                 

Dungeon Escape 

United States

Independently developed; published by Computer Shack

Released in 1980 for the TRS-80

Date Started: 5 November 2020

Date Ended: 8 November 2020

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 15

Ranking at Time of Posting: 57/392 (15%)

      

Dungeon Escape is a recently-rediscovered Dark Age entry that, like Beneath Apple Manor (1978) or Dungeon (1979) for the Commodore PET, vaguely anticipates the roguelike genre. You explore a single-screen, randomly generated dungeon by slowly uncovering the "fog of war"; you find creatures and items in the various rooms; and there's a leprechaun who appears now and then to piss you off. The similarities mostly end there; Escape certainly has none of the tactics of Rogue, nor the permadeath, and a lack of character development makes it technically fail my definition of an RPG. By the time I determined that for sure, it was mostly over.

     

Escape begins with the creation of a fighter, thief, or mage character. Fighters are best in melee combat. Mages start with a selection of "Teleport," "Fireball," and "Locate Stone" spells. Thieves are somewhere in between. They can cast spells, but they don't start with any. Once this brief character creation process is finished, the character finds himself on Level 1 of a three-level dungeon from which he must escape.

    

During the setup, you get to specify the speed of a "ghost" that follows you through the dungeon, Pac-Man-like, and kills you instantly if he catches up with you. The problem is that the interface becomes essentially unusable whenever a ghost is present. The game can't read "inputs" from both you and the ghost at the same time, so it ignores half of yours if the ghost happens to be moving at the same time, and it makes simple tasks a nightmare. Fortunately, you also have the option to eschew the ghost entirely. The game is difficult enough without it.

      

Getting caught by the ghost is no fun.

    

Once the game begins, random numbers rule the day. Everything from the contents of a room, whether you encounter or escape a trap, whether you hit or dodge in combat, and what direction the next turn of the corridor takes, are all dependent on a series of numbers generated from a random seed. Reload and do something slightly differently, and you might not only encounter different monsters in the next room, but you might also completely change the dungeon configuration.

    

Ultimately, each level consists of a number of rooms connected by corridors. Nothing much happens in the corridors. Rooms usually contain monsters. They're made up of the usual Dungeons and Dragons bestiary--gnolls, orcs, kobolds, zombies, skeletons, and so forth--but with a couple of creative additions like "shadow slaves" and "intelligent mushrooms," which can briefly paralyze you. Combat is somewhat action-oriented. You and the enemy trade blows, but on the game's own timer. You can only act (attack, thrust, parry, or cast a spell) when the game invites you to do so, and you only have a fixed amount of time to respond. If you hit any key during the monster's term, the game notes that you "acted out of order," and gives the monster a free round.

         

An orc strikes me during his turn.

       

Combats are pretty tough at the outset; sometimes up to eight or ten enemies line up to kill you in the same room. You start with six "elixirs," and you find more as you explore. However, these are dangerous to use in-combat because there's a chance that the elixir is not a healing elixir but a sleep draught or poison or a teleportation potion.

   

Once combat is over, you can R)ummage (search) the room for items, including gold, weapon upgrades, cloak upgrades, elixirs, and incantations. Weapons and cloaks will upgrade to +3, but there's a chance they might be cursed, too. Incantations can also be cursed and damage you with lightning bolts.

        

I hit the mother-lode in this room.

        

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the game is the frequent use of traps. These include spear traps that damage you and may be poisoned (requiring a second roll to see if you die from poison), smoke traps that put you to sleep, poison gas traps, cave-ins that close an exit, and leprechauns that steal your map (blanking what you've filled in already), cloak, or elixirs. Once the game notifies you that you detect a trap, you have a short time to arrow out of the room before it goes off. 

      

I narrowly survive a poison trap.

          

The game rolls for the presence of a trap every round, not including combat rounds. So the moment you finish combat, it rolls for a trap. If it doesn't find one, but you spend a round in the room picking up an item, it rolls again for a trap. Drink a potion, roll for a trap. Traps come up so often--about a quarter to a third of the time--that you frequently have to flee a room where just won a long combat, abandoning items behind you (they're never there when you return).

    

The ultimate goal on each dungeon level is to find some magic stones, return to the level's starting point, and get carried to the next level (or, in the case of Level 3, out of the game). There are two stones to find on Level 1, four on Level 2, and six on Level 3. The game alerts you with a flash and a tone when you're in a room with a stone, and the "Locate Stones" spell helps you find those rooms faster. There are usually more rooms with stones than strictly needed, probably because it's possible for the dungeon configuration to leave some of the rooms isolated except for a lucky teleport. And speaking of teleports, rooms with stones often have teleport traps, sending you to another part of the dungeon before you can pick them up.

    

To win the game, you mostly have to buck the stacked odds or just reload a lot. If this were a real RPG, it would make sense to fully explore each level because you'd get stronger as you did so. Here, you break even at best. You find elixirs at about the same rate you use them. Weapons are as likely to be cursed as not. You might as well do your best to make your stay as short as possible. To discourage such speedruns, the game includes a "score" that counts down as you waste time but generally increases as you kill and find things, particularly gold.

        

A ghost shows up on Level 3 even though I didn't ask for one.

       

I found Level 3 quite hard. You have to find six stones, and in my case several of them were in teleportation rooms. Meanwhile, late in the level, the game decided to ignore my "no ghost" preference and stuck one in there anyway. I had to reload many times. But eventually I won, at which point the dungeon "collapsed" and I got a message that I had escaped.

         

Is this the author speaking directly?

        

There's hardly any point in GIMLETing these Dark Age titles. I gave it a 15, doing best with a 3 in "gameplay" (short, decent challenge), 1s and 2s in most other categories, 0s in "game world" and "NPCs." It was one of many games feeling out the new genre and vying to establish its conventions.  

My research turned up some interesting things about the author and company. Bill Dunlevy is a relatively well-known programmer who became most famous for Time Bandit (1983), an action game that anticipated the similar Gauntlet (1985). In the three years that he was active he also wrote Jovian (1982), Cyborg (1982), Cashman (1983), and Assault (1983). He was still in high school in Waterford, Michigan when he wrote Dungeon Escape, brought it to a computer club, and attracted the interest of a local photographer named Gordon Monnier. Monnier converted half his photography office into a new company, Computer Shack, and began publishing Dunlevy's games. The company changed its name to MichTron in 1984. Ultimately, at the height of their success, Monnier began making weird businesses decisions, reneged on contracts with his programmers, and forced most of them, like Dunlevy, to quit. I get most of this from The Timelord's Handbook, a clue book for Time Bandit published by Harry Lafnear, the graphic designer for the game, in 2010--twenty-seven years after the program was released. From his LinkedIn profile, I gather that Dunlevy got a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan after his time as a game developer and went on to a successful career writing software for environmental, healthcare, and automobile companies.

     

If you happened to check in during the weekend, you might have seen that I originally posted a BRIEF on the game but ran into a glitch that prevented me from continuing. The game was pretty annoying to get running in the first place. Of all the machines and emulators that I've had to learn for this project, I'm probably weakest with the TRS-80. I don't know how to solve a lot of its problems, particularly since my chosen emulator (TRS32, which I paid for) chooses all the settings itself whenever you auto-start a disk. Meanwhile, almost all of the downloads for Dungeon Escape were just the original basic file, not the original basic file on disk, which TRS32 needs to run.

   

Commenter Dungy sent me his version on a bootable disk. It worked, but it also had some notable changes from the ones that I had found online. The title screen was different, and Dungy's version seemed to have a lot more traps than the original one I tried to play. I wonder if the game wasn't originally easier, causing Dunlevy to put in more hazards.

   

That clears 1980 once again, but I'm sure that other long-forgotten proto-RPGs from this era will continue to be found.