BRIEFs: Crypts of Terror (1981), Devil Dwell Dungeon (1981), and Dungeons & Dragons: The Dungeon Master's Helper (1981)

       

Crypts of Terror

Canada 

Inhome Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1981 for the Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

Crypts of Terror is an action game in which you control a little man with your joystick, run him around a multi-screen maze, stab enemies, open chests, collect gold, and try to find the Magic Ring of Power. I'm rejecting it on the basis that its only statistic is a health meter, but at the same time I recognize that it's not a million miles away from, say, Sword of Fargoal (1982), Sword of Kadash (1984), or The Seven Spirits of Ra (1987). To argue that those are RPGs and Crypts isn't is a bit like arguing that chicken noodle soup is a soup but chicken broth isn't—technically true, but still a bit unsatisfying given how much the former depends on the latter. On the other hand, I'm also unsatisfied with games in which you run around a maze with a joystick, so between the two forms of dissatisfaction, I'll choose the one that gets me out of having to do the other.

    

The opening screen, after I killed the first enemy. Enemies resurrect if you touch their corpses.

       

Crypts is clearly based on Adventure (1980) for the Atari 2600. It's basically what you would get if you added hit points and more monsters to the earlier game. Other aspects are identical; for instance, the character can only carry one item at a time, so he spends a lot of time shuttling between the sword and the key (both of which are always found in the first room). Since every room has a monster and a chest, this gets annoying fast.

   

Combat is also annoying. The character holds the sword in his right hand, so you have to approach enemies from the left to kill them. If you approach from any other direction, or they jump on you, the character's hit points will deplete but the enemy's won't. Losing all hit points means you lose one of three "men."

     

Trying to stab an enemy while the Tree of Life looks on.

     

Chests can have food (restores hit points) or gold, which the player can spend at trees of life to restore hit points. The manual specifies that the tree of life is also called the Quabala, making it the first of two games I know of (cf. The Return of Werdna) to use this element of Jewish mysticism.

    

If this were an RPG, I'd be playing it for a while. Not only does each game require the player to explore 50 rooms, but according to the manual, to truly win it, you have to win at each of 11 difficulty levels, from "neophite" [sic] to "ipsissimus." Each win provides a code word to unlock the next level. Only by winning at the highest level is the player awarded with "the ultimate secret," which "explains the first step towards unlimited power." Fortunately, we live in an era in which we can just pluck that secret out of the code:

       

Let it be known: That there exists an ancient Order of sages. This Order has existed in the most remote times and has manifested its activity secretly under different names. It has caused social and political revolutions and proved to be the rock of salvation in times of danger. It has always upheld freedom against tyranny. The truths of the universe lie burried in a secrete system of study called the "OCCULT". The Truth is thereby kept from vulger eyes by a veil of superstition and study. The symbol to look for is a single eye! (check the american $1 bill!) [every misspelling in there is a sic].

   

So, in the end, it's like a prologue to Assassin's Creed.

         

The various levels.

      

Crypts of Terror was written by Daniel J. Dorey, who also wrote Raidus! (1982) and Bugrunner (1985) for the same platforms. He died in 2022, aged 63.

    

******

       

         

Devil Dwell Dungeon: The Clearian Adventure

United States

Independently developed; published by Computer Age Software

Released 1981 for Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

My definitions of an RPG require that a game offers character development in more than a single "health" meter and that it allows the player some choice into the nature and rate of that development. I included those criteria mostly to avoid an interminable series of Zelda clones in which the character technically gets stronger throughout the game, but only in health, and only at fixed intervals that every other player experiences in the exact same way.

   

I didn't anticipate a game that failed the second criteria not because the game occurs in fixed stages, but rather because what happens to the player is completely random. That's what we have with the awkwardly named Devil Dwell Dungeon. The player guides a generic (unnamed) character through a chaotic dungeon where good and bad things happen with every step. When the bad things outnumber the good things, the character dies and you get a final score. With the sole exception of what weapon you use in combat, there isn't a single thing that happens to the character that isn't the product of a random number. It would be just as entertaining to watch the computer play this one.

     

The beginning of the game—with another way to spell the title.

       

Originally titled Ork Attack, and known in magazines by the shortened name Devil Dwell, the game's setup is that you've entered a vast labyrinth of caverns to find the Golden Septor (sic, but the game knows it because it refers to it generically as a "scepter"). After choosing a difficulty level from three options, the player begins in the dungeon with random values for strength, constitution, and dexterity (3-18), and random numbers of hit points, magic swords, normal swords, torches, rations, water, and arrows. He also has a bow. The random numbers for most of these assets are lower at higher difficulty levels. El Explorador de RPG studied the code and determined that strength isn't even factored into the game.

     

Collecting treasure is a secondary goal of the game.

       

My favorite part of the game is right at the beginning, when it has you type either "C" for "coward" and then "be free of the dungeon," or "B" for "brave" and begin the quest. If you type "C," the game then has a message for you:

   

Making me call myself a coward on the previous screen took the sting out of this insult.

       

Assuming you choose "B," you find yourself in a dungeon. It's a mix of corridors and doorways. The player controls the character through numeric commands, to wit:

 

• 0. See a list of commands. 
• 1. Go forward.
• 2. Go left.
• 3. Go right.
• 4. Open a door or chest.
• 5. Commit suicide (the message you get is "Suicide Is Painless," the title of the theme from M*A*S*H).
• 6. Light a torch. In the first move of the game, and any time the torch goes out, this is literally the only move you can make. You can't even commit suicide in the dark. If your torch goes out and you don't have another one, you have to reset the computer, I guess.
• 7. Leave a room.  

       

The game's response to anything other than "6" if it gets dark.

      

The rest of the commands are combat commands and represent really the only choices the character has in the game:

 

• 8. Avoid the monster.
• 9. Shoot an arrow
• 10. Check the character's status.
• 11. Fight with a normal sword.
• 12. Fight with a magic sword. 

          

Checking my statistics. There's a door to my right and a corridor straight ahead.

     

Any time you make a move, enter a room, enter a corridor, or exit a room, any number of things can happen, including:

   

• A monster attacks. Monsters, in order of difficulty, are orcs, wolves, skeletons, and slimes. You can also get attacked by an "unknown" monster.
• Your torch goes out. 
• Arrows randomly vanish.
• The magic disappears from magic swords.

      

I wonder if the dung caused that.

        

• Normal swords suddenly dissolve.
• A thief steals all your accumulated treasure.
• Some kind of mist or fog raises or lowers attributes or hit points.

      

PCP smoke will do that.

        

• Something spoils your food or water. 
• A "flux" causes the dungeon to re-arrange itself. 

   

In rooms, you can encounter chests or tunnels, which usually have some kind of item or treasure. Rooms occasionally also have a wall of buttons from 1-20, which you can push to get a random item or encounter.

   

As I say, the only real choices are in combat, where you have to decide what weapon to use, although I don't see any reason that you wouldn't just always use a magic sword unless you didn't have any. They don't wear out or break, at least as far as I could tell. Sometimes random encounters relieve you of them, but I never had anything happen to one sword (normal or magic) that didn't happen to all of them.

        

I am responding to the orc attack by using my regular sword.

            

There's no point in trying to map anything, since every time you move to a new area, the game just randomizes what you see. You can't explore in any systematic way. You never reach the end of a corridor. The game isn't even capable of regenerating the previous area once you exit combat; thus, every combat victory is accompanied by a message that the battle somehow transported you to another part of the dungeon.

    

If you want a deeper analysis, I would direct you to El Explorador de RPG, who either won the game or manipulated something to get the winning screen. I played honestly for a while, then started cheating with save states, but I never found the Golden Septor (it's supposed to appear randomly in a room), and I'm not willing to put in any more time trying. Whether you find the artifact or not, you get a final score based on how much treasure you collected, how many enemies you killed, and how much time you spent in the dungeon (the last one subtracts from the score). The score is translated to a title, from "Stable Cleaner, Class 9" to "Superlord of the Superlords." You can't save the game, so any achievements would have to be earned in one session.

       

"King's guard" doesn't sound bad, but it's only one step up from "stable cleaner."

       

The game was written in BASIC by a Chris Clearo (given as "Clero" on some of the materials). I can't say for sure, but I suspect the author is John Christopher Clearo, who died in 2004 at the age of 48. His obituary indicates that he would have been attending Catholic University in D.C. when or shortly before this game was published, and Computer Age Software was only about six miles away. He went on to serve as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, then retired and ran some kind of business in San Antonio.

       

Clearo's headstone presumably does not say this.

      

My guess is that Clearo expanded on type-in games available at the time; Devil Dwell suggests some DNA from The Devil's Dungeon (1978) and Quest 1 (1981), the former in the commands and the latter in the types of inventory and treasures available. It's an interesting idea, but it needed more player agency and less randomness.

   

******

      

       

Dungeons & Dragons: The Dungeon Master's Helper

United States(?)

Kinetic Designs (developer and publisher)

Released 1981 for Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Not a game

    

This one isn't even a game; it's a utility intended to assist dungeon masters playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. And it doesn't even do much of that. It has exactly two functions: a "character creator" that randomly rolls the standard set of D&D attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, charisma) and then tells you what character classes you're allowed to choose; and a die-rolling function that just generates a random number between any two numbers you input. That's it. It doesn't save anything or help you at all with equipment, spells, or combat. Anybody reading this could probably write a more useful version of the program.

      

At least he's got charm.

      

Curiously, one of the character classes is "normal man." Was there an edition of D&D that allowed you to choose this option if no class's prime requisites were met?

   

The "Kinetic Designs" referenced is definitely not the later United Kingdom company. A note in the code says that the program was "obtained by Ace through the Jacksonville [Florida] Atari Group," so it was probably someone's local label. I can't find any evidence that it was sold, which is probably a good thing, as I doubt that TSR would have been mollified by the copyright nod on the title screen.

 

Mark your calendars: 16 May 2026 is MUD Day!

On 16 May 2026 from 18:00-21:00 UTC (14:00-17:00 EDT in the U.S.), I will be playing the original Multi-User Dungeon (1978), as hosted on British Legends. (I will subsequently post an entry about it.) Create an account, join me, and help mimic the original multiplayer experience of this landmark game.

 

I'll put out a longer post about this during the first two weeks of April.