Game 584: Dungeon Arcade (1987) and Game 585: Search for the Jewel of Strength (1987)

In the end, the game is true to its name; it's more of an arcade game. 

        

Dungeon Arcade

Israel

Independently developed; published as type-in Atari 800 BASIC code in the December 1987 Antic magazine

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

       

From an Israeli high school student comes this type-in game published as code in Antic magazine. I'd like to be able to call it the first Israeli RPG, but it's not really an RPG, so I guess we have to wait until the 2010s. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Quest games, but not so much that I'm sure developer Nadav Gur was inspired by them.

   

The game takes place in a dungeon of 40 rooms, the player's only goal is to get out with as high a score as possible. There's no character creation, just a name. Each new character starts in a 38 x 22 room (including the borders) with 400 hit points and no items. He must contend with the monster in the room, pick up any treasures, avoid traps, and make his way to the exit. Repeat 39 times or (more likely) until the character dies.

     

A typical room. I have just fired an arrow at a rat, which has temporarily blinked out of existence. A suit of armor and a "Fireball" spell await amidst the traps. The exit is on the south wall.

                  

Along the way, the character can find:

   

• Food, which has an uncertain purpose. It is consumed immediately when found. The game frequently says that you're hungry, very hungry, or starving, but I'm not sure what negative effects this has. You never die from starvation or even lose hit points. Maybe it affects combat strength.

• Healing potions, which restore a paltry amount of health, like around 3d6. They're used immediately.

• Bows and arrows, each one adding to the arrow total. If you have arrows, you can shoot at monsters with the "I" key, always shooting the direction you last moved, as long as you moved east or west.

• "Fireball" spells (only one at a time). Fired with the comma (,). Travels east or west until it hits something, then explodes.

• "Freeze" scrolls (only one at a time). Fired with the "N" key. Shoots east or west until it hits an enemy, then freezes him for a random number of rounds based on his health.

• Armor, which protects the character against hits.

• Shields, which do the same.

           

The character swallows a health potion. A dead "firecreep" lies in the northwest corner. Everything else is a trap.

       

Any of these items can be unceremoniously destroyed as you wander around. "Fireball" scrolls catch fire, armor just falls apart, and so forth. 

  

Each room is selected randomly from about eight templates, all of which have fixed wall patterns. The position of the exit, the number and placement of traps, the type of enemy (there's only ever one per room), and the number and placement of treasures are all randomized. I don't quite understand the traps, which are clearly marked and easy to avoid. About a quarter of the time, you get lucky and the exit is the same wall that you entered, and you can move immediately to the next room.

   

Enemies include giant rats, eagles, minotaurs, jellies, giant scorpions, manticores, hydras, dragons, demons, and "dark ones." Even if the character has spells or arrows, combat almost always eventually devolves into melee combat, which you engage by holding down the joystick button or the "J" key. You and the enemy pound at each other until someone is dead. (When they die, enemies' bodies don't disappear, so if you miss the message that you killed them, you can end up pounding away at their corpses for a while.) Because health potions are so weak, the player really has to rely on those starting 400 hit points for most of the game, taking care not to fight enemies that are likely to do a lot of damage. Sometimes running for the exit, maybe after freezing the enemy, is the best choice.

        

Melee combat with a spider.

          

One annoyance is that enemies can only be fought if they're to the character's east or west. The same restriction applies to casting spells and shooting arrows. The enemy has no such restrictions; enemies can not only attack from the north and south, but they can also move and attack on the diagonal. The player is limited to moving in the cardinal directions.

    

One of the room designs is a shop. Characters gain gold from killing enemies (only in melee combat, though). Some of the ways the character finds money are both puzzling ("It had a check for 126 g.p.") and disgusting ("It had 34 g.p. in its guts!"). Gold can be used at the shops (by bumping the counters) to buy any of the game's items. I used it mostly for healing potions, but it was annoying to get so little health for so much money.

         

"I just don't know why we have so few customers."

          

You also get experience from killing enemies, but I don't think it does anything but add to the final score. At least, that's all the magazine mentions, and I didn't notice combat getting easier as it went up. 

      

The only other notable thing about the game is that it flashes random messages at you as you explore. The magazine says that: "It's up to you to figure out which ones are important and which are just red herrings." I'm pretty sure they're all just red herrings. Here are most of them:

      

• "Put him in the comfy chair."
• "Don't you wish you were home?"
• "Super Software from ANTIC! Yahoo."
• "Buy at Stumpps for best merchandise!"
• "A voice says: I'm so Horny!"
• "A wizard once said: 'Use Typo II.'"
• "You'll never get out of here alive." 
• "Smile, you're almost dead."
• "Make a left turn at Albuquerque." 
• "A voice mutters: Use the force!" 

       

As you can see, there are a fair number of pop culture references in the list, including a Bugs Bunny reference that I think about literally every time I hear something about Albuquerque.

    

If you can make it out of the 40th room, you get a congratulations screen with "fame points" (based on experience), "fortune points" (based on the gold you found, I think even if you spent it), and a textual description of your consequent rank. My winning rank, Average Knight, is the lowest, probably because I won by moving onto the next room as quickly as possible and avoiding most of the battles. From there, the ranks are Hero, Super Hero, Supreme Lord, and True Overlord of Might.

       

The author should have changed the earlier text, too. "You have shown a middling amount of courage, hardly any skill, and no wisdom, but you somehow nevertheless survived . . ."

         

There's no way to save along the way, so you have to win in a single session. It only took me about 30 minutes—which is why I gave it a number and full review instead of BRIEFing it. Plus, if I'm wrong about experience points, it's technically an RPG. It gets an 8 on the GIMLET, with 2s in "Gameplay" and "Economy" and 1s in "Encounters," "Magic and Combat," "Graphics, Sound, and Interface," and "Equipment." For interface, the author tried too hard to get everything into one cluster, so you move with UHKM, fight with J, shoot with I and cast spells with N and [comma]. I get what he was going for, but it would have been better to leave the movement to one hand and the other actions to the other. I suppose if you typed it in yourself, you could change that to your heart's content.

     

The editor has a different definition of "epic-scale" than I do.

         

Developer Nadav Gur went onto a full university education in Israel, moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000s, and became a technology executive. 

    

I'm starting to wonder if anything that AtariMania calls an RPG that doesn't appear in other game databases is actually an RPG. Let's find out by selecting another game from 1987. 

    

****

      

I guess by 1987, all of the other titles were taken.

     

Search for the Jewel of Strength

United States 

Independently developed; released as freeware

Released 1987 for the Atari 800 

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 1

Difficulty:  Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

"Search for the Jewel of Strength is one of the best games put out by Kevin Haley and Scott Weeks!" the instructions say. That's the kind of statement that makes you sit up straight, particularly since it seems to be the duo's first and only game. They were a sophomore and freshman, respectively, at Clio High School in Michigan. I didn't set out to compare two games written by high-schoolers, but I guess the pairing works well. 

       

"This game involves strategy, fast reflexes, and good puzzle solving skills," they wrote. It's a cute effort, certainly impressive for a free game from high school students, but it involves none of those things, and like Dungeon Arcade, its RPG status hinges on a questionable statistic.

      

The setup: "The Evil Guardian has stolen the Jewel of Strength and has hidden it in a large maze in the countryside." It's up to the character to go get it. He has to travel through a "maze" of eight fixed screens, organized in a single line from west to east, battling monsters, gathering treasure, and assembling the resources necessary to grab the jewel and return to the entrance.

       

I just love the "in the countryside" detail.

         

Each screen has some configuration of walls, a couple of treasure piles (represented as straight vertical lines), and one "oracle" who offers a spectacularly unnecessary hint (sample: "Do you have enough power?"; "Whatever you seek may be closer than you think") for enough gold. Screens respawn when the character leaves and returns.

   

The unnamed character begins (with no creation options) with no items, 10 gold, and 500 "power." The character's hit points are defined as one-tenth his power.  

   

As the character moves through the room, he's attacked randomly and without warning by the various monsters in the game: dwarves, gnomes, lizard men, zombies, and medusas. Each is described briefly in the manual (medusa: "Witch with a head covered with poisonous snakes!"). They have between 40 (dwarf) and 90 (medusa) hit points.

     

One theory is that it's so long, it can wrap around your neck. I don't care for the other theory.

        

The player has a choice with each encounter to fight or run. Running is always successful, but the character loses gold.

  

In battle, numbers flash on the bottom of the screen, too fast to time. The player pushes the joystick button to lock in one of the pairs of numbers, representing the number of hit points that the player and the enemy lose. Whoever has the lower number "wins" the round, but winning and losing rounds doesn't really matter. All that matters is whose total runs out first. All hit points are restored between battles, so the player only has to worry about his total pool for each individual battle.

     

I'm glad I didn't press the button right now.

          

Winning a battle adds between 100 and 300 points to the character's power, and thus between 10 and 30 points to his hit point pool. As you might imagine, after a few battles, the game becomes significantly unbalanced. Once you have 1,000 power or more, you can outlast any enemy. All you have to do is ensure your first few battles are with evenly-matched foes like gnomes and dwarves, and pretty soon you're invincible.

      

She died anyway.

       

Despite its name, I don't think the "power" attribute translates into anything else. If it affects the combat rolls, the influence is very subtle. 

       

The character occasionally trips, falls, and loses 100 to his power, but this is easily restored. The more annoying random event is when the Guardian casts a "Darkness" spell and the player has to navigate in the dark. At those moments, it helps to have taken a strong mental image of the wall pattern. None of the "mazes" are terribly complicated anyway.

        

I want to see this implemented in a modern game. You're walking along and just suddenly . . . face-plant.

        

The instructions mention all kinds of items you can buy in occasional "villages," and I was deep into the game before I realized that a weird wall configuration in a couple of rooms was in fact a village. By bumping into it, the player can purchase these items:

   

• A potion. Raises power.
• A lamp and lamp fuel. Gives some recourse for the aforementioned "Darkness" spell.
• A key. Needed to open the box containing the jewel.
• A sword or an axe. Weapons that supposedly increase combat power, but I didn't see it.
• A shield. Can be used instead of (not in addition to) a weapon to increase defense. By the time I figured out the store thing, I had almost 4,000 power and nothing could touch me, so I didn't try it.
• A tote bag. Also needed for the jewel.
• Medical supplies. Prevents you from losing power when you trip and fall.  

        

Visiting the "village," that wall pattern in the lower left that looks like a booth in a diner.

      

The jewel is on the eight screen, in the southeast corner. To get it, the character must have a key to open its box and a tote bag in which to put it.

     

I hope it isn't my good NPR tote.

       

After that, it's a matter of making one's way back to the entrance, fleeing from most enemies. There, the Evil Guardian confronts you: "So, you have recovered the jewel and have killed all my servants, I see . . . But now you have to deal with me!"

   

The Guardian has 180 hit points, but by this point in the game, the battle is no harder than the regular enemies. Once the Guardian is dead, the player gets a "You have saved your kingdom!" message, a score, and then it's all over. I didn't include a graphic here of the Guardian because there isn't one; the fight takes place on a blank screen.

     

But the kingdom was not saved for me.

       

So it's not going to unseat Dungeon Master for "Game of the Year," but let's give these teenagers credit for a few things:

   

• The in-game documentation is exhaustive.
• The authors wrote little poems for each enemy to recite when approaching the character.
• The game looks and feels like no other RPG that I have any experience with.

         

The lizard man needs to work on his meter.

       

Moreover, the game comes with a "maze utility" that the player can use to create his own eight-screen maze. Alas, it crashes when I try to use it, and I can't imagine why I ever would have used it in the first place, but kudos for building it. 

     

Can't say I didn't try.

        

I rate Search for the Jewel of Strength as a 12 on the GIMLET, but it's another sequence of 0s, 1s, and a couple of 2s ("Economy," "Quests"), so I wouldn't call it that much better than Arcade.

   

I mentioned that this was the only game (in any extant database) from Kevin Haley and Scott Weeks. This is true, but it's not the only game from Kevin Haley alone. He branded himself "HaleySoft" and continued to make games throughout high school and well into college, including Galactic Conflict (1988), The Hidden Treasure (1988), and The Wrath of Doom (1989, updated as late as 1995). Both Treasure and Doom are listed as RPGs, and I checked them out briefly. They're definitely more advanced than Jewel. Treasure appears to be an RPG/graphical adventure hybrid about the search for stolen gold. I can't get Doom to run yet, but it seems to be a multi-character game.

       

A shot from Hidden Treasure. This author really has a thing about the countryside.

             

Well, it was fun checking what was happening in 1980s secondary education, and these two titles did an admirable job of delaying my entry into Pagan, but I suppose there's no more putting it off.

      

08/08/2026