Dunjonquest

www.hardcoregaming101.net/dunjonquest/dunjonquest.htm

Dunjonquest isn't exactly a well-known name nowadays, but back in the early 80s it rivaled the likes of Ultima and Wizardy in popularity. They're a series of decidedly old school dungeon crawlers, but unfortunately got dropped around 1985 and thus never proliferated likes its peers. This article covers the main Dunjonquest games as well as its spinoffs.

One of the first RPGs I ever played was Gateway to Apshai for the Atari 400, and Dunjonquest is where this all started. I also had the first StarQuest as a kid, but given I was about five years old, I sure as hell didn't know how to play it. Loved the box art, though. I dig the Epyx neon-lights-on-black style in general.

Aaah, now I remember. I saw these games a lot of times back the Abandonware days. Never tried them, but I always though it was weird that Epyx made RPG's, considering they later became more famous for their sports games.

As an Epyx fan,this article totally made my day.I only played Temple Of Apshai Trilogy which is great and the Movie Monster Game which presentation aside is pretty meh gameplaywise.

And speaking of Epyx Dungeon Crawlers,I'm hoping that Sword Of Fargoal will be covered sometime in the future.

I didn't realize Temple of Apshai had so many sequels/spin-offs. I've only played the original, which I enjoyed, despite having access to the Bard's Tale series and Pool of Radiance for my C64. Nice piece!

Stop me! / Encourage me!

While I was writing the article, I ordered a few of the games off ebay, but they came from Venezuela and took forever to get to me, so I've received them now. I have a factory sealed copy of Upper Reaches of Apshai (that's a factory sealed copy of a 30 years old game!) and I'm fighting with myself over the thought of opening it because I'm curious to find in the manual who did the level design for it. :'(

I'm not very fond of older CRPGs but learning some history of the genre is always interesting and Crush, Crumble & Chomp! is a great concept that would have deserved better use. I also like the details of the context that led the series to be dropped by Epyx, although the engine was getting a bit too dated when it happened.

So my parents visited over the weekend, and brought with them some of my old stuff from preschool. Somewhere in there was a really old Epyx catalog that listed pretty much every game mentioned in this article. It was pretty cool.

As for The Dilemma - was it particularly expensive? If it wasn't too much then there probably isn't much of a demand for this sorta stuff sealed, so it wouldn't totally shatter the value, would it?

No it was two games (Temple & Upper Reaches) for 40,ドル but I kinda fear opening a sealed game that old would feel like desecrating a relic...

Ah, to hell with it, I just opened up the box. The wrapping had two small circular holes where dust was coming through, anyway.

Probably gonna scan the whole thing for preservation later, but for now it shall be said that the level designers for the add-on were Tim Bird, Mark Madrid and Andrew Martin. Other than the designers for the Hellfire Warrior missions, none of them appears in the giant list of classic video game developers (or whatever it's called exactly).

Now that particular bit of information is missing only for Curse of Ra and Sorcerer of Siva.

Two additional observations regarding especially Crush Crumble and Chomp:
First, I've been tinkering for awhile with Atari emulators now, and firing up both Morloc's Tower and Crush Crumble imply that these run in different colors provided that artifacting is turned on, simulating an NTSC display with the appropriate connection. This is probably the reason that Crush Crumble asks if the user has an old machine, presumably to make color adjustments. Crush Crumble can look rather strange if you use some specific settings, but as far as I've gathered the user had some control over this via the tint control on the monitor/TV.

Second, the reason the Vic-20 port does not contain the monster creation is probably because it's the only version that didn't came out on disk. Certain (if not all) tape versions do not contain that feature either.

I'm not sure I fully understand that, but I'll experiment a bit more with emulators when I find the time.




I think that makes sense, as tape versions of the Dunjonquest games regularly have limited/no saving options, too.