Wikimedia Commons, Fair Use

This is my entry for the "Gaming in the '80s" contest being run by @archdruid (@veryspider and @elfranz). This is the third of my three allowed entries! The first two were iconic tabletop games called Car Wars and BattleTech.

The Game

By User:Warren - This file was derived from:MacBook Air (Early 2015).jpgApple Macintosh.jpgIBook G3 Blueberry.jpgImac G5 20inch.jpgPower Mac G4 Cube.jpgTeviot employees using Apple Macs.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0,

When I was growing up... my father was a mathematician with who was pretty interested in the applications of personal computers to a variety of problems. So, it meant that we had a table tennis table in our living room that had several of the original (before they got to be hipster cool...) Apple Macintoshes sitting on it, remember those boxy all in ones? This meant that as I was growing up as a kid, I had access to some of the best hardware at the time (looking back they seem so quaint!).

One game that stuck in my mind was "Dungeons of Doom"... which in researching this post was actually a demo for a game called The Dungeons Revealed. To think, I've been living the past few decades thinking that Dungeons of Doom was the demo for a game called The Dungeons of Doom! Anyway, as a kid... I only had the demo shareware version anyway... and so, I never got to experience the game in it's full glory... although, I never really seemed to remember minding about that. Come to think of it, most of my games on the Apples at the time were shareware demos... and a good chunk of my gaming remained with this mode of freeloading until I reached university... or after...

Oddly enough, someone has made a Let's Play of the Dungeons of Doom on YouTube... which is currently measuring in at over 55 episodes! Riveting television right there!

Anyway, the game is a dungeon crawl... with graphics (which was pretty cool for the time!). As all games of that generation, it was in the style of a hard-core rogue-like. Meaning, there was no hand holding... and you would die.... with no option but to restart from the very beginning with a new character. Something that games of this generation have largely done away with with their pandering to a (generally male) power trip fantasy...

There are the usual fantasy class tropes... but there was also an interesting one called the "Jones"... the quintessential dabbler in all things and master of nothing. Oddly enough, one of the more useful classes at the beginning of the game... but I gathered the more specialised classes eventually out-powered the humble Jones. What I did remember was that each class could make a guess as to the properties of a class of objects that were related to the character class... which was almost always wrong. The only sure way was to use things in a trial and error sort of way... which sucked if you picked up a potion/scroll of forgetfulness...

The shareware was out in the wild for about two years between 1985-1987... before the release of the full commercial game in 1987. This shareware model was quite a common model of distribution and advertising back in those days... before the internet, you would have these computer magazines with a floppy disk (and later CD) of shareware goodies... which more than made up for the purchase price of the magazine! At least from a kid's point of view!

Interestingly enough... the commercial (and shareware) version of the game could still run on Mac OS systems up until OS10. The shareware repository can be found here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5469-the-dungeon-of-doom (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!).

My Memory of the Game

Unsplash

Although I had spend many hours in this game... my most striking memory of this game is something that isn't directly related to the game itself. I remember one day after school, coming home... and my father and his mother (my grandmother) were talking... My grandmother had moved out to Australia in her old age... and was living with us in our home, as is the norm of the traditional Chinese families. It was great to have her around... she didn't speak any English.. and my Cantonese was quite terrible... but somehow, we did manage to build a relationship over the few short years that she lived with us.

Anyway, it was quite apparent that they were talking about something quite serious... and upon listening... it was that my grandmother was diagnosed with quite advanced cancer... it was my first experience directly with anything to do with human death and I remember being incredibly upset. My grandmother knew that I enjoyed playing games on the computer.. and she told me to go and play (and also so I would be out of the way whilst the adults were talking...).

This was the game that I ended up playing... and as such, it does hold a sort of special memory for me.

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