Dungeons of Daggorath

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Home / Software - Dungeons of Daggorath

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Dungeons of Daggorath
Year	1982
Publisher	Dyna Micro
Author	Douglas Morgan
Media	Program Pak
Requires	16 KB
Optional	Tape Drive (for saved games)
Graphic mode	256x192x2

Dungeons of Daggorath is a real-time dungeon crawl game, rendered in three-dimensional vector/wireframe graphics.

Widely considered to be one of the best (and best-selling) CoCo games ever, Daggorath was hugely innovative for its time. The Guinness Book of World Records 2010, Gamer's Edition credits it as the First Action RPG.

Along with its legendary 3D graphics, Daggorath has impressive sound effects which (far from being a frill or extra) play an essential role in gameplay. The game's sole indicator of player character health is an audible heartbeat, which slows down from rest, healing, or improved strength, but speeds up from exertion such as running, carrying a large inventory, or battle, as well as from injury. The player character can pass out or die (only one life!) if his heartbeat gets too fast, so the constant heartbeat sound adds hugely to the suspense and realism. Quite an immersive contrast compared to the typical game's more artificial, emotionally distancing on-screen health number or thermometer bar.

Similarly, each monster makes a distinctive sound in the dungeon, and gets louder the closer it gets to the player, adding to suspense, especially when the monster can't be seen approaching due to being around a corner, behind a door, beyond the reach of torchlight etc.

Speaking of visibility, the five dungeon levels are unlit, forcing the player to find and use torches to see. But a torch can't last forever; eventually the reach of its light shrinks and the level of visible detail begins to blur, until the player is left in complete darkness, hearing his heartbeat.. and any monsters nearby.

The Rainbow's July 1983 review by Lonnie Falk called it "simply the best Adventure game I have played to date."

It was released in cartridge format in 1982, and the entire program was crammed into an 8K ROM. Douglas Morgan, one of the original authors, has mentioned that a larger, more sophisticated version was originally done, but it had to be compressed to fit on a cartridge. It is too bad that the original version has not survived...

Unlike most cartridge games for the CoCo, Daggorath supports using a cassette tape drive to save your game, and to load saved games -- nearly essential given how difficult the game is and how long it takes to solve.

In July 1986, Burke & Burke introduced DaggorPatch, which patches the ROM to run the game from disk and add features like disk load & save, auto-repeat command, pause, tape-to-disk, screen dump to a DMP-100 (a popular Tandy/Radio Shack dot matrix printer), and more.[1] [2]

The original game has a bug that makes shields all but useless early in the game, because the programmer mistakenly transposed the values for protecting from physical versus magical attacks. [3]

The game had such a huge influence that a PC port has been done, and entire webpages have been devoted to it.

See also:

Dungeons of Daggorath FAQ

External links

• Wikipedia article
• Full list of DoD items on the Color Computer Archive, including manuals, downloads, playable links, etc.
• Dungeons of Daggorath PC Port
• The Dungeons of Daggorath Video Game (a comprehensive fan page)
• Listing at MobyGames
• Listing at Ultimate Video Game List
• Listing at L. Curtis Boyle's CoCo games list