Dungeon Master

Dungeon Master is a real-time RPG dungeon crawler that launched on the Atari ST in 1987 and arrived on the Amiga a year later, where it became one of the platform's most technically admired titles. The player assembles a four-member party of adventurers found locked in cells beneath a mountain, and moves through a maze of corridors densely packed with traps, button-and-pressure-plate puzzles, trapdoors, and all manner of monsters, from giant flies to crawling slimes. Movement proceeds step by step with ninety-degree turns, but combat, spellcasting, and food preparation unfold in real time, so enemies don't wait for the player to select the right weapon or assemble a spell from runes.

On the Amiga, the game used the machine's full color palette and processor speed to smoothly render the maze from a first-person perspective, which felt almost revolutionary at the time; the music and sound effects complemented the grim atmosphere of dungeons full of skeletons, zombies, and magical traps, while the characters had to keep an eye on hunger, fatigue, and equipment wear. The magic system built on assembling runes into syllables was one of the game's most original elements and, together with the mouse-driven interface, inspired a whole generation of later dungeon crawlers, from Eye of the Beholder to the much later Legend of Grimrock.

Contemporary reception was enthusiastic; for many the game became a reason to buy a home computer, and on the Amiga it remained one of the genre's best-selling titles for a long time. The game's influence is evident in how many studios tried to imitate its formula of a step-based maze combined with fluid combat, and several of them openly cited Dungeon Master as their model. Even today Dungeon Master is valued for its thoughtful level design, the feeling of genuinely exploring an unknown underground realm, and the satisfaction of gradually unlocking its tricks, even though its pace and the need to draw the map by hand on paper may slow down today's player.

Why play it: For players fond of thoughtful level design and the feeling of truly exploring an underground realm, Dungeon Master is still an enormous satisfaction, even though its slower pace and manual mapping demand patience.