By 1986, the Atari ST was flying high. It was the most popular color 16-bit computer and many companies were flocking to it, porting their software to take advantage of the ST’s impressive performance and graphics.
FTL Games and Sundog
One company was FTL Games. Founded in 1982 by Wayne Holder, the first game that FTL released was Sundog: The Frozen Legacy for the Apple II in 1984. Sundog was an open-world space trading game. It has the distinction of being programmed by Bruce Webster, who I remember as the author of the “68000 Wars” column in Byte Magazine from late 1985 and into 1986.
Even before the ST was established, FTL spent much of 1985 porting Sundog from the Apple II to the Atari ST with much-improved graphics and better mouse control. Sundog was released in late 1985 and went on to be the best-selling ST game of 1986, dwarfing its success on the Apple II.
I remember reading in Bruce Webster’s Byte column that Sundog was mostly written in Pascal. Wikipedia notes that “large sections of the Pascal code” was used without modification for the Atari ST port, apparently using USCD Pascal. I’m not actually aware of a Pascal compiler for the Atari ST that was available in 1985, but perhaps they also ported that. You can find more information about Sundog at Bruce Webster’s Sundog page.
I never played Sundog back in the 80s and although I do have it now, I still have yet to play it.
Dungeon Master
Doug Bell, the Technical Director of FTL that took over when Bruce Webster left in 1984, helped port Sundog to the ST. His next project was finishing game of his called Crystal Dragon, originally intended for the Apple II, that had been started before he joined FTL. This was a dungeon crawler game, inspired by the Ultima and Wizardry series.
Development progressed throughout 1986 and into 1987 before being released in late 1987.
Dungeon Master went on to become the best-selling game for the Atari ST. In 1988 alone, it sold over 40000 copies. And speaking of copies, one of the reasons that Dungeon Master sold so well was because of its sophisticated copy protection system that made use of “fuzzy bits”, which could “only be written by one particular brand of disk duplicator that cost $40,000 at the time”1, and its multiple copy protection checks that made it difficult for crackers to find2. The copy protection for Dungeon Master took over a year to break. It is estimated that Dungeon Master was purchased by half of the ST owners in the U.S.!
Dungeon Master is a huge and graphically impressive game. Also impressive is that the entire game was fit onto just one single-sided 400K floppy and could run on a 512K 520ST. The Amiga version, which shipped a year or so later, required 1MB of RAM and really only had improved stereo sound when compared to the ST version.
And speaking of ports, Dungeon Master was also ported to the Apple IIgs, PC and many other systems (made possible by FTL designing the game from the beginning to be easy to port).
Thoughts on Dungeon Master
I didn’t get my first ST until January 1989 and it was a monochrome system. I didn’t really play games on it much. It wasn’t until 1990 or so that I first saw Dungeon Master for the first time, running on my Dad’s Mega ST 2 color system. From that point forward, I spent a lot of time playing Dungeon Master when I should have been doing homework!
Dungeon Master pulls you in immediately when you click the button to open the doors to the dungeon where you first get to experience the 3D, 1st person view and amazing graphics in all its glory by walking around the Hall of Champions.
Before you can even play the game, you have to pick the members of your party. You have to four characters from the 24 available. There are a wide variety of characters, from tough brutes, to lithe elves and wizards adept at spells. You need to choose your team wisely to get deep into the dungeon.
I really liked how the game slowly ramps up the learning curve while still keeping things creepy and nerve-racking. You’ll quickly learn how to cast some spells, light being the most important to start, fight some monsters and look around for loot to acquire.
The game interface was perfect for mouse control. In fact, you could play the entire game using the mouse and the on-screen controls, although most people also used the keyboard, especially for easier movement. Combining the keyboard with the mouse allowed for much quicker reactions when battling monsters.
Dungeon Master was a real-time game, but things were shown in steps. The camera did not move around smoothly, instead a new “view” was displayed based on the way you were facing. This design worked well for the overall slower pace of the game.
I’m not going into details about the the game play itself as there are plenty of places online about that.
Here are some of my favorite ST Log articles about Dungeon Master:
Dungeon Master review (ST-Log August 1988)
Ancient Corridors, Part 1 (ST-Log October 1988)
Ancient Corridors, Part 2 (ST-Log October 1988)
Dungeon Master review (Atari Legend)
Legacy
Some thought that FTL would release other variations of Dungeon Master, but that never happened. Instead the follow-up to Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back, was released in 1989 and did not fare quite so well. As a direct sequel it assumed you had successfully completed Dungeon Master, something few people did (I certainly never finished it). Thus the difficulty level was high and not something that the casual gamer could just pick up and play. Other than the increased difficulty, the game had similar graphics and gameplay. Sure, there were newer, tougher monster and more spells to learn, but there just wasn’t really anything new there.
Just a few short years later (in 1993), Doom was released and it took 3D gaming to the next level as with its fast-paced 1st-person gaming.
If you want to play Dungeon Master yourself, perhaps the easiest way is to fire up an emulator and load it up. Of course, I prefer to play it using my Mega STE!
You can also find some modern ports that work on Windows and Linux (I’ve not seen one for macOS).
Now I think it’s time for me to fire things back up on Mega STE and have a go at it again!
From a comment by Doug Bell, one of the game’s designers on a YouTube video.
This article has much more details about the Dungeon Master copy protection.
Dungeon Master debuting as an ST exclusive was a kick in the gut for folks like me who went Amiga from the Atari 8 bit line. That and the MIDI ports were really the only items of jealousy I had towards friends with STs.
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