Dark Chambers
| Dandy | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Developer(s) | John Palevich |
| Publisher(s) | Atari Program Exchange |
| Designer(s) | John Palevich |
| Platform(s) | Atari 8-bit |
| Release | 1983 |
| Genre(s) | Dungeon crawl |
| Mode(s) | single to four player |
Dandy (later Dandy Dungeon) is a dungeon crawl for the Atari 8-bit family. Dandy is one of the first games to offer simultaneous, four-player, cooperative play. It also includes a built-in level editor. Dandy was the direct inspiration for the popular 1985 Atari Games coin-op, Gauntlet.
Dandy takes place in a maze-like dungeon, seen from an overhead view. The dungeon has multiple levels, connected together using stairwells. Portions of the mazes are blocked by locked doors, which can be opened with keys scattered through the maze. The goal of the game is to fight through the maze to the next stairwell, from there to the next level, and proceed through the dungeon's levels to the end.
The players are armed with a bow and arrow which can be shot in any of the eight cardinal directions. Monsters come in several varieties, though the differences are strictly graphical. When hit, the monsters "devolve" to the next less-powerful state, before eventually being killed and disappearing. Some monsters are placed in the maze during its pre-game creation and appear as soon as that level is entered, while others are produced in skull-shaped monster generators.
Monsters touching the player reduce the player's health, which can be improved by eating food scattered around the dungeon. Potions destroy all monsters on the screen when activated. Potions can be either shot with an arrow, or picked up and carried for later use. A special "heart of gold" can also be collected to revive dead party members.
Players interact with the game primarily through the joystick, although some key-presses are used for eating food or using potions. With two or more players, the screen scrolls according to the average location of the group to encourage cooperation.
The game map was created using a custom character set drawn in the Atari's five-color text mode. Each dungeon level is three screens wide and high. The Atari's special smooth scrolling hardware is used to pan around the level, while the player/missile graphics capabilities are not used.
The game that eventually became Dandy had been originally written in the fall of 1982 as Thesis of Terror, Jack Palevich's MIT bachelor's thesis. The original concept was for a five-person game, four players on Atari computers acting as graphical terminals, and a fifth machine acting as dungeon master controlling the action from a separate computer. The two machines would communicate over their serial ports. However, time constraints meant that the interactive dungeon master role was never implemented. The separate machine, a Hewlett-Packard Pascal Workstation (a member of the HP 9000 family), was used solely as a file server, sending new maps to the Atari on demand.
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