Space Dungeon

Space Dungeon
Box art for Atari 5200 port
Developer(s)	Taito Corporation
Publisher(s)	Taito Corporation
Designer(s)	Rex Battenberg
Platform(s)	Arcade, Atari 5200
Release date(s)	1981
Genre(s)	Multi-directional shooter
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players, alternating turns
Cabinet	Standard
Display	Vertical orientation, Raster, standard resolution 240x256, size: 19 inch Raster, standard resolution 292 x 240, Colors UNKNOWN out of 1024

Vertical orientation, Raster, standard resolution 240x256, size: 19 inch

Space Dungeon is a shoot 'em up arcade game released by Taito Corporation in 1981 and designed and programmed by Rex Battenberg. It was available both as a conversion kit and as a full arcade cabinet.

Like Robotron: 2084 (1982), but preceding the release of that game, the controls for Space Dungeon are a pair of 8-directional joysticks: one for moving, one for shooting. Space Dungeon is one of the first twin-stick shooters, after Taito's earlier games Gun Fight and Boot Hill.

Each level of Space Dungeon consists of 36 rooms arranged in a six-by-six grid. Rooms are connected by open doorways of various sizes. One room in each level is the entrance, where the player begins, and another is the "Collect Bonus" room. Other rooms may or may not contain laser defenses, hostile aliens, or various bits of treasure.

The goal in each level is to navigate using an automap to the room containing the "Collect Bonus" area, visiting as many rooms and collecting as much treasure as possible along the way.

The player's only weapon is a laser cannon, which fires a pulsing, solid beam in any of eight directions.

Higher scores are awarded for exiting each level with more treasures. A 10,000-point bonus is awarded if the player visits every single room on the level, whether or not all treasures on the level have been collected. Since an extra ship is awarded to the player every 10,000 points, this, and the large point values of the treasures (especially the later ones) created an interesting tension between securing the treasures already collected or risking losing ships to acquire more.

If the player's ship collides with an enemy or any of their spore shots before reaching the "Collect Bonus" cube, all collected treasure is dropped in the room where the ship was destroyed. This room is designated on the map by an "X".

The game counts from level 1 to 99, and upon completing 99, rolls over to zero.

Levels two through nine, and then levels that are a multiple of one hundred, are preceded by a rhyme:

On reaching level 10, the game then displays "Sorry. No more rhymes." No further messages appear until the player rolls-over the level counter by completing level 99. At level 100, the level counter resets to zero, and the message displayed is "You're a hero on level zero." Thus this same "level zero" message will be repeated every hundredth level.