Dungeons of Doom

Harvsoft

Status: Full Game, Findability: 3/5

A game that was advertised in the US press as a mail order only title. It was described in the advert with you having to guide Elvin through 40 music filled levels, collecting treasures along the way. You would have to avoid Evil King Morbid’s goons who are trying to stop you. You must use ropes, ladders and poles to escape enemies or blow them up using dynamite charges.

The title was a static platform and ladders game that seemed to have plenty of promise, but it wasn’t ever known if any copies had got out. Was it ever finished at all?

Well, in early 2019, the developer himself – Brian Harvey got in touch with GTW64 and informed us that he had written and completed the game back in 1987 and had attempted to sell the game during 1988/89. He confirmed that copies did sneak out and the game was even reviewed in Computer Shopper December 1988. Only a handful ever snuck out, making it an extremely hard title to try and locate.

Brian luckily though still had a full retail copy of the game, and very kindly sent it all the way from the US to be preserved and scanned in. Brian had used a special copy protection on the disk, so combined with a degrading disk, it was tricky to get everything preserved. Thankfully errors have been fixed by Jazzcat and the Onslaught team (Arcane and Comos, Bieno64 for testing) and you can now download the full game to play.

We’ve also included the RAW Kyroflux files that were made from the original disk too, if you are interested in taking a look. The fixed G64 original has also been included too, which the Onslaught guys fixed.

Overall, it is a simple but fun game which has a bit of a Manic Miner/Frantic Freddie feel to it and a large number of tunes on every level. It’s also bloody hard!! A shame it didn’t get more of an audience, but now finally it can be enjoyed as originally intended.

Case closed!

Contributions: Peter Weighill, Brian Harvey, Jazzcat, Arcane, Comos, Bieno64

Supporting content

Update history

23/12/19 – Full game preserved!

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