
The Making of Dungeon Master - jsnell
http://www.filfre.net/2015/12/dungeon-master-part-1-the-making-of/
======
incepted
If like me, you are curious about the copy protection mentioned in the
article, here is the patent that was filed about it:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US4849836](http://www.google.com/patents/US4849836)

It relies on "fuzzy bits" which were stored on a specific track. Reading this
track repeatedly should yield different values. If the same value is found
multiple times, the disk is a copy.

The devious aspect of this scheme is that if the program detected an illegal
copy, it wouldn't abort right away but later, in various ways (system errors,
killing your entire party, etc...). The check was also performed multiple
times during the game (e.g. changing levels).

All these reasons combined explain why it took more than a year for the first
real cracks to appear.

~~~
Udo
I'd imagine the rate of false positives was also quite high.

~~~
incepted
Apparently not. The fuzzy bits created on the master discs were extremely
reliable (and by that I mean "unreliable"): every time you read the track, you
would get different values. Remember that a track contains a lot of bytes. The
copy protection was only checking one fuzzy bit to declare the disk genuine.
And these fuzzy bits were by design impossible to create on regular disk
drives (thankfully!).

The hardware required to create these tracks was extremely expensive and
sometimes even out of stock, leaving hackers no other solution than to
actually remove the protection if they wanted to produce a crack.

Years later, a disk copier appeared that was able to preserve these fuzzy bits
but it was way after there was any commercial interest left in the Dungeon
Master titles.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Years later, a disk copier appeared that was able to preserve these fuzzy
> bits but it was way after there was any commercial interest left in the
> Dungeon Master titles._

I wonder what's the story behind that copier. Was its ability a side effect of
the method they used? Or was there a legitimate commercial interest in
preserving those fuzzy bits in copies? Or was actually built with pirates in
mind?

------
bostik
I remember Dungeon Master fondly, even if I never finished it. It was a _truly
great_ game. One silent aspect of that was probably the lack of scripted
story. Just a few fragments of text on scrolls and a few more scattered
around, chiseled on the walls. (Author notes that story didn't really come
into the play until the final level.)

The level that killed my interest was the annoying, slapped-on-for-malevolent-
humour "Zoom!". Everything until that point is a marvelous gaming experience,
but the forced timing and counting based teleport field problem is a big
misstep. In a game where sometimes returning to earlier levels was not only
possible but also encouraged, facing that single funnel-like problem raised a
terrible spectre of a thought: _" I may need to go through that again"_.

It killed the game for me.

But considering how massive an influence Dungeon Master had on a generation of
gamers, it's probably not a coincidence that the release of an indie game that
promised the ability to relive the experience was was so eagerly expected. [0]

Oh, to have time to play again...

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_Grimrock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_Grimrock)

~~~
jstelly
Dungeon master was definitely one of my favorites back then. I play it all the
way through and even played the sequel "Chaos strikes back". I enjoyed this
article for the nostalgia. I wish it had mentioned two other games though:

Dungeons of Daggorath
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath)]
This did many of the things Dungeon Master did but much earlier. I can see
it's arcade-style gameplay being thought of as different, but I didn't see it
that way as a player.

Black Crypt
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Crypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Crypt)]
This really improved on the formula. It was released around the same time as
Ultima Underworld, but it's a much more direct comparison to dungeon master.

------
mrbill
I played the heck out of that game on my Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s.

~~~
zhoujianfu
Me too, me too.

Man, it was just so scary and intense, creeping around that dungeon in
realtime, with the stereo sound effects. It was about 1000x more exciting than
bard's tale 2 (which I did love too)!

------
__david__
If anyone is interested in a modern take on Dungeon Master, checkout Legend of
Grimrock.

~~~
sqldba
I saw that but wasn't very interested in anything without a solid story and
story progression...

~~~
crispweed
The story side of Legend of Grimrock _2_ is pretty good, I think, and the
story side of things worked pretty well for me, although it's always going to
be more of a set of related puzzles kind of story I guess. (It's a bit like
the Dark Souls games, maybe, where a bit of story helps to make it
interesting, but keeping this kind of minimal and keeping the story out of the
way of the actual experience is also important.)

Just got reminded about the following, also, from the comments below the
article: [http://dungeonkingdom.com/](http://dungeonkingdom.com/) (In Steam
early access currently, looking pretty good also, but didn't play it yet.)

------
wazoox
If you're interested in this game and want to get a feel of it, I can't
recommend enough the "CRPG addict" playthrough:

[http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/11/game-33-dungeon-
maste...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/11/game-33-dungeon-
master-1987.html)

------
sqldba
Anyone reading on iOS notice there are no scroll bars even when scrolling
down? For such a long article it made it extremely irritating to read; never
knowing if it was going to continue on or if I was near the end.

I ended up skipping a huge portion and moving on. Sorry; if you ruin user
experience then I'm not going to waste my time on your site.

