of rocks and fireballs are controlled via mouse movement and clicks respectively, while the character's locomotion is controlled via key strokes. Duncan easily gets disoriented; when walking into a wall or falling a short distance without jumping he walks around in circles for a moment, mumbling incoherently. He is highly vulnerable to attacks during this time. Falling into holes in the floor does not cause death but instead leads to a dungeon ("Trouble 3") which can be escaped with some effort. On easier difficulty levels, this causes a delay. However, this may be strategically necessary on the harder difficulty levels so that the player can stock up rocks and elixir. Easter egg: Playing Dark Castle (and its sequel) with the computer's clock at December 25 or any Friday the 13th, the Great Hall or the throne room (respectively) will have holiday decorations. Levels This game has 14 levels, which came out of the 4 doors in the Great Hall, the first two doors are random. Leftmost door (usually): Trouble 1, Trouble 2, Trouble 3. Farther away door on left side (usually): Fireball 1, Fireball 2, Fireball 3, Fireball 4. Middle Door: Black Knight 1, Black Knight 2, Black Knight 3. Right Door: Shield 1, Shield 2, Shield 3, Shield 4. Development Mark Pierce was based in San Francisco with his own company MacroMind, while Jon Gay and the rest of the Silicon Beach team were in San Diego; so after an initial launch meeting, most of the collaboration between Pierce and Gay was handled remotely. Pierce designed the animations in MacroMind's "VideoWorks" (the direct ancestor of Adobe Director) and then mailed the files on floppies to Gay, who then coded the game in 68000 Assembly Language on an Apple Lisa (a few parts like the high-score system were written in Pascal). The digitized sound was created by Eric Zocher who worked with voice actor Dick Noel. Ports and remakes A version for the Mega Drive/Genesis was released by Electronic Arts in 1991. An MS-DOS version of the original Dark Castle was also released, which was closer to the original game. Because of the lower resolution, color was used to make up for it; also, because the PC did not have a mouse at the time, aiming was done through the keyboard. There is some controversy over the colors, due to the nature of the coloring. Versions for the Amiga, Atari