A special "heart of gold" can also be collected to revive dead party members. Players move and shoot via the joystick and use keypresses to eat food and activate bombs. With two or more players, the screen scrolls according to the average location of the group. Development Thesis of Terror The game that eventually became Dandy had was written in the fall of 1982 as Thesis of Terror, Jack Palevich's MIT bachelor's thesis. The concept was for a five-person game: four players using an Atari computer as graphical terminal, and a fifth player acting as dungeon master controlling the action from a separate computer. The machines would communicate via serial ports. Time constraints prevented the dungeon master role from being implemented. The second machine, a Hewlett-Packard Pascal Workstation in the HP 9000 family, was used as a file server, sending new maps to the Atari on demand. The gameplay design of Thesis of Terror was heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons; Palevich had never played D&D, but he had read through the manuals and watched campaigns in the lounge of MIT's New House II dormitory. It was also influenced by the arcade video game Defender (1981), which contributed the idea of the smart bomb (potions), and by several "half-forgotten" maze-exploration arcade games, which contributed the idea of using keys to unlock doors. Dandy was not influenced by any of the roguelike games, as Palevich was unaware of Rogue at the time. Thesis of Terror'''s gameplay was designed with help from MIT freshman Joel Gluck. Gluck designed several of the levels and invented dungeon crawl idioms such as the "funnel trap", where treasure is placed in such a way that the players run to it, causing a wall of monsters placed just off screen to activate and charge the party. Early versions of the game let players shoot each other. This was removed after testing showed that the game quickly degenerated into a free-for-all. Dead players originally had to sit out the rest of the game, but playtesters would start the game over when one member died. To keep the game going, the revival heart was added. Creation of Dandy After graduating from MIT, Palevich went to work for Atari, Inc. in the Atari Research division. He helped design the operating system for the unreleased Atari Sierra personal computer. He worked on the Atari AMY sound chip which was never used