Dandy (video game)

Dandy (later Dandy Dungeon) is a dungeon crawl maze game for the Atari 8-bit family published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1983. It was written by John Howard Palevich, originally for his undergraduate thesis while at MIT, drawing inspiration from "Dungeons & Dragons", "Defender", and arcade maze games. "Dandy" is one of the first video games with four-player, simultaneous cooperative play. It was the direct inspiration for the popular 1985 Atari Games coin-op, "Gauntlet", and later turned into the Dark Chambers home game published by Atari Corporation.
In 1986, Electric Dreams Software, having failed to secure the "Gauntlet" licence acquired the rights to produce the home computer ports of the game. Their intention to release their game as "Dauntless" led to a dispute with U.S. Gold who were publishing the computer versions of "Gauntlet" at the same time.. Electric Dreams published the game, as "Dandy", for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC.
The name "Dandy" is a play on D&D, the common abbreviation for "Dungeons & Dragons".
Gameplay.
"Dandy" takes place in a maze-like dungeon, seen from an overhead view. The dungeon has multiple levels, connected together using stairwells. Portions of the mazes are blocked by locked doors, which can be opened with keys scattered through the maze. The goal of the game is to fight through the maze to the next stairwell, from there to the next level, and proceed through the dungeon's levels to the end.
The players are armed with a bow and arrow which can be shot in any of the eight cardinal directions. Monsters come in several varieties, though the differences are strictly graphical. When hit, the monsters "devolve" to the next less-powerful state, before eventually being killed and disappearing. Some monsters are placed in the maze during its pre-game creation and appear as soon as that level is entered, while others are produced in skull-shaped monster generators.
Monsters touching the player reduce the player's health, which can be improved by eating food scattered around the dungeon. Potions destroy all monsters on the screen when activated. Potions can be either shot with an arrow, or picked up and carried for later use. A special "heart of gold" can also be collected to revive dead party members.
Players interact with the game primarily through the joystick, with some key-presses are used for eating food or using potions. With two or more players, the screen scrolls according to the average location of the group to encourage cooperation.
History.
"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 original concept was for a five-person game: four players using an Atari computer as graphical terminal, and a fith 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 game engine was inspired by John Conway's "Game of Life". "Life" is cellular automata; at each "turn" the game examines the squares on the grid that makes up the playfield, and uses a basic calculation to determine whether or not that square should hold a cell. In "Dandy" this same basic mechanism is used, but the decision was essentially "if the player is on that side of the cell, and there is a monster on the other side, then I will hold a monster on the next turn." This gave the illusion of the monsters chasing the player, when in fact they did not move at all. Like a marquee, the motion was an illusion as they simply turned on or off. It also has the property that any dungeon that could be drawn in the editor will run correctly and efficiently. The designer does not have to worry about correct placement of the monsters or generators.
The gameplay design of "Thesis of Terror" was heavily influenced by "Dungeons & Dragons"; Palevich had never actually played "D&D", but he had read through the manuals and watched some of his dorm-mates play campaigns in the lounge of MIT's New House II dormitory. The new name "Dandy" is a play on the phonetic pronunciation of "D and D", which at the time was a generic term for dungeon adventure role-playing games. According to Palevich, "Dandy" was also influenced by the arcade shoot 'em up 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; an example of an earlier maze-exploration arcade game requiring the use of keys to unlock doors is Konami's "Tutankham" (1982). "Dandy" was not influenced by any of the roguelike games, as Palevich was unaware of "Rogue" at the time "Dandy" was designed.
"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.
Several changes were made a result of playtesting. 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 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 in a shipping product.
While working at Atari, Palevich continued developing the game. During the period from February to May 1983, the original was cleaned up for release, and it was during this period that the name became "Dandy". The workstation was removed, and the dungeon master's role was reduced to laying out the maps and saving them to floppy disk. Another change was to remove the ability to return to higher levels of the dungeon. This change was made after play-testing revealed that nobody ever went up to previous levels, except by mistake. Removing this feature sped up level changes, because the maze state no longer had to be written out to disk before the next level was loaded. It also enabled the game to work on cassette tape as well as on disk; on the tape version the cassette tape was stopped between levels, and then started up again to load the next level.
Atari Program Exchange advertised "Dandy" as "the great new team game ... Bring up to three friends! Work as a team to battle monsters!", with a cartoon of four children exploring a dungeon.
Legacy.
Two years after "Dandy"s release, Atari Games released "Gauntlet", a project led by Ed Logg. During a speech given at the 2012 Game Developers Conference, Ed Logg said that "Dandy" served as direct inspiration for "Gauntlet".
In 1988, Atari Corporation released a "Dandy"-like game named "Dark Chambers" for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, and Atari 8-bit family (with the packaging in the style of Atari XEGS games). The manual states "Copyright 1983 John Howard Palevich. All rights reserved." It only supports two players and has many fewer on-screen enemies than either "Dandy" or "Gauntlet."