Tunnels of Doom

If Dungeons of Daggorath was the big CRPG for the Tandy CoCo, Tunnels of Doom was most certainly the best CRPG going on Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A. Texas Instruments is one of the few personal computer manufacturers that actively discouraged third-party development, preferring to publish all software for their systems themselves.

Rather than generate a collection of must-have exclusives that would help sell the platform, the policy disenfranchised developers and no doubt proved disastrous for Texas Instruments. The inevitable result is that the TI-99/4A had one of the smallest game libraries in the industry; only 40 or so games were ever published for it, the bulk being remakes of popular arcade games.

Nevertheless, at least one gem really stands out. Programmed by Kevin Kenney and published by Texas Instruments in 1982, Tunnels of Doom contains many of the features that will show up in later games such as SSI's "Gold Box" games, which debut in 1988 with The Pool of Radiance.

Perhaps the best way to describe the game is as a combination of themes from Telengard and Wizardry. Like Telengard, Tunnels of Doom features fountains, altars, and thrones that have random effects on players willing to experiment with them. However, the game imitates Wizardry by allowing the player control a party of adventurers (four, to be precise) rather than a single character.

It also predates Ultima III in offering different screens for combat and exploration, as well as in using solid colors for the first-person, 3D dungeons rather than monochrome wireframe graphics. It even offers an automapper!

Like Ultima III and the later "Gold Box" games, Tunnels of Doom switches to a top-down, tactical screen whenever the party engages in combat. Combat is turn-based and offers ranged as well as hand-to-hand weapons.

Another nice touch is the ability to target specific monsters with ranged weapons, rather than just firing them in a straight line. Although there are only three classes available (fighter, wizard, and rogue), a special hero class was available to players who opted to lead a single adventurer in the randomly-generated, ten-level maze. All in all, it's an intelligent system that was relatively easy to learn and quite flexible.

The game shipped with two adventures: "Pennies and Prizes" and "Quest for the King." The first of these was more or less a tutorial designed to familiarize users with the interface (or to entertain small children). "Quest of the King" is the standard "fetch the orb" quest, though players must also locate the king and return him and the orb to the surface. A strict time limit ratchets up the tension.

However, what most people remember about Tunnels of Doom are the many third-party modules created with Asgard Software's Tunnels of Doom Editor, created by a Chicago police officer named John Behnke. Fans of the game would often design their own scenarios and distribute them at conventions and club meetings, and a few were even available commercially in compilations sold by Asgard. One of the more unusual of these is a game where the dungeon is a K-Mart store. Another was based on the popular TV show Star Trek, though I doubt seriously whether this scenario was authorized by Paramount.

Although the game was one of the most successful for the TI-99/4A, Texas Instruments laid off Kenney shortly after its release. Kenney speculated in a 2002 interview that the company was unhappy with his "liberal political bent," but TI later contracted him to do some additional databases for the game (they were never released).