Dandy (video game)

The game that eventually became Dandy had been originally written in the fall of 1982 as Thesis of Terror, Jack Palevich's MIT bachelor's thesis.[4] The original concept was for a five-person game, four players on Atari computers acting as graphical terminals, and a fifth machine acting as dungeon master controlling the action from a separate computer. The two machines would communicate over their serial ports. However, time constraints meant that the interactive dungeon master role was never implemented. The separate machine, a Hewlett-Packard Pascal Workstation (a member of the HP 9000 family), was used solely 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. This algorithm was easy to implement using the limited resources of the Atari 800; it takes the same time to run no matter how many monsters were currently in the map. 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 to ensure the map would.

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. Dandy was also influenced by the Defender arcade game, which contributed the idea of the smart bomb (potions), and by several maze-exploration arcade games that 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 Dandy was designed.[5]

Thesis of Terror's gameplay was designed with help from Joel Gluck, who was a freshman at MIT at the time. Gluck designed several of the levels in the game, and invented some of the common idioms of Dandy-style games. For example, he designed the "funnel trap", where treasure was placed in such a way that the players would run to the treasure, causing a wall of monsters placed just off screen to activate and charge on the party.

Several changes were made to the gameplay as a result of playtesting. Early versions of the game allowed players to shoot each other, but this was removed after testing showed that when the players discovered that they could hurt each other, the game quickly degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all. Another change was that dead players originally had to sit out the rest of the game. Testing revealed that parties would start the game over when one member died, so that the whole party could continue to play together. To keep the game going, the revival heart was added.

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.[6]

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.[7]