A Tunnels of Doom Retrospective on the TI99/4A
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2020
- Ep 11 : Tunnels of Doom on the Texas Instruments 99/4A - one of the earliest dungeon crawler RPGs for the home computer market, this game introduced a number of genre-defining elements that still appear in modern games today!
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Tunnels of Doom Remake:
www.dreamcodex.com/todr.php - Наука та технологія
As a lonely kid I played this game all of the time. I hadn’t heard the load sound of the cassette in over 30 years but when played in this video it was like it was yesterday.
Nice ! The sound of Tunnels of Doom loading from cassette is one of my earliest memories of home computing and is permanently seared into my brain :)
Lol yup me too
Same here, haven't played it since 1984 but that sound is completely burned into my cerebral cortex.
Miss the way gaming used to be.
I was 10 yrs old when my mom bought me $50 TI99/4A for Christmas. I mowed countless lawns to save and buy all kinds of things from the Triton aftermarket catalog and This game was a crown jewel no doubt about it. It dominated more than a complete 1983 summer and also "seared" incredibly fond memories. Watching the font reduce in size as the game loads with that amazing theme music and walking down a computerized 3d hallway for the first time and shooting cross bow across the battle field. Scared to death that i wouldn't make it to a fountain or back to the general store in time to restore my health so hours of game progress weren't wasted as they were so many times. (Talk about suspense). Wondering "HOW DID HE CREATE THIS?" so much so i became a programmer. This game should sit right beside Pac-man, Galaga, Space Invaders in a gaming hall of fame for its incredibly early ground breaking take on RPG/DND style play and on 30kb not mb... not gb of memory (insane). I would like to publicly thank Kevin and Hank for very very fond forever memories. The energy put into this game had a profoundly postive impact on me and obviously others. and thank you @retrobits for putting this tribute together.
Awesome, thanks for sharing your memories!
ToD was the best. Position is a critical part of ToD combat and one of the best parts. I miss that in many modern RPGs.
This is an amazing comment. We were gifted a TI-99/4a by my stepfather’s parents for Christmas one year, I believe it being sold to them by a door-to-door salesman. Whoever it was was good, as he later sold them the “voice modulator” for us.
At first, I was disappointed at what I took to be sort-of generic games and even (edit: 8-year old) me had a hard time making “hunt the wumpus” feel very exciting. Then we got this game and I was blown away. Like you say, so much of this game is now hardwired deep in my mind, the cassette loading sounds not heard for decades taking me right back to winter nights playing this game as a kid. Classic and a thrill to hear and feel again. Love that it so inspired you.
I remember this so vividly. I joined a Computer Club in the 8th grade back in 1984 on a lark because there was nothing else of interest to me -- and we played this in the club during lunch. I was introduced to computers then and never looked back.
I just hummed along perfectly to the "dungeon under construction" music which should tell you how much I played this fantastic game.
This is one of the best games ever made. You can really see where the gold box dnd games borrowed many of the concepts.
there is a difference between your favorite game, and the best game
@@HawkeClan69 there's not, when you consider context.
@@iami3rian394- Concur. To that other guy I say, face.
First PC I ever had, and my all time favorite game
The dungeons aren't procedurally generated. There's about 50-60 individually hand crafted maps. I know this because a friend of mine and I made maps of every single dungeon because she was convinced opening the map screen used "steps". We had dozens of hand drawn maps and started finding duplicates after several games.
The developer said they were actually procedurally generated and shared the rules he used. With just 24 rows to work with on the whole screen I wonder if you found all the possible iterations. I wish I had done that.
@@ronhutcherson9845 Every time we played a new game we always checked every map of each floor and started finding duplicates. If we didn't have the map then we'd draw a physical copy. If they were procedural then the algorithm wasn't very complex. (Shrug) I know we didn't find "every" map but we had lots of duplicate floors when we'd start new games.
So much nostalgia for this.
I became a game journalist then game dev. And this was the first home game/RPG I loved!
I always loved solving the vaults
The first RPG I owned. It was the second best 99/4A game after their space invaders knockoff.
ToD is my favorite video game ever. I got a TIPI so I could play it without the 3 minutes of load time.
Nice! I'm going to have to try out the TIPI at some point, it looks awesome!
Cheater. = )
I had this at the time. It's so important to realise that before this, only the simplest of text adventures and 2d puzzlers existed. This was the first one to really bring a lot of RPG concepts to computers. From multiple classes, to levelling up, to different gear, puzzle locks, cursed items, gradually revealed maps... these all seem a given now but at the time were almost unheard of, or in very limited implementations.
This is the one game that made my TI look good compared to the spectrums and c64s my friends had.
Not to mention astonishing improvements like a pseudo-3d view, randomised dungeons (not just encounters, but entirely procedurally-generated maps!!) and moving between 2d and 3d for movement/combat, sound effects (and using them strategically e.g. listening at doors)! This really was state of the art, generation-defining and genre-defining.
Microsurgeon was another one that I showed to my friends that had Atari 800s and a C64.
My uncle had Tunnels of Doom with the disk drive.
I loved TI99 4a but those 2 carts blew everything away during that time period. We could not compare either of those games with anything else that was out at the time. BTW other Microsurgeon ports were not the same game. The TI was top notch arcade quality and had speech synth and multiple screens.
Tunnels of Doom was like playing Eye of the Beholder or Might and Magic years ahead of time. I remember playing Rogue and Nethack years later and Tunnels of Doom has real graphics and 3D like tunnels. I also remember playing Alkabeth. Tunnels of Doom took everything to another level.
The TI99/4a was the first computer I owned. My mom had a brushed aluminum version when I was 16, and I saved and purchased my own when they blew out the beige ones for $50. My friends and I were obsessed with this game off and on (in waves) for several years. I own a few vintage TI99/4a consoles and my son loved playing TOD when he was 5-6ish. He still fondly talks about it, but his dad is lazy and doesn’t want to hook all that mess up again. 😀
Haha, who could blame you? Thanks for sharing your memories!
Nice! I'm about to introduce my 5yo to it. You could just provide the components and let him hook it up. With the manuals on the Internet, videos on YT, and community on AtariAge, he'll have no problem!
Got this for Xmas when it came out. Played it all the time.
I played this game for years. I learned the music on my synth too
Wow, Tunnels of Doom looks both more graphically appealing and more user-friendly than the other well-known 3-D RPG games popular around that time, namely Wizardry and Ultima. It seems to have done the procedurally-generated labyrinth thing before the original Rogue even.
It was later. It was also definitely better, though.
Glad you mentioned the remake. It used to take 6 to 7 hours to play ten floors on the TI99 and the whole game takes about 90 minutes on modern PCs. It really was the loading that made the game so long.
Never knew about the redundancy on tape. Makes sense as a kid if the game wouldn't load I would fast forward a little and it would work!
Reminds me of dungeon master and I'm surprised to see DM was released 5 years later. I have a friend nowadays who used to play tunnels of doom with her dad and brothers. One of these rare girls who love the bossiest, most classic games. This is definitely one of these awesome classics, I'm very impressed.
Oh yeah, your video is fantastically produced. Great job:)
This game was great
Although I've owned a TI-99/4a my father bought late in 1981 I never owned Tunnels of Doom until 1989. By then I owned Ultima III and IV for the Atari 800xl and really delighted how much Tunnels of Doom reminded me of the Ultima dungeons. I had several cassettes including a Doctor Who one (so delighted to fight Daleks on that one). It was amazing I was still able to buy games for it in 1989 years after it was discontinued, but most of the other TI games I had were bought between 1981 and '84.
I adored this game. I lost tons of sleep playing this.
I had one of these and the game but I remember having a huge black box that you would place floppy disks as big as records into instead of the cassette or along with it and my game seemed to load fairly quickly.
I remember how long it took to load this game.
Best game on ti!
Remember seeing advertisements for this game in magazines when I had my first TI-99/4A in the eighties, but I never got it, unfortunately. I had Parsec, Munchman, Hunt The Wumpus, TI Invaders, Congo Bongo, Etc. Think I had borrowed a schoolmate's Microsurgeon, Ambulance, Moon Patrol, & Munchmobile at different times.
We had a couple of those as well. Parsec was my favorite but I could never figure out how to play Microsurgeon when I was a kid. Weird game.
@@retrobitstv yes, I always loved Parsec. Liked using it with the speech synthesizer. Those refueling tunnels were difficult, though.
I don't remember a lot about Microsurgeon, so it must have been tough & I didn't play it a lot. Played Parsec, TI Invaders, Munchman, and Hunt The Wumpus the most.
Hilariously, my 6 year-old niece watched some Hunt The Wumpus UA-cam videos with me recently, and she wants me to hook up the old TI-99/4A and play it. She has asked me to replay the UA-cam footage several times.
There's also a 3D Windows Hunt The Wumpus remake we saw UA-cam footage of, and it looks fun. She wants to play that one, but I can't find a download link for it. I found a webpage for the game, but no download link.
Here's the UA-cam video of it: ua-cam.com/video/37ZbnJivan8/v-deo.html
And it was originally up here: bestwindows8apps.net/app/hunt-the-wumpus/
But the Windows Store App won't load on my system for some reason.
definitely reminds me of Ultima
Loving the TI-99 content! (Although, I'm a bit biased, haha)
Definitely an underserved market :)
the audio of the cassette tape is as familiar to me as a nostalgic song from that era. Was the only game we had on cassette tape besides some lame educational and business titles
Dungeon Master name drop! Nice! I can only find one of my ST disk from that.
I've been meaning to play it, once I get my ST recapped. I just learned today that there was a Dungeon Master game for the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine.
It came on one disk, IIRC, with extreme custom compression.
All I hear is, how are you, gentleman All your base are belong to us. Move zig.
any clue on whether it was written straight in assembly language , or compiled from something like basic?
thanks a lot for such an interesting retrospective.
YW! I did run across this interview when I was researching the episode. Page 2 talks about the development environment that was used at the time. Interesting stuff! www.ridingthecrest.com/edburns/classic-gaming/tunnels/kevin_kenney_interview.html
So cool. So sad that my parents LITERALLY tossed out our old TI-994/A. I did stumble on my old TI Tape Player, at least.
That looks like fun! I'll have to see about playing it on an emulator, since I want the original experience as much as possible without buying yet another vintage computer. 🙂
The game is included with the Classic99 emulator and loads from Disk so no long wait times :)
@@retrobitstv Oh, cool! 🕹
@@retrobitstv I gave that a try, and it seems to work quite nicely! 🙂 I played through the super easy adventure as a nice test to try out the controls and such. I'll have to play again with monsters next time!
this sure wouldve beat kingdom of kroz on my tandy 1000 hx back then
Next play Tunnels of Doom : Eternal
I see what you did there :P
Funny story: my dad had the cartridge, but not the rest. As a kid I, could never figure out how to get past the intro. It didn't stop me from trying every once in a while since it looked so cool.
Fun to finally see what the game was like.
You missed out, it was legendary
Similar story. I was too young to understand the concept back then. I was only 3 to 4 years old. Way too advanced for me to conceive back then.
But I did learn to play Blackjack.
Okay, listen carefully, the ti-99 failed not because of software availability and blah blah blah, it failed it was too smarty pants for the average consumer. You had to do stuff, there were certain modules where you actually had to continue programming or like tunnels of doom you had to put a tape in and what not. It was ahead of its time, think of the tape as Grand theft auto loading the open world, there was just too much going on for the stupid people.
Remember King Edward's minds or whatever it was called where you actually had to log on to the TI extended basic freaking modulator network deal thing? There was too much going on for the average consumer they wanted rapid and right now and that is not what Texas instruments was providing.
people forget that the Texas instruments ti-99 4A was the very first networked computer, it was the beginning of the internet.
Return to Pirate's aisle that was the name of the game that killed the ti-99 4a