“Beware This Brimming Tome!”
“Explore 14 rooms filled with zombies, rats and dive-bombing vultures!”
Dark arts by @snakeandrews.
Once upon a time, Apple launched its line of Macintosh computers. And they were pretty darn practical back in the day, as it turns out! For all your data and word processing needs – and without the hassle of command prompt mastery – it served a fine alternative to the reigning IBM-compatibles of its era. And for what it’s worth, they were A-OK at playing games, too… albeit, featuring a distinctly different library than what was available on the likes of DOS. Being stuck with purely 1-bit black-and-white displays [until around 1989] was almost certainly a dissuading factor for some games software publishers — not to mention the complications of codebase compatibilities when it came to creating conversions. But for a brave few developers who recognized the potential market, the early Mac served as a platform of choice for some classic games.
Judging from retrospectives and nostalgic postings in the modern era, 1986’s Dark Castle is among the most widely and fondly remembered titles from this golden age of Mac gaming. At the very least, it certainly benefited from one of the larger campaigns bringing Apple’s interactive offerings to other computer and console hardware. With versions made available across Amiga, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS-compatibles, and even the Philips CD-i; you can likely gather that the mainstream aspirations for Dark Castle aimed fairly high. But perhaps the greatest opportunity came with its debut on one of the most popular home consoles of the early 90s: The venerable Sega Genesis. If any one conversion had the potential to launch the burgeoning series into the stratosphere, it was likely to be the release on Sega’s 16-bit, millions-selling piece of kit. All that was left to do was to stick the landing.
Needless to say (considering that we’re talking about it on this website), the Genesis version of Dark Castle isn’t quite as fondly remembered as its source material on Macintosh. As a matter of fact, it’s well-considered to be among the weakest offerings in the console’s entire cartridge library — between mediocre critical reception surrounding its original release, and more recent reviews slamming it as one of the Mega Drive’s all-time biggest stinkers. Perhaps most infamously, it’s received a treatment by the Angriest of Video Gaming Nerds, and thus cemented its legacy as one of the worst games of all time. But here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, we like to question these sorts of assertions, and see for ourselves whether or not the hateful hullabaloo rings true. We’ll be giving the Genesis release the fairest due we can, as well as tracking the muddy path that lead us to the darkest version of Dark Castle.
Quaiff thine elixirs, and gather ye stones:
The Black Knight awaits us, atop digital throne.
I reckon I have a sentimental favorite in the original MacVenture release of Déjà Vu, but maybe that’s just me?
“Adventres [sic] in Dark Castle.”
The original Macintosh incarnation of Dark Castle is largely the brainchild of one Jonathan Gay, in association with the San Diego software publishing / development company Silicon Beach. When he was initially discovered by company founder Charlie Jackson in 1984, he was just a 17 year old high school student, who accepted an offer to work for Jackson’s latest startup without pay — until such time as the new company would [hopefully] manage to turn a profit. Recalling the story of Silicon Beach’s shaky foundation: “Jackson wanted to start a Macintosh software company, owned the necessary $10,000 Lisa computer, and didn’t have much money to spend paying programmers. I wanted access to a Lisa computer and, as a high school student, didn’t need a paycheck until after the software started selling. It was a perfect fit.”[1]
Luckily for all involved, the company found immediate success with the release of games software such as Airborne! and Enchanted Scepters both in 1985, representing some of the earliest games available on the also-then-new Macintosh platform. But 1986 would prove an even more lucrative year for the young studio, beginning with the release of the influential [and highly profitable] “SuperPaint” graphics editor. While Gay wasn’t directly involved with the development of that program (though he would contribute some code to the updated SuperPaint II), he was hard at work on a piece of software that would soon rival its success. In collaboration with a graphic designer by the name Mark Stephen Pierce hailing from San Francisco, the two would collaborate to create a new game for the Mac; with Mark contributing design documents and assets on floppy disks via mail, while Jonathan coded and compiled the guts of the gameplay.[2]
Funnily enough, the origin of the concept for Dark Castle was born of exasperation and spontaneity on the part of Mark; who had suffered through what would be described as a “stupid and incoherent” pitch by Silicon Beach sound designer Eric Zocher during a car ride: “Some guy with modern weapons would walk through a portal at the end of every level and the next world would be totally different. Zocher had got the idea from a short-lived TV show about a family that stumbled through a portal, and a military board game called TimeTripper, which involved pitting modern soldiers against foes from across the ages — dinosaurs, Roman gladiators, future spacemen, and more.”[3] Reportedly – in a fit of frustrated inspiration – Mark drew the entire storyboard for the game shortly after arriving at their destination, and came up with the gameplay mechanics while speaking aloud as he worked. Despite the apparently blunt nature of this presentation, the Silicon Beach staff in attendance luckily “had no objection to being talked to that way.”
For his part; Jonathan’s design goals were to fully realize flicker-free animation on the Mac, incorporate digitized sound into the presentation, and to develop a control scheme made specifically with mouse and keyboard in mind [so as to compensate for the Mac’s lack of joystick support].[4] In a broader sense: His intention was simply to produce the most sophisticated game possible for the hardware, by taking advantage of features and functions that nobody else were taking advantage of at the time. It may have taken roughly a year’s time to see the concept through from start to finish, but when it finally hit shelves in ‘86, Dark Castle was still unlike anything Apple’s featured platform had yet to see. Oh, and it certainly helped that it was an equally entertaining and challenging romp, as well.
Dark Castle for Macintosh (Silicon Beach Software, 1986)
Without going too much into gameplay details (as we’ll be saving that for the review portion of this article): The incorporation of mouse and keyboard controls into a platformer would prove to be a forward-thinking move, with mouse movement used to orient your character’s arm and aim projectiles across the screen. It occurs to me that placing your shots with the mouse cursor itself would probably have made for an even more innovative / easy-to-play experience; but bear in mind that the very concept of the computer mouse was still something of a novelty at this point, to where folk were still figuring out what exactly to do with it. Beyond that, the inclusion of digitized voiceover (credited to commercial jingle superstar Dick Noel) and an intricately detailed game world (especially given the strict limitation of the monochrome display) were also major leaps forward for the world of Mac gaming, managing to wow both players and even Apple’s own engineers.
As you may well have guessed by this point, the original Dark Castle was as critically and financially successful as it was innovative. Dedicated Macintosh magazines Macworld and MacUser were quick to award it their “Game of the Year” awards for 1986, with other computer software reviewers and columnists regarding it as no less than a rival to the most entertaining arcade games of the era.[3b] Come the end of ‘87, the game had moved up to 30,000 units, and Gay had made enough from his share of royalties to pay his way through college. Still a year and some months after that, Dark Castle would finally conclude a 39-month rein near the top of Macworld’s “Best-Sellers in Entertainment Software” list. To call it one of the most popular games on the Macintosh platform would be an understatement. And naturally, a sequel would soon be slated.
1987’s Beyond Dark Castle would prove a worthy iteration on its predecessor’s established formula; providing far more castle to be explored, more environmental objects to be interacted with, new enemies and weapons with which to combat them, and generally just more to see and do within the scope of the same core gameplay. It was also an even more challenging title on top of all that, proving to be perhaps one of the most difficult platformers I’ve ever played — in a totally fair and satisfying way, mind you! But despite further success and acclaim, the sequel would prove to be the last piece of entertainment software Silicon Beach would publish, as well as the last video game that Jonathan Gay would be involved in. Both parties saw more lucrative and fulfilling futures in productivity and graphic design software, noting that products in that line could be sold for more than five times the retail price of computer games.
Beyond Dark Castle for Macintosh (Silicon Beach Software, 1987)
This left the future of the Dark Castle franchise stuck in something of a limbo, as Silicon Beach now had no interest in being the ones to further cultivate it. It took until a freshly-founded studio “Three-Sixty Pacific” acquired the licensing rights to see the original game converted to other platforms; including Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS — plus a later port to the Apple IIGS, with graphical work credited to none other than John Romero. Speaking broadly, though, none of these variants quite capture the spirit or the feel of the source material. The DOS version, for example, was able to display in 4-color CGA graphics, but at the cost of a smaller resolution (320×240 versus 512×342 on Macintosh) — not to mention the fact that the garish coloration only really served to detract from the atmosphere of the original title. There was also the fact that several of these releases didn’t support mouse peripherals (namely on the C64 and DOS), leaving the controls isolated to the keyboard.
Altogether, Three-Sixty Pacific failed to capitalize on Dark Castle to the extent that they had envisioned, and passed on the option to bring Beyond Dark Castle to other platforms. No less than Activision would step up to commission conversions of the sequel for Amiga and Commodore 64, only to see no more success than Three-Sixty before them had. With Activision left wiping their hands clean of their affair by the end of 1989 and Three-Sixty still stuck with rights to the original, the series was shelved once again. And as time continued to pass the now-dormant Dark Castle by, its once-unique selling points would only continue to diminish in value, as PC and console games both continued to iterate on aspects of audiovisual presentation. By the dawn of the next decade, Dark Castle must’ve looked like a relic from a long-distant past to the casual consumer: Black and white graphics with choppy animation, outshone by even the most underwhelming of emerging 16-bit titles.
Of all the publishers in all the world, it would be Electronic Arts who attempted once more to make Dark Castle appeal to the masses. Likely offered console publishing rights on the cheap by Three-Sixty Pacific; their intention would be to bring the game to the Sega Genesis, with the hopes that it might make an impression on the previously unpolled market of console gamers. As for development duties, Three-Sixty tasked a new internal team with programming and design work (as their previous conversion expert, Lane Roathe, had left to co-found “Ideas From the Deep” with John Romero), while entrusting sound design duties to business partner Artech Digital Productions — a developer whose titles they had handled publishing for. Somewhat worryingly though, neither of these companies actually had previous experience developing for console hardware before. Perhaps EA figured that the best team to bring a computer game to console would be a team primarily experienced with programming for PC architecture?
And so it came to pass that in late 1991, Dark Castle would make its way to Sega’s Genesis by way of Electronic Arts; who manufactured their own format of cartridges for the title, as they had done and would continue to do across all their releases for the console. Would the first-time console developers somehow manage to capture the spirit that made the title such a rousing success on the Macintosh? Could this finally prove to be the fledgling franchise’s big break into the mainstream consciousness? Should someone have actually checked to see if any demand for this five-year late conversion actually existed? Only time would tell… But the answers to all these questions was “No.”
Quick backstory on this, for those who don’t know: When EA first approached Sega about publishing games to their 16-bit console, Sega were cribbing their notes on system licensing from Nintendo’s playbook, and forcing third-party publishers into restrictive contracts. Negotiations between the companies dragged, until a Sega executive reportedly taunted “If you want a different deal you’re going to have to reverse engineer the system, aren’t you?” Sure enough, EA managed to do just that, and presented their prototype cartridge schematics to Sega — effectively threatening to upset their entire manufacturing and licensing structure if EA so chose to publish independently. As a result, Sega acquiesced, and gave EA a sweetheart royalty rate; while also allowing them to go ahead manufacturing their own cartridges at their lesser expense.
“A Single Elixir Protects You from Rat and Bat Bites.”
North American box art.
While neither the original release of Dark Castle nor the accompanying manual to this Sega Genesis conversion bother to name our protagonist, he’s one Prince Duncan of Brightland. As heir to the throne (and apparently lacking the services of any knights or other soldier types), it lands on him to single-handedly defeat a nefarious Black Knight threatening his kingdom. As the villain resides in the titular Dark Castle, Duncan travels to the lair with intent to end his [ostensible] reign of terror. Needless to say – considering our hero’s hailing from a royal family – Duncan comes equipped with only the most sophisticated of armor and the most deadly of weapons: A cloth tunic and a bag of rocks. Give ‘em hell, Duncan!
Naturally, the path to the Dark Knight is laden with a variety of other dangers: Perilous platform jumps, rabid rats, armor-clad guards, disembodied flaming eyeballs, and even a damned fire-breathing dragon; just to name a few. And for the most part, Duncan is at a pretty steep disadvantage when made to face these hazards, lacking in the sufficient means to defend himself or navigate safely. As a matter of fact, our Prince is actually something of a klutz — like a Lester the Unlikely for the medieval era. Considering the fact that negotiating steps is tantamount to a herculean feat for him, perhaps it is for the best that he’s not made to carry a sword with him on this quest? It’s more likely he’d gouge his own eyes out than strike a glancing blow on his foes. It’s up to the player to master Duncan’s particular way of moving – as well as the fine art of stone-throwing – if there is to be any hope for Brightland. Think of the poor peasants, won’t you?
So, in comparing a 16-bit console intended for color televisions to the Macintosh and it’s 1-bit monochrome display, you should be able to assume some “advantages” off the bat for this Genesis version of the game. Namely, you’d expect an altogether-improved level of presentation; with superior sound, color graphics, and smoother gameplay courtesy of that oft-touted ‘Blast Processing.’ And sure enough, our console-crafted Dark Castle begins to flaunt these features right off the bat, with its take on the title’s iconic title screen. A vulture sits perched atop a tree branch in the foreground, as the Dark Castle in the backdrop is briefly illuminated between flashes of lightning on a dark and dreary night. Set to the foreboding tones of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” – now presented as programmed track for the Mega Drive’s YM2612 sound chip, rather than a fuzzy-sounding truncated sample – the power of Sega’s hardware is put on full display for all to revel in. Surely, the Macintosh should stand no chance in this competition of presentation.
… And yet, the “new and improved” full-color graphics of the Genesis across the game actually end up feeling like something of a step down? It’s a strange case too, as there’s little that’s technically inferior or more crudely-rendered in this version compared to the source material on Mac. It’s not even so much a matter of the smaller resolution putting a damper on things here, as the concessions made for it are all made smartly enough. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to just how striking that classic black-and-white presentation served to be, and how cleverly-implemented it was to a point where it presented absolutely zero issues with discerning the foreground and background / confusing active and inactive on-screen elements. Even with its comparatively choppier animations and jerkier motions across the screen, it somehow feels stylistically justified and entirely earned. With the larger palette and more efficient processor afforded to Three-Sixty Pacific’s developers, they may well have been able to craft a competent-looking castle for you to crash, but they can’t seem to manage establishing an aesthetic that is quite as unique or charming as their template.
Beginning your game, you’ll be swiftly escorted to the castle’s ‘Great Hall,’ and presented a small selection of options for modifying difficulty and disabling either sound effects and/or music. Past that screen, you’ll find Duncan [and yourself] confronted with a choice of four passageways, which you can freely choose from. Though two on your left have emblems hanging above them with curious question marks, you’ll discover whether they lead to either ‘Trouble’ or ‘Fireball’ once you enter (the question marks serving to indicate your 50/50 chance of getting the preferred Fireball route). A passage on the right-hand side has a shield adorned above its doorway, serving as a pretty good hint as to what it might hold. Finally, your center path will take you to the indicated ‘BK’ — the road to the Black Knight himself. In an ideal playthrough, you’ll likely want to head down the ‘Shield’ and Fireball paths, in order to acquire the associated magic gear at their end. But if you’re feeling brave – or simply looking for the most challenging playthrough possible – heading directly for the boss is certainly a way you can go.
You’ll notice that I didn’t include the Trouble path as a recommended destination. That’s because it’s nothing but trouble, fittingly enough: If you should accidentally enter it, the door back into the Great Hall will immediately lock behind you, and force you to undertake a round trip across three screens. Furthermore, you can wind up landing at the bottom of it from most any other room in the castle, should you fall down pitfalls or be grabbed by a gargoyle. Assuming you’re coming from the Great Hall, though, the first stage (‘Trouble 1,’ as per the level-naming convention) will teach you the dangers of rats, bats, and the castle guard; as you attempt to make your way down a stone staircase, and up some dangling ropes toward the right edge of the screen. Rats are likely the most abundant creature within the castle, and will endlessly emerge from holes / the edges of the screen to intercept you on the floor and ropes. Bats serve as a standard aerial menace, dismounting from their perches in order to fly towards you like a homing missile, before ultimately disappearing off-screen. When bitten by either species, you’ll automatically consume an elixir from your limited stock, effectively serving as your points of health. Run out of precious potions, and you’ll succumb to some presumably fast-acting plague. Luckily, rocks are enough to dispatch these breeds of foul beast with a single strike.
The guards, on the other hand, represent a step up in the tier list. While pictured as something like armored knights in the limited capacity of the Macintosh game (they were detailed enough that you could discern their feathered helmets and joints in their plate mail), here they seem to resemble something more like Frankenstein monsters, sporting some all-grey sweatsuit ensemble. They carry crossbows with which to shoot you with – though their projectiles appear as lightning bolts emerging from their chests – and can additionally kill you by mere contact. And unlike the bats and rats, these attacks are both one-hit kills against you, while the effect of your rocks is downgraded to a temporary stun to them. When considering their ability to loose bolts from a range, this means that occupying the same horizontal layer as them for any extended length of time is tantamount to playing with fire: You can duck to dodge them, but they’ll likely just use this time to close the distance between you, until eventually colliding. This means having to have your arm ready and angled to fire at them the moment they get back up from a stun, or risk getting caught in a battle you can’t win.
On that note, it’s high time we discuss how exactly Duncan is meant to utilize his Major League pitching ability. Back on the Macintosh and other mouse-compatible platforms, you would adjust the angle of our hero’s arm by moving the mouse up and down, to where you could account for close to a full 180° range of trajectory (from top to bottom). You’d still have to briefly turn around to toss rocks behind you, but being able to quickly land on a precise degree of aim with a well-practiced mouse swipe proved a satisfying bit of precision. Unfortunately, Dark Castle on Genesis doesn’t support the Sega Mega Mouse peripheral — as if you were likely to own one, anyhow. No, you’ll undoubtedly be left with your controller’s D-pad, and made to hold up or down on it to slowly rotate Duncan’s arm. This makes for much more hassle in the process of adjusting your shots, and can sometimes require flawless timing [and accuracy] in being able to get the draw on enemies simultaneously approaching from different angles. It’s not an impossible feat on the Mega Drive (in most cases), but it’s a far tougher one when compared to computer counterpart.
Assuming you’re able to master the offensive front, you’ll still have the hurdles of basic movement to surpass. As mentioned earlier, Duncan has something like two left feet, to the point that the slightest imperfections on the ground or fallen foes will cause him to immediately fall flat on his face. Trouble 1 actually provides a perfect example of this sort of obstacle, as the ground floor presents a subtle two-pixel height differential between two layers of flooring. Should you attempt to step across rather than jump over it, Duncan will promptly eat dirt, and proceed into a several second dizzy animation while he recovers his bearings. This presents a palpable opportunity for rats to bite you or the guard to shoot you dead, and more generally serves as a cruel trick on players unable to discern the point of stumble. But if you think Duncan’s reaction to tripping over himself is frustrating, just try and fall any further than a quarter-screen’s worth of height: It will result in instant death, harnessing the same lethal power of gravitational pull as seen in the original Donkey Kong. You’ll be fortunate if you only fall about 20 pixels worth of screen real estate, as you’ll only have to deal with that damned dizzy animation again.
More so than any particular variety of enemy, overcoming these basic controls are the biggest obstacle you as Duncan will face — which is to say nothing of some of the more “advanced” operations, including three different approaches to / variations on jumping. And in fairness, this isn’t an exclusive quirk to the Genesis conversion: Control over Duncan on the Macintosh was just about as exacting and specific as it is here. The problem here – if you want to call it one – is that console games of the era were generally moving away from the design idea of being deliberately clunky and strictly punishing. By 1991, we were well into an era of momentum-applied movement and forgoing fall damage, all serving to make Dark Castle feel like the relic that it was. And so, while some might well appreciate the throwback quality to it, there’s no arguing that the casual consumer or more modernly-accustomed player would have a harder time cottoning to it.
As you negotiate the castle on a screen-by-screen basis, you’ll have to learn how to answer for all manner of adversary and ambush. With a cast of enemies ranging from “infinitely respawning” to “outright invincible,” your best offense won’t even be a good defense: It’s gonna be fleeing from fights entirely. Your rocks are really intended less as a means of self-defense, and more of a means of temporarily clearing pest-type baddies out from your path. For some more examples of persistent attackers: Vultures will appear in formation in the air like waves of Galaxians — complete with the ability to divebomb you as their means of attack. And within just a few seconds of knocking one down, another will appear back in formation to take their place. And then there are the humble ‘Mutant’ enemies, effectively serving as an “improved” version of the rats which will now kill you in one hit. And while they’re on-screen, you’ll be treated to a chorus of them repeatedly chirping “NYA NYA NYA,” which should prompt you to exit said screen as quickly as possible.
Even if there weren’t any endless army of enemies, the task of navigating would still be a challenging one on its own. On top of figuring out exactly which non-indicated points at the edges of the screen will actually take you to the next, you’ll be contending against various mechanisms and traps native to the castle; including perpetually swinging ropes, moving platforms, and rolling thunder. Half of these exist to kill you on the spot, whether by fall damage or being struck dead where you stand. In one of Dark Castle’s more iconic deathtraps, you’ll have to quickly pick one of a pair of keys at the end of ‘Trouble 3’ — after figuring out how to temporarily stun a whip-wielding torturer with a nearby flail. One key will allow you to exit the Trouble path back into the Great Hall, while grabbing the other will cause a comically-oversized anvil to land on you and crush you to death. It’s one of only two hurdles in the game I’d refer to as a “puzzle,” as passing the anvil test requires you to look toward a row of prisoners chained to the wall in order to determine which key is rigged. The other puzzle in the game (located at the end of ‘Fireball 4’) has you yanking on a trio of overhead pull chains in some unspecified sequence, in order to open a magic barrier. Of all the obstacles in the game, this puzzle has always felt the most out of place to me.
Going out of your way to sample all the castle’s deadly creatures and contraptions proves to be well worth your time, though; as collecting the fireball magic and shield (or even just one or the other) will markedly improve Duncan’s survivability. Receiving the ability to cast fireballs from the wizard Merlin will replace your rocks with more powerful projectiles, which can actually knock out guards and gargoyles for good. The shield will grant you something like a magic aura, replacing your ability to duck and cover – unintuitively mapped to Up + B on your controller – with a fully invincible power stance. Curiously, the Genesis conversion does make some tweaks to the effectiveness of both of these power-ups, but we’ll be covering those in a later breakdown. For now, just know that these upgrades to Duncan can both make the path to the Black Knight far more approachable, as well as aiding in any other trips you may have to make beforehand.
The Black Knight’s room is preceded by one of the most challenging screens in the game… plus a second stage that’s outright trivial so long as you pack at least one power-up. On that first screen at least, your mastery of climbing and timing is tested, between having to perfectly plot out Donkey Kong Jr.-esque rope-crawls and avoiding the gargoyles who swoop in on regular interval. Get caught on a rope at an inopportune moment, and you’ll have no recourse for the most frustrating baddy in the game — even if you’re fully powered up. As for ‘Black Knight 2,’ well: It at least continues the Donkey Kong comparisons by having one of the black-hooded executioner type-enemies tossing barrels at you (reappearing after a previous screen, ‘Shield 1’), as you jump across floating skeleton platforms and dodge another repeated interval of gargoyles. So long as you have the shield power-up to deal with the barrels or a fireball to dissuade the gargoyle, this stage is downright trivial.
Which finally brings us to the battle against the big bad of Dark Castle himself. And if you were expecting some sort of epic sword fight or test of strength here, then boy howdy; you’ve been barking up the wrong cartridge. Defeating the Black Knight comes down to pulling all the pull chains present in his chamber, dodging emptied mugs of mead he’ll be tossing at you all the while. Manage to activate them all, and the Black Knight’s throne will fling him into the abyss below — where he presumably rage quits his own castle rather than have to play through his own dungeons all the way back up to the top. It’s an anti-climactic end to the adventure, but in this way, it’s entirely in tune with how Dark Castle aims to take the piss out of classic “castle quest” tropes in the first place.
At a certain point, you have to accept the fact that Dark Castle is a parodic pastiche of generic medieval fantasy, and that many of the jokes are to be had at your own expense. Your cartoonish deaths are the sometimes tortured punchlines to a game designed to punch down at hapless players. Needless to say, this very particular approach to design is pretty divisive, and had been since Dark Castle first released on Mac. In consciously and cruelly subverting player expectations of the action platformer, Gay and Pierce created a game which challenged said players to forget what they knew and to re-learn the fundamentals of the genre. This was helped back in the day by the merit of its originally innovative control scheme — which may well have been one of the first to map “WASD” as your movement keys, in addition to the novelty of the mouse. Dark Castle was a game which only could’ve worked at a specific moment in time, on a specific platform of that era. And needless to say, the Sega Genesis in 1991 was not the intended place or time.
That’s really most of what Dark Castle’s troubles come down to in this console incarnation. As far as conversion work goes, it’s really not as if Three-Sixty Pacific botched the process in any one major way in particular. As a matter of fact, I find myself at a bit of an impasse here as to how to proceed with writing about it all, since most of what can be said applies as much to this beloathed 16-bit imagining just as it does to the beloved 1-bit classic. In effect, any criticisms I could point towards the underlying game design here on Genesis can be seen as me also criticizing the original game as well, with all its attached nostalgia and its still-remaining cult-like following. Clearly, there’s a sort of “sacred” quality to the original Dark Castle, and it probably won’t do much good for me to try and tarnish it in any way.
Anyway, here’s why Dark Castle is kind of a hot mess of a game.
To be clear, everything about the platforming in Dark Castle is archaic from the get-go; from the unforgiving fall damage, to the complete lack of momentum behind your running and leaping, and counting the pixel-perfect jumps and landings often required of you. For just about every mechanic of movement and traversal you can isolate in Dark Castle, you can find games released three or four years prior [to 1986] that realize them better — not to even invoke the name of Super Mario Bros., which would only dominate the entire conversation. I’d point to titles like Pitfall! (and its expansive sequel Lost Caverns) as elevating the art of running and jumping, or Jungle Hunt setting a standard for something like rope-to-rope swinging. And did we really still need to press a button to pick up items off the ground by this point in time? Of course, this isn’t to say that all games need to conform to the same standard of control, or to discount the fact that Dark Castle was setting the stage for the likes of the “cinematic platformer” genre (soon to be massively iterated on by Prince of Persia): It’s only to explain that folk had already been spoilt for fluid control by ‘86, and that it can sometimes be frustrating to feel like you have to forfeit it in order to play this odd little title.
Then there’s the hodgepodge nature as to how the stages in the game are compiled, to where theming doesn’t begin to factor into matters. Over the course of the Fireball path, you’ll deal with an endless armada of vultures and mutants as you attempt to scale ropes, before landing on a screen with moving platforms and no enemies to speak of, then proceed to something like a log flume ride where the screen wraps around / transports you from the top-right corner into the bottom-left — for the one and only time in the game, mind you. All this precedes a screen where you’re flanked by the magic brooms from Disney’s Fantasia plus an invincible floating eyeball that follows you across the screen – marking the only level either of these enemies inhabit across the game – and made to solve that aforementioned pull chain puzzle without any real explanation or clue as to how to do so. The point I’m trying to make here is, it all ends up reading as a disarray of half-realized and non-committal design ideas, with no flow or expectation of consistency from level to level. It leaves me constantly wanting for more screens featuring some of these more unique elements — and not in the anticipatory way that’s often read as a positive note.
Alas, perhaps the biggest problem with Dark Castle is the small amount of content packed within. Consisting of a total 14 screens of play, Duncan’s adventure may feel to some as if it’s over before it even begins. Furthermore, playthroughs altogether forgoing the Fireball and Shield routes can be consolidated down to a cool two or three minutes with what actually amounts to a minimum of practice; learning the timing and trajectories needed to conquer ‘Black Knight 1,’ and still allowing for the last two stages to be approached as cautiously as you might like. By that point, you probably wouldn’t feel any particular motivation to revisit any of the rest of the castle again, and your interest in further replays would be pretty well-sapped. Perhaps this all adds up to sufficient enough playtime for a 1986 Macintosh release, but I suppose that’s where our problem comes into play in ‘91.
Knowing what factors contribute to the original Dark Castle’s “niche” appeal, and understanding that the time where it could’ve appealed to a console audience had already passed, we’re brought back to the subject of the Genesis release. And with it, we run into a rare case where developers largely sticking to the script / not changing much in creating a conversion might well be a negative to be held against it. This isn’t to say that it’s an entirely 1:1 recreation, mind you: There are at least a handful of changes and concessions made here, not just counting the coloration. That said, most of these tweaks and changes make for pretty lateral moves, all things considered.
For one, there are some slight changes to all the stage layouts in order to compensate for the smaller screen resolution. We’re really talking about mostly minor moves here, like squishing platforms closer together and shortening some of the vertical height between different floors. It never ends up feeling too compressed at any point or anything, but it’ll certainly be noticeable to anyone who has experience with the original Macintosh release. There are only two more “major” changes that I noticed: Some different background graffiti in Fireball 4 (what once read “Alaric Was Here” and “Huns Rule,” now read as “Saddam was here” and “Gamers rule”), and swapping the entrance / exit positions in ‘Trouble 2.’ In the case of the latter, if you’re entering the screen from Trouble 1, you’d perhaps expect to enter from the top-left corner of the screen and exit through the bottom-left, as you descend into the depths of the dungeon in Trouble 3. But for reasons unknown, the Genesis release has you moving from bottom-screen to top, as if the dungeon is spatially located at the top of one of the castle’s towers — despite the fact that you can fall down into it from most other screens in the game. A strange change, to be sure.
Then there’s the matter of a handful of mechanical revisions, which all serve to make the Genesis version easier. Rocks no longer travel across the screen in an arc, opting for unwaveringly straight lines instead. This takes some of the guesswork out of knocking out enemies from across the screen, and might help to save you some precious stones over the course of the game. Your shield is also now improved, to where invincibility is no longer temporary / you don’t need to repeatedly tap the action button in order to maintain it. This was something of a weird quirk of the original game, considering that the shield can only be activated while standing still. As an added bonus, the shield now also works against gargoyles, which was frustratingly not the case in the source material. With this change, it’s that much easier to approach the Black Knight without grabbing the fireball upgrade.
There’s one more change that comes to mind, and it is subjectively one for the worse. While the original game was devoid of background music during gameplay, our Genesis Dark Castle does provide you with musical accompaniment… consisting of “Toccata and Fugue” on loop, for the entire duration of the game. Perhaps figuring that console players would be appalled at a lack of soundtrack, but not having the time or energy to convert a couple extra songs to soundchip format, Three-Sixty brings us this ill-advised half-measure. At the very least, there is an option to disable the music from the menu should it become too irksome, but its implementation is unfortunately broken: If the music is turned off mid-note, the game will hang on said note and produce a prolonged tone for as long as you can tolerate it. The only way to avoid this earache is to make sure you’re stopping the music during one of its moments of silence. This rates as pretty amateurish all around.
That’s really about it as far as changes to be aware of between releases. So, really, what does that leave us with in terms of why Dark Castle on Genesis is so reviled? Again, it comes down to the 16-bit release playing things too safe, and serving as only the most rudimentary conversion of what is already sort of sloppily-assembled title. It’s like an exercise in remaking something like Pong or Space Invaders: Those titles might well be classics, but it doesn’t take too much in the way of challenge or creativity to imitate them. Criticizing a conversion for being “too accurate” feels like a strange case for me to be making, but it’s all I’m left with here in terms of explaining why this cartridge is apparently so beloathed. I’m gonna contend that most folk who have harsh words for the game on Genesis are going to have largely the same complaints in going back to the original Silicon Beach release — save maybe for the admittedly stiffer controls given the console gamepad. But again, that’s not all that damning when considering that the Macintosh version is already something of a clunker.
Which brings us to the million dollar question: What could Three-Sixty Pacific have done differently, in order to allow their Genesis rendition of Dark Castle to positively differentiate itself? Needless to say, I’ve got a few suggestions! And they start with reworking the presentation from the ground up, working to create an aesthetic that would stand out from the rest of the console’s library at the time. Now, I know I said earlier that there’s nothing here graphics-wise that’s particularly cruder-looking than as seen in the original, but that’s not really a compliment being paid there. What should’ve been called for here was something dark and drearier; riffing on the monochrome palette of the Macintosh release, but inverting things some in order to produce more of a “brights on black” contrast. While they’re at it, they might’ve strived to improve on some of the issues of scale present here — where humanoid enemies appear smaller than Duncan, and where jumping to higher platforms can sometimes present as the Prince not actually getting his feet higher than what he’s trying to land on. (‘Shield 4’ is particularly egregious in this respect)
At this point, I’d call for a full control overhaul as well, to bring the game closer in line with its genre contemporaries. I’m talking the likes of Prince of Persia and Another World, where input is as intuitive as it is precise. More specifically, I’d ask for the tripping and falling to get the axe, and making death by fall damage less severe. In their place, add something like the ability to grab on ledges and pull yourself up, so that the developers might’ve had more room to play around with different means and methods of platforming. Toss in something like rolling or crawling from a ducking position, so that players aren’t completely trapped when presented with a guard’s barrage of crossbow bolts flying overhead. I’d also probably suggest making arm movement for aiming a bit quicker – possibly adding something like an acceleration factor if you hold up or down – but I admit that dialing this in just right would be one of the trickier feats to pull off.
While we’re adding some new features to the game, how about some new pick-ups and power-ups? For items, I’m thinking some new weapons; like firebombs that can keep a designated spot on the floor burning for a period of a few seconds, or the ability to fire your own crossbow bolts at a faster speed than your rocks. The bombs could be useful as a means of clearing out crowds of smaller monsters, while the crossbow could serve as an emergency attack in order to deal with enemies who are a straight shot away from you. As for power-ups, maybe consider a pair of boots that let you move faster and jump higher, or gloves that make your thrown projectiles move that much quicker across the screen? If you wanted to add the arc to tossing rocks back in, maybe have the gloves straighten it back out again. I know I’m just spitballing ideas here, and that not all of these additions may actually balance out as well as I imagine they would. But you know what? At least I’m trying to bring something new to the table here, unlike the developers who didn’t so much as bother.
But perhaps the most practical suggestion is the most obvious already: Adding some more damn stages to the game. What might kill Dark Castle’s chances with players more than any other issue is the fact that it’s so short on content, and that its difficulty curve is so high accordingly. For my most labor-intensive recommendation – and yet, what might prove to be the most necessary – I’d have urged for a series of “introductory” screens leading up to the Dark Castle and its Great Hall. Something like a march through a hazardous mountain path or a trek through some dark woods, where you can get acclimated to the game’s mechanics in a more straightforward and forgiving stretch of stages. Of course, this would also open a door for extra routes within the castle itself — potentially lending to some even more challenging ones, if the developers felt up to the task. You could even go and make the rewards for completion some of those new power-ups I pitched, or just make the road to the Black Knight that much more punishing. By the point the developers might decide to start adding fresh levels to the game, the sky’s the limit as far as what else they might see fit to add and change up.
What may have well been most ideal / practical pitch would’ve simply been to incorporate Beyond Dark Castle into the game as well, making for something like a “2-in-1” deal. Seeing as Beyond Dark Castle came with its own share of iterations and improvements, plus an accompanying 15 new stages; combining the two titles would have amounted to a fuller, more complete package. Granted, the issue here would appear to be a matter of rights-holding, where Activision may have still held exclusivity over that title and the content within. But come on, now: Would it really have cost that much for Electronic Arts to own both games in the franchise, especially considering the fact that Activision seemed to have nothing to want to do with it past their pair of computer conversions. Perhaps therein lies the problem: Maybe EA barely had any interest in this Genesis endeavor to begin with, and only allocated it the bare minimum of budget? Could Three-Sixty’s ambitions have been stifled by a publisher who struggled to muster up much support for the project in the first place?
Whatever the circumstances or reasoning may be for Dark Castle’s dismal showing on Genesis, it doesn’t change the state of the final product. And while the resulting game might well be stuck in the past mechanically, and short on content for the here and now, I still hesitate to say it’s worthy of hate. Truth be told, I think it’s totally fine as is! Maybe not worth full retail price for how little content it provides, but it still proves a satisfying little romp by my books. Then again, I already like Dark Castle on Macintosh, and this here is just a straightforward conversion of that game. But my tastes weren’t / aren’t in tune with the general console audience in 1991, and that was the demographic this game had to try and appeal to. It seemed to fail in that endeavor back in the day, and it only continues to look worse with age now. By the Black Knight’s design, Duncan is trapped in this seemingly unwinnable situation. Only those with the nostalgia to sympathize with his plight hold the perseverance needed to see him through it.
Well, technically, the Genesis didn’t really boast “full-color” graphics. It utilized a 9-bit palette ranging 1536 color permutations, though it could only display 61 of those simultaneously. But hey, that’s still 59 more than two!
“You’re Sure to Find Trouble Throughout the Dark Castle.”
Dark Castle never did quite crack the Mega Drive’s “Top 20” sellers list, suffice it to say. While I can’t track down any specific sales figures; it’s safe to say that between the complete lack of marketing and scathing critical reviews, consumers were not endeared to Prince Duncan’s cause. By ‘Mike’ of Mega Play magazine’s reckoning, “Perhaps the game looked and played as bad on the computer version, but then why compound the error with a Genesis version.”[6] A fellow editor known only as ‘G.O.G.’ weighed in by saying “The graphics may be [EA’s] excellent work, but the game play is equal to those from the Atari 2600 days.” But a third contributor ‘Bart’ was perhaps the most scathing with his assessment: “A total waste of a 16-Bit cartridge. The graphics aren’t that great, and the game play is absolutely the worst I’ve ever seen. No more computer ports please.” Judging by that last request, I have to imagine Bart threw a fit when it came time to review Slaughter Sport.
If you prefer your vintage reviews with a little less hyperbole, Sega Power UK’s Rod Lawton has you covered. By his estimation: “The game gets better the more you play it. The sprites are small and the animation’s none too special, but the excellent classical soundtrack (by none other than Bach — a quite famous old-worldy composer) more than makes up for it. […] Dark Castle offers quite a big game task and some nice timing and logic puzzles — there’s a good deal of humour in there too. Even so, it’s not terrible original and after a short while it gets extremely frustrating.”[7] As fair an assessment as any, though one of the featured bullet points surrounding the game’s review score (69%) makes the hugely erroneous claim that there are “Over 50 rooms to explore” in the game. I can’t imagine what could’ve lead to such an off-base number getting printed here, other than a straight-up typo or miscommunication to the editor.
Do you wanna see some snippets from one of the most needlessly aggressive, poorly-aged reviews of the era? Of course you do. Cue Mean Machines, and their two-page spread on the Mega Drive release of Dark Castle. After seeming to miss the fact that the doors in the Great Hall marked with question marks are meant to be randomized, and providing an incorrect count on how many rocks you can carry (claiming 50, when it’s actually an arbitrary 89), editor Julian ‘Jazza’ Rignall tears into the game with all the fury of a reviewer scorned: “This game is so bad, criticising it is like kicking a sad, retarded cripple while he’s down. […] The way you throw stones is pathetically slow, and the collision detection is so dodgy it had me yelling with frustration. Within a few hours I’d had enough, and Dark Castle was dumped. If a gameplayer went to hell, this is the game he’d be made to play.”[8] This insensitive diatribe is capped off with a 23% review score, and the suggestion that “apart from the comedy appeal of owning the worst Megadrive game yet, there’s no point in buying this awful, unplayable game.” If you say so, mate.
Dark Castle for Philips CD-i (Philips Interactive Media, 1992)
By all accounts, Electronic Arts had shoved the Genesis release of Dark Castle out the door, and left it to die. By a reviewer for Sega Pro UK’s testimony: “There was no blaze of publicity, no dollybirds, no free cars for the reviewers, just a little note saying that it’s just been released and it’s £34.99.”[9] In an era of early success for EA – marked by the publisher attaining “Incorporated” status earlier in the year – Dark Castle was being framed by gaming magazines as the odd cartridge out in their catalogue. How quickly they seemed to forget that EA had also released the dreadful Genesis conversion of Sword of Sodan just the year before, which also prompted pretty much the exact same reactions from reviewers. Match Sega Pro UK stating “Electronic Arts have a brilliant track record at the moment, which is why we were surprised when [Dark Castle] sneaked in the door,” to Mean Machines positing that “after a string of impressive titles, Sword of Sodan comes as a b-i-g disappointment.”[10] The interchangeable nature of 90’s gaming mags aside; EA had clearly lost whatever faith they had in the Dark Castle franchise prior to it even releasing, and kicked the license back to the curb shortly after launch.
This would not be the end of Dark Castle yet, however. 1992 would see a fresh conversion released for the Philips CD-i; developed by an internal team within Philips Interactive Media, and subject to a development cycle so frustrating that it reportedly drove one of their engineers to quit developing several other projects for the platform. By the account of a supposed CD-i quality assurance staffer: “The engineer [who did Dark Castle] was already too burned out from making all the fixes to Dark Castle so two projects (Deja Vu and Uninvited) were killed off without ever being tested.”[11] While I’d love to compare and contrast the CD-i and Genesis conversions of Dark Castle, that Philips release is unfortunately not a game I’m currently capable of playing through, and so I’ll have to reserve any judgments on it until such time as I’m able to. On a similar note, there was supposedly a Japanese-exlusive MSX conversion of the game released in 1993 by the likes of MNS Soft, but it’s currently categorized as a piece of lost media. Perhaps some day.
In 1994, Dark Castle returned to its Macintosh roots, with the studio Delta Tao Software handling the development and publishing of Color Dark Castle. As you might imagine, this serves as a fully graphically-rehauled remake of the original Dark Castle, with some genuinely nice-looking new backgrounds. That said, that’s really all there is to say about this version of the game, as it’s otherwise just the same 14 screens (plus one new / exclusive ‘Secret’ room with little of note in it) we’ve played through before, as playable with its original control scheme. What’s more important to note here is Delta Tao’s original announcement of a full-fledged sequel installment, to be titled Return to Dark Castle. With work on the game beginning as early as 1996, development duties would land in the laps of yet another Mac-centric software company by the year 2000. Z Sculpt Entertainment taking the reins still resulted in a further eight years of on-and-off development, with most folk writing the game off as vaporware. At some point in the middle of all this, a studio SuperHappyFunFun (alternatively known as ‘Merge Games’) acquired the rights to publish a mobile version of Dark Castle in 2005 — colloquially known as Dark Castle Mobile. Apparently, it’s not great.
Finally, 2008 saw Return to Dark Castle launch on Macintosh platforms; with development credited to both Delta Tao and Z Sculpt, and publishing owed to SuperHappyFunFun. And true to its word, it’s finally a proper sequel to Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle before it, boasting 50 new levels [in addition to remakes of all 30 combined screens between its predecessors] and a suite of other new features. And truth be told, it looks like it’s actually pretty great! Fans really seem to dig it despite over a decade of delaying, and it seems to do a solid job in carrying on that classic spirit. Again, I can only speculate as to how good a game it might be, as it’s still a macOS / iOS exclusive all these years later — and is thereby not currently accessible to me. Man, I guess I know now how Mac users must feel day in and day out about not being able to play games…
Return to Dark Castle for macOS / iOS (SuperHappyFunFun / Z Sculpt, 2008)
With Dark Castle having acclimated to dormancy in the past decade, I reckon it’s time we checked in on what its original creators are up to now. Silicon Beach Software continued developing various wares for the Macintosh until around 1990, when they were acquired by a desktop publishing company Aldus Corporation (the creators of PageMaker, if that should mean anything to anyone). Aldus themselves were eventually acquired by none other than Adobe Systems in 1994, which — hey, speaking of, do you wanna know what Jonathan Gay got up to at around this time? After a series of contributions to companies including Aldus and a short-lived operating system venture named ‘Go,’ he went and published a piece of software called FutureSplash Animator. This program would eventually be picked up by another software company Macromedia, who went and rechristened the application Macromedia Flash. Well, as you might already know, Flash goes on to become something of a big deal on the late 90s / early 2000s Internet, before Macromedia and its software suite were ultimately acquired in 2005 by – you guessed it – Adobe. So, in short: Jonathan Gay left the games industry to create Flash, which ultimately enabled a generation of creators to develop their own games within the program. Isn’t the world of software publishing fascinating?
But what came of Three-Sixty Pacific, who had taken the initial gamble on Dark Castle’s post-Macintosh success? Well, seeing as they largely lost that particular gamble, they had settled into a more stable business model: Publishing and developing hardcore wargames software, including the likes of Harpoon and V for Victory. Unfortunately, they made another bad bet with the 1992 DOS release Theatre of War; the budget of which had apparently been allowed to balloon out of control, and resulted in some sort of strange real-time take on chess with projectiles. It released to middling reception, played a role in sinking the company’s finances, and lead to them being acquired by publisher IntraCorp in 1994 — who themselves went and folded in 1996, along with their subsidiary development division Capstone Software. Oh, you’d do best to remember the name of that particular developer: We’ll be seeing them again on this here website.
Dark Castle’s legacy as a franchise is fascinating, curious, and potentially cursed. The number of attempts at reviving and remaking its original installment over the years is downright staggering, considering how absolutely none of them seemed to have ever met with any financial or critical success. And yet, it was perhaps that most-reviled Genesis conversion which has come to define the title in the modern retrospective; all thanks to one Nerd’s video review of it, completely divorcing its context from its beginnings on the Macintosh. To many, all they know or associate with the name Dark Castle is that ill-fated 16-bit cartridge, as they remain blissfully unaware of the pedigree carried with it. And why should they bother to check out the source material, when it’s unlikely they’ll get anything more out of those earlier releases than this apparently awful conversion? The original Dark Castle is as much a relic to time as the medieval castles it draws its architectural inspiration from, and its Genesis conversion represents a dirtied window into that past. It takes a specific kind of perspective to peer through that grime, and to appreciate the historic novelties within.
