#mike singleton

Doomdark’s Revenge (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: Mike Singleton / Beyond Software Released: 12/1984 Completed: 06/05/2022 Completion: I would love to lie about this, but i rescued Morkin, got him almost all the way back to the gate and Luxor randomly died to a dragon, which you cannot undo. I’m counting it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

I wrote extensively about Doomdark’s Revenge’s predecessor, Lords of Midnight previously, and it remains one of my favourites of the last year; a ZX Spectrum game that’s more ambitious than, honestly, the majority of games that even come out now. So ambitious that it’s only now I could even understand it, really.

Doomdark’s Revenge is the sequel which came out, astonishingly, within eight months of the original, which makes you think maybe it would be just an expansion pack of sorts. And, yeah, it is mostly the same systems, but it’s a game that represents absolutely when ambition gets a bit too much–for the ZX Spectrum, for the player, and likely for the designer, too.

In Doomdark’s Revenge, you’ve got another novella to read which sets up the game: whatever the player managed in their own playthrough, Morkin and Luxor have managed to destroy the ice crown and win a military campaign, and Morkin is now set to be wed to Tarithel. Except awkwardly it turns out that Doomdark had a daughter, Shareth, who lives up north (you wouldn’t know her) and has managed to bewitch Morkin and kidnap him.

So now Tarithel has given chase, and Luxor has also given chase, and they find themselves in Icemark, a brand-new and huge map that also happens to have an entire tunnel system (so basically two maps) and tens of new lords all of whom use their own AI to travel around the map (rather than just sitting in their castles waiting to be recruited like the last one).

If I thought Lords of Midnight was a lot, this is… a lot. The last game was easily comprehensible by comparison. In the last one, you could accurately map where environmental enemies (wolves and dragons, etc.) and allies were, with only the moving enemy armies creating complexity. Here, everything is moving all the time. I’ve got to again give huge props to Chris Wild (who has only recently put out the 2.0 versions of Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge) because without his modern adaptation and its auto-map I do believe this would be completely unplayable. I do wish, however, that he’d make it even easier on the player by showing where the other lords and their armies were on the map too.

You see, the game plays out similarly to Lords of Midnight; with Tarithel, you’re questing alone or with a small party to try and grab Morkin, who is about as far away as it’s possible to be. With Luxor, you’re basically trying to mass a huge enough army that you can either find Shareth (I have no idea how you would) or wait for her to show up and kill her.

The thing is that the game ends up playing out a bit less excitingly than the original, even though you can tell it was designed to be more exciting. There, you’d play several games, stumbling about and opening up the map, and strategizing the best way to get your armies together, usually ending up in several skirmishes that were actually sort of predictable. 

Here, you never get out of the “stumbling about” phase. Your best hope is to wander around near the beginning area of the game, and hopefully bump into lords who you can recruit. It’s not actually that bad, because most lords (even the evil ones, it seems?) are pretty happy to get recruited if they meet the right guy, so there’s quickly a snowball effect as you end up with what feels like most of the lords on the map because your giant lord is down with all his giant lord homies, your barbarian lord good with barbarians, and so on.

The map, also, is simply massive and not at all as memorable as the first game. Sure, there are forests and mountains and so on, but it seems much more open than the first one, leading to quite a lot of wandering (and giving the AI way too much freedom) and the tunnel system could not be more boring (hope you like looking at black screens.) It just seems to take ages to get anywhere, and in my (admittedly non-winning) final game, I had played for over 20 in-game days before I was on the cusp of getting Morkin back to the Gate of Varenorn.

The thing is, I kind of understand why this all seems like a good idea. Not simply the “more” of it, but the fact that the world is intentionally more alive than the first game. It’s more “realistic” that each Lord would be moving about and have his own intentions; a more open map and tunnels increase the ways to navigate the world, and so on. But unfortunately without giving the player near-perfect information of the game state, it’s simply frustrating and (whisper it) kind of boring with how long it takes to get to Morkin.

Which is why I’m not going to have another go after almost finishing the game. Let me set out the scene: Morkin is a day’s ride from the Gate of Varneorn. A group of friendly giants and dwarfs are in a skirmish north and seem to have killed Shareth. Luxor has just moved north slightly to make sure an army that approaches isn’t antagonistic; he quickly recruits them.

On return to the gate, despite being accompanied by 22 lords and a massive army, he is killed by a dragon. The game is over. No backsies.

Remember last week when I deleted Bloodborne? It was literally nothing compared to how I felt at this moment. Hours of work literally destroyed by a single dice roll and nothing I could do about it. Talk about the Dark Souls of video games. I’d won! I was a turn from winning. But also, I wasn’t. Cruel, cruel fate.

So anyway, that’s the problem with Doomdark’s Revenge, it’s too long, it’s not as memorable, and it’s too random. If you play it though… just never move Luxor, ok?

Will I ever play it again? Or maybe Chris Wild will include a turn undo if Luxor dies. Please Chris!!! Maybe I can still do it!!!

Final Thought: So sadly creator Mike Singleton was never able to finish the “real” third game in the series, The Eye of the Moon, but it was apparently going to be four times larger than the original which, you know, sack that. He did go on to make a sequel, Lords of Midnight: The Citadel in 1995, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get round to that one. However, we do have his 16-bit Lords of Midnight-a-like Midwinter showing up in 1989, which I’m very much looking forward to trying to see how he evolved the systems–and hopefully not just “more”.

Lords Of Midnight (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: Mike Singleton / Beyond Software Released: 5/1984 Completed: 12/11/2021 Completion: Destroyed the Ice Crown with Fawkrin on Day 12. 22 Lords under my command. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

It’s rare to say I’m stunned by something, and it’s pretty surprising to say I’m stunned by a ZX Spectrum game from 1984, but holy hell am I stunned by Lords of Midnight.

I’m so stunned by Lords of Midnight I immediately regret not playing it properly earlier (for reasons I’ll detail) because it absolutely deserves a place on the Insert Credit list of Best British Games. It actually gets a tiny mention (alongside Mike Singleton’s later game Midwinter) during our discussion of Damocles, but it deserved so much more. So let’s just all agree that Sonic R isn’t on that list any more and Lords of Midnight is.

So why didn’t I play it properly earlier? Well, because I’ve always been completely baffled by it. I was sure I’d played it on Amstrad CPC--and I may well have--but I can’t see it having been put on any Amstrad Action covertapes of the period where I was religiously buying Amstrad Action, so I am pretty sure it must have been put on a PC Gamer (maybe PC Format?) coverdisk (or coverdisc?) at some point in the mid-late nineties in the form of one of Chris Wild’s ports, either DOS or Windows. It made no sense to me then either.

So let’s discuss what Lords of Midnight is before we get to why it baffled me and why now it astounds me. Lords of Midnight is a big ol’ rip-off of Lord of The Rings, basically, where a “fellowship” featuring an Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Legolas are tasked with two different possible solutions to defeating a Sauron: either by successfully attacking and taking the citadel his forces stream from, or by destroying his one ring analogue (the “ice crown”) which can only be done by the Frodo in combination with another character (possibly the Gollum that’s kicking about, if you can find him.) You lose if the Sauron takes the “citadel of Xajorkith”, or the Aragorn and Frodo are killed.

These characters all have their own names: Luxor, Morkin; the baddie is called Doomdark, but honestly, it’s quickest to make sense of it if you just think of it all via the Lord of the Rings. But here’s where things get crazy. The game begins and Luxor (Aragorn), Morkin (Frodo), Corleth (Legolas) and Rothron (Gandalf) are all standing about a tower on the east side of the map, and the game goes: ok, play me.

And you’re like “wait what?”

You see, Lords of Midnight comes from an era when no one really beholden to any genre, and, to be honest, probably didn’t know what else had even come out. So sure, by this point Wizardry’s come out; Ultima has reached it’s third instalment; but if you’re a guy like Mike Singleton working on the ZX Spectrum, you might not even know that, never mind be thinking “ok, well, I do dungeons like this and character development like that”.

Instead what you do is you decide every character will view the world in first-person, be able to turn in eight directions, ensure the graphics always show a relative viewpoint that extends as far into the background as possible, and design a huge open world with plains and mountains and nothing even slightly like a corridor to traverse.

It is, in its own way, a work of actual genius, it just works extremely differently from anything I experienced then and to be honest have experienced now. It has some echos of a board game: you move each character until they run out of movement/action points and “night falls” for them, once that’s done you end your turn and the forces of Doomdark move. And move they do! It’s a simplistic AI, but you’re in a race against time: either to move Morkin into position to nick and destroy the Ice Crown, or to get the other characters to recruit enough lords that you can defend and then push back Doomdark’s forces (or more likely, try to do both.) If you just stood still, you could literally watch the forces move across the map, sacking fortress after fortress.

Well, sort of. You see, the original Lords of Midnight only came with a paper map that roughly marked out where everything was, so you were forced to map something that (honestly) feels ten times more complex than a wizardry map even with warps and wrapping and all that shit. If you weren’t extremely dedicated, you’d just wander the map, get lost, and die--not helped by the fact that every screen had to redraw, meaning that you could quickly lose the sense of where you actually stood. So you had better get the graph paper out.

But of course, it’s 2021 and sack that. So I didn’t actually play this on the Spectrum, I played this via Chris Wild’s most recent build of his PC version, which is extremely faithful to the original though might have some bugs (there’s a GOG thread that claims that the battle calculations are off, and either it’s a bug or I missed something in the UI but I feel like there was more information available to me on things like the amount of enemies at a character’s location I could never find, which made the game a bit harder.). The reason to play Chris Wild’s version, bugs or not, is that it includes an amazing automap that fills itself in across successive games and means you can click about each character, know where they are and where they’re actually going.

I think there’s a really good argument to be made, however, that that’s actually a little unfaithful. You see, Lords of Midnight is very much about the experience of, I guess, “real” medieval warfare. A commander might have a crappy map, sure, but he sees the battle from the ground. He doesn’t look at a map and see an enemy approaching; he looks to the east, and tries to work out how many regiments are approaching.

I suspect that’s why the map doesn’t record where Doomdark’s regiments are (even if you can see them) and only tracks things like where wolves and horses are (which don’t move) and while I kind of wish I did, but I respect the decision to keep the thematic spirit of the original while updating it so looking around makes more sense.

That said, this game is taxing. Recruiting lords is as simple as meeting them with a character that they are willing to speak to, building their armies as simple as hitting “recruit” in keeps and citadels, and entering combat as simple as walking to face an enemy army and hitting attack--at which point the combat continues across days until you choose to run away or one side dies. If you’re playing for a military victory, you’ll be tracking the movement of up to 32 lords, each with individual numbers of warriors and riders, facing off against enemies that you also have to track mentally. In my winning game, I was tracking 22 lords and only a couple of active battle grounds, with the majority of my lords just retreating to the citadel of Xajorkith to defend it.

(Chris Wild’s PC version also doesn’t actually have an ability to save, too, increasing the absolute stress of a game where overnight an army can suddenly kill one of the two most important characters. You can restart a day, and take back a single move, but… woof.)

Alright, maybe I’m not selling this to you. Singleton positioned this as an “epic game” rather than something as simple as an RPG, and once you grasp the systems and understand how to navigate the world, it’s undoubtedly the best description. There’s something so much bigger to the story that you tell in a playthrough of Lords of Midnight than there is to (say) the average roguelike, where the story you tell often hews closer to diagetic (“I walked into a trap that spawned this enemy and I died”). Here, I failed loads of games trying to defend the mountain-ridged choke-point above the plains of Blood, but in my successful game I had my miltary forces withdraw to Xajorkith, keeping a secondary force at the Fortress of Kumar (yes!!!!) ready to strike. Morkin recruited Lord Shadows to defend him while Rothron went to recruit the legendary dragon Farflame. Lord Shadows got entangled in a battle in the plains of Ogrim, meaning Morkin had to wind his way around the mountains, eventually recruiting the skulkrin Fawkrin who followed behind him--close but not too close, much like Gollum. I intended Farflame to destroy the ice crown, but right before the tower of Doom Morkin found himself facing a regiment of Doomdark’s men; Farflame flew from Lord Shadow’s side to take them on, dying in the process but allowing Morkin to escape, get the ice crown to Fawkrin, who destroyed it.

Ok, look, it’s not Shakespeare; it’s not even Tolkien. But that’s not all to the story--I haven’t told you all about Corleths’ desperate flight to unite the Fey against Doomdark, ending in (likely doomed) battle of Kor keep, or… I’ll stop.

It’s wonderful. I’ve talked many a time on this site about how these early games are imagination engines, and I understand now why people obsess over this game still nearly 40 years later. It could desperately do with giving the player more information in a more succinct UI, but if you suddenly cluttered the main screen with all that info it wouldn’t just be these wild, spectrum vistas full of possibility. It’s a bit hard to recommend Lords of Midnight to any but the historian, but if you want to be amazed at what was possible, and imagine another future (imagine if this had become a huge hit in Japan instead of Wizardry?) you’ve got to experience this once. Just remember that it’s a first-person video game. I genuinely think that I couldn’t grasp that on that first screen you’re viewing the world through Luxor’s eyes back in the day!

Will I ever play it again? So, look, I’ll be honest: I probably won’t play this again, simply because as I said above trying for a military victory is so mentally taxing and also brutally long (I was amused to see the difference between an optimal ice crown victory and a completionist military victory youtube videos: fifteen minutes vs. over six hours) that unless a new version of this was to dilute the concept with a tactical map with full information I don’t think I’ll ever do it. However, Doomdark’s Revenge was out at the end of 1984, so I’ll play it, why not!

‘Dark Sceptre’

[SPEC] [UK] [MAGAZINE] [1987]