Dungeon Keeper

Many games today, as interesting and exciting as they are, tend to recycle old concepts and ideas. Dungeon Keeper first came out back in 1997, developed by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions. Its sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2, came out in 1999. The two games at the core are very similar, so I will discuss both in this article. Molyneux is famous for creating innovative and unique games that have unusual concepts and themes, most notably the ‘god-sim’ type games. Dungeon Keeper is no different and is hugely innovative game that has yet to have any real challengers to its own subgenre of real time strategy in the nearly 12 years since its release.

Dungeon Keeper is real time strategy game with a difference. You play as a Dungeon Keeper, an evil being whose sole purpose is to destroy the land of goodly hero’s in the world above. The games imagery, sound effects and atmosphere do much for the creepy overall feel. Despite the evil and dark setting, there is large amount of humour that works very well, with the second game in particular being one of the funniest I have played in all my years of being a nerd.

You play as a malignant incorporeal entity residing underground within a large construct called your Dungeon Heart. This is the epicentre of your domain, where you yourself reside within the gameworld. The standard strategy elements are here, resource gathering, base building, gathering up your army then sending it off to battle while you revel in the carnage. But there the similarities end. The whole game is located underground. You expand and build up your dungeon by tunnelling into the surrounding rock. As you go, you hollow out cavities which you then use to build rooms. The layout of your dungeon is only hampered by certain environmental obstacles, like water, natural caverns, lava lakes or impenetrable rock, the latter usually only there to mark the border of the game map. This give the player a huge amount of freedom in building their subterranean fortress, with every dungeon you build having a unique layout.

Each level is differnet, allowing the player literally limitless ways to build and design your dungeon

Now, as a Dungeon Keeper, you have a certain handicap. Being incorporeal you are unable to physically manipulate the world yourself. But the game has an excellent solution to your problem. When you start the game, you notice small creatures running around your dungeon heart. These are your Imps. These are your hands and tools within the world. With a simple click, they will run off to the designated area and begin excavating the tunnels and rooms you have designated with boundless enthusiasm. They never tire, grow hungry or complain, even when you slap them to make them work faster. When you have assigned them no tasks they will traverse you dungeon repairing walls, clear away corpses and generally maintain your fortress of evil. Truly model employees. However, they are small feeble things that cannot fight or cause much trouble on their own.

So in order to perpetrate some evil deeds, acts of violence and cause general disruption, you need some more powerful creatures. In order to recruit them, you must tunnel towards a portal. There are usually several scattered around a map, and once you’ve tunnelled to and claimed a portal, the gates of hell are now open, spewing forth a tide of horror that you can quickly get on the payroll. There is a large variety of foul monsters you can attract to your dungeon, from huge overgrown flies and other insects, demon spawn, dragons, trolls to leather bound S&M dominatrix with a taste for murder and foreplay. The number of different evil creatures is really expansive resulting in a large and hugely varied army as you advance through the levels. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, skills and abilities, that you will usually need to exploit as the game progresses.

Creatures are attracted to your dungeon depending on the combination of rooms you have constructed. There are many different rooms available that all perform different functions. Your creatures need to be sustained and nurtured, so rooms such as lairs to provide housing, and hatcheries to provide food are essential from the beginning. Other rooms are then required to attract specific monsters and allow certain tasks to be completed. The slovenly bile demon requires a vast hatchery, while a fully stocked library will attract the attention of warlocks. Workshops construct traps and doors, libraries research new spells while torture chambers allow you to extract information from prisoners. The different combinations of rooms you have doesn’t guarantee you’ll always get the creatures you want, so your army in each level will be different on every play through.


The games is played from a top down isometric view and move fast and smoothly. One of the most interesting and fun aspects is the ability to possess your creatures and control them like you would in a first person shooter. This is a cool feature, its lots of fun wandering around your dungeon from your creatures perspective. You can attack and cast spells as well as perform functions around your dungeon should you choose. Each creature type also has unique and interesting ways of viewing the world, but this never has any negative impact on the game play and adds greatly to the depth.

All of your rooms cost money, as does your army, with periodic paydays being announced where all of your minions stop what their doing and march off towards your treasury demanding their well earned coin. Money is provided by mining out gold seams, which you imps then dutifully carry back to your treasury. Most levels provide you with only a limited amount of gold, so it usually not wise to sit in your fortress for too long, as certain other tasks such as training creatures, building and a few others all cost money, putting a constant drain on your funds. In some levels, gem seams can be found. These can never be mined out and provide an infinite source of money, however they take longer to mine and are often located in hard to reach spots.

Your primary foes in the game the goodly heroes from the sunlit world above as well as rival dungeon keepers. Heroes are found as you tunnel through the level, or as they come tunnelling into your dungeon. Knights, fairies, wizards, barbarians and even samurai all seek your down fall. When entering combat, your creatures will charge towards their selected target firing spells and screaming. As they fight, a ‘health flower’ will appear above their head, with each petal disappearing as they take damage. You can pick up creatures and drop them into combat, or similarly pick them up out of combat if they are unlikely to survive the encounter. Each creature has its own variety of spells, some of which are quite humorous with bile demons farting a cloud of poisonous gas that harms both friend and foe.

As mentioned earlier, the two games are very similar.

DK 2 in its 3D glory. Note the early lighting effects

Graphically, the original Dungeon Keeper uses a mix of 2D sprites for the creatures and certain objects, while the landscape is 3D. The game looked good when it came out and doesn’t look too bad today, but the graphics haven’t aged well. In Dungeon Keeper 2 however, there is a huge graphical leap, with the game looking great even today. The whole game has being moved to 3D, with all creatures and objects looking detailed and interesting. In the first instalment your Dungeon Heart is represented as a large glowing jewel, while in the second, it is an pulsating organic mass embedded in the earth. The game also uses early dynamic lighting effects well as well as rendered water and lava. The interface is slick and presented well, while the whole game moves fast and smoothly. The intro cinematic is also great as well as the numerous cut scenes played between most levels.

It is very clear from the second game that the developers learned a great deal from the first. The sequel is highly refined, most of the issues from the first game are remedied and there is much more attention focused on story telling and atmosphere. Several rooms have been removed and new ones added, such as the combat pit or casino. Gameplay has been left mostly untouched mainly because it worked so well. There have been some adjustment with the addition of an added resource known as mana, used for spells and to sustain your imps.

DK2 is one of the funniest games I have ever played. Your mentor/narrator, voiced by Richard Ridings, has a decidingly evil voice. He constantly informs the player of their tasks, gives helpful advice and the occasional humorous messages, like warning the player of an invasion of micro-piglets, or that your creatures demand cable. The game also uses your computers calendar to tell the date and time, telling the player to go to bed if its late or else relaying holiday specific messages, e.g. ‘Trick or Treat Keeper’. One of the most memorable moments is when a creature wins the jackpot in the casino. Over the evil ominous soundtrack can be heard the 1976 disco classic ‘Disco Inferno’, and all the creatures in the casino begin to dance to the music, with each species of creature possessing its own dance style. While these are small touches, they add a huge amount of fun to the game.

A helpful reminder of your need for central heating

There are some problems though. These mainly focus on the AI, which tends to be rather poor, especially when it comes to other dungeon keepers. They tend to just sit behind their walls and do nothing until you attack, or sometime allow you to take over much of their dungeon with minimal resistance. There isn’t much consistency in the difficulty of the later levels, mainly in the first game, which can be disappointingly easy. Some early levels can be very difficult, while some of the last missions are a breeze. An example would be where an AI keeper occasionally kills itself by digging right into the centre of a heroes fortress for no apparent reason and getting killed. You only find this out when you abruptly win the level having not even begun your attack. I had some stability issues with the second game, but nothing too serious.

So in conclusion, these are some of the best, most original and innovative games ever made. DK was a milestone in gaming with dark and interesting gameplay. DK2 lifted the bar considerably with its great graphics, atmosphere and hilarious writing. I still find myself playing this game on a regular basis despite its age, still feeling as fresh and fun as it did when I first played it at the tender age of 14. It is a tremendous shame we never got to see DK3 which was cancelled way back in 2000. Bullfrog was assimilated by the ever expanding Borg collective *cough* sorry, EA, in 2004. Due to a lack of any creativity in EA these days, they have announced they will be robbing the grave of Bullfrog to revisit some of their games. So maybe we might see another Dungeon Keeper in a few years. Whether this can live up to the originals only time will tell.

Only a fool would disturb the grave of such a terrifing beast