Game history - Dark Chambers - Atari 7800 | A7800

It all started in 1982, when Jack Palevich , at that time a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote the game "Thesis of Terror" for educational purposes . The game has a noticeable influence of D&D , although the author of the game himself did not play D&D at that time. Thesis of Terror - labyrinth walker for 5 players. Four people were playing on an Atari 800 computer , and a fifth was on a Hewlett-Packard Pascal Workstation . The fifth player was never implemented and the server just sent new cards to Atari . Later, Joel Gluck joined the development , drew a couple of levels and gave some ideas. Later, already in the wallsAtari , Jack Palevich continues to work on the game. In 1983, it is already called Dandy (that's what the word D & D sounds like), the fifth player is deleted, instead all the cards are saved on disk. The Atari Program Exchange (APX) even sells the game (via mail order). A couple of years later, Atari arcade programmer Ed Logg and his team released Gauntlet . In general, the game was a copy of Dandy, the differences were not so significant, and John Palevich , who at that time had already retired from Atari , claims his rights and demands that he be included in the game developers. Atari manualconsiders it unacceptable to flash all ROMs . As a result, they agreed that John Palevich received a Gauntlet slot machine as a gift . Palevich would later sell his rights to Dandy to the British game developer, Electric Dreams Software , who released versions of the games for the ZX Spectrum , Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC in 1986. The game turned out to be more of a clone of Gauntlet than Dandy , so then there were litigations with Atari .
Late 80s Atariagain trying to enter the game console market, and making a new game similar to Dandy - Dark Chambers . True, the game is more like Gauntlet than the original. Dark Chambers appeared on the Atari 2600 , Atari 7800 and Atari XE in 1988. This version only allowed two players to play at the same time. Other differences from Gauntlet (of course, for the worse): there are no character specializations, there are no many chips that give special abilities, the levels are weaker, there is no arcade excitement. The game does not reach the level of 1988, alas. Interesting, looks like Gauntlet release on Atari 7800nevertheless it was planned, maybe someone had a prototype of the game lying around.