Tunnels of Doom was written by Kevin Kenney and published by Texas Instruments for TI-99 computers.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect from this offering. I had never heard of it and it involved installing and becoming familiar with yet another new emulator in order to run the program. What I discovered was a game that has an addictive quality to it and was a very pleasant surprise.
When the game begins you choose how many you would like in your party. You can have up to four characters in your party and the character classes you get to choose from are fighter, wizard, and rogue.
I chose to play the game with only one character in my party and chose the class of fighter. My thought process was that I would feel my way around the game a bit and then can elect to play with a larger group later.
Once you choose a character class and name; you then get to equip your character. There are various choices to suit each class. A rogue can listen at doors and is more successful at negotiating with enemies. A wizard can use various scrolls that are found throughout the dungeon. So once equipped I realized my mission was two-fold: find and rescue the king and also retrieve his orb of power.
The game sports a variety of screen views and I found that I liked them all. This overhead view of the room and it’s exits takes place when you enter a room or when combat ensues.
While you’re exploring the dungeon you navigate the corridors in a wire grid view reminiscent of Ultima or Wizardry however the dungeon is in color. The first three levels of the dungeon sport relatively bright colors but the colors become more drab and darker the lower you go creating a tense experience.
I really enjoyed the way the game handles combat. You’re allowed to move towards your opponent and then can attack once your adjacent to your enemy. If you have a ranged weapon like a crossbow, shortbow, or sling you can press the F key to fire and a “crosshairs” appears and you can then use your keyboard keys to position the “crosshairs” over your target. Once you are satisfied with your aim you then hit the space bar to fire. You can also press W to switch weapons during combat from melee weapon to ranged weapon or vice versa. You can elect to press the U key to use a magic item as well. The game is turn-based and thus each of the party members you control gets a turn. Each character gets a movement action and then an attack action.
Characters gain experience points by defeating creatures and level progression is slow. Your character gains 5 hit points for each new level. There are magical fountains that can heal you and if you purchased rations back at the Guild they will slowly heal you as you eat them. Once I became used to the nuances of the game I would make my way back to the Guild and pay 100 gold pieces to be healed then enter the dungeon again.
The game actually has an automapping feature and this is the third view of the game that I alluded to. You can press M on the keyboard to pull up a map of the dungeon. The areas in black represent areas that I had explored already and the areas in light purple had yet to be explored. There is usually a fog of war in play and the map reveals itself to you as you explore; however in one of the rooms I found a map of the level which reveals the areas you have not yet explored.
I found the gameplay to be genuinely engaging. I loved the overhead combat view and tactics involved. I fell in love with the automapping feature and fog of war associated with exploring the dungeon. I enjoyed the 3-D first person view of the corridors as well. Listening at the doors was a cool gimmick because each creature elicited different sound effects from the other side of the door. There was another unusual gimmick the game employed to open vaults that you find. The game tells you that the combination of the vault consists of three digits between 1 and 4 and then you have to guess the combination. With each guess the computer will tell you if you are too high or too low and each wrong answer saps 3 hit points from the character doing the guessing. I was first charmed by this mechanism and soon found it to be an irritating feature of the game. To be clear, it was the ONLY irritating feature.
I played two games on Easy mode with one character and then a game with three characters on Medium mode which consisted of three dungeon levels. It ended up being a real treat discovering this little gem and I can see how TI-99 owners could have become addicted to the game in 1982. If you want to try to play the game yourself you can get the Classic99 Emulator by clicking on the link and it comes with the Tunnels of Doom game. There is no way to save the game so be prepared to spend a good afternoon or evening exploring the dungeon. Supposedly there is a Tunnels of Doom Editor and further modules or adventures that were available but I could not find any. I believe this was the only RPG that was created for the TI-99. I really enjoyed playing this piece of gaming history. There were a lot of moving pieces and unique features and I found myself taken by surprise by all that was here. The keyboard layout and function keys took a little bit of getting used but the documentation for the game is excellent. If you get a chance be sure to give this little gem a try.