Evil is Good
A while back I bought a bunch of cheap games on Steam. A few of them were indie games from random companies I thought I might like, while the others were just nostalgic games from my past selling for $5 (which apparently isn't even the lowest price and was $2 at one point).
And while Dungeon Keeper isn't a particularly good game for a lot of reasons that I'll inevitably explain later... it's still a bit of a cult classic because it's one of those things where the "old folks" can say, "They don't make them like they used to."
The vibe begins with the antithesis of normal fantasy:
Be it books, movies, or games, the audience is always guided to side with the "good guys". The "good guys" always win and the bad guys always lose and there's a very thick line between the two. The good guys have very few character flaws and the bad guys have zero redeeming features... at least that's how things used to work back in the day. Creators have been trying to breakout of that box for a while now with more dynamic setups and character developments.
So the reason why Dungeon Keeper had such a draw is that you play as the bad guys and you kill all the good guys without remorse. Your alignment is very much chaotic evil and you basically just run around killing everything with zero respect for any kind of rules or discipline.
Remember CDs?
I'm 99% sure I still have this exact case sitting in storage somewhere.
Short for "compact disks" in case the children don't know about these things. There was a point where we all thought that CDs was all that would ever be. Need to store more information? Just get a doubled sided DVD disk. People were even talking about potentially having "data cubes" in the future that could store the information in three dimensions... and then flash drive technology was invented on top of high-speed internet on top of smart phones on top of cloud storage, and that all went right out the window.
According to the interwebs:
Having been hit by the rise of filesharing and MP3 players in the early 2000s, CD sales nearly halved between 2000 and 2007, which is when smartphones and the first music streaming services emerged to put the final nail in the compact disc's little round coffin.
The loading screen cracks me up
Legit just a picture of a dead technology that nobody uses anymore. I don't even remember the last time my computer had a DVD player/burner. I made this computer in 2016 and I'm fairly sure the one before that also did not have one. No need.
Godmode
Dungeon Keeper was one of the first games where you basically play as a demi-god type being. Your lifeforce is represented by a "Dungeon Heart" pictured above. You can pick up any of your minions anywhere on the map and drop them in any location you control. You can possess them and go into first person mode for direct control. You can slap them to make them work faster. You can sacrifice them in a temple for rewards or even throw them in the torture chamber to keep your other minions in line. It's a weirdly involved strategy game.
Of course the multiplayer was terrible, in part due to the basic mechanics of the game (like being able to pick stuff up before it dies). The "AI" (if you can call it that) is also quite bad and perpetually sends your workers to their deaths unless you can manage them using hackish means.
Launch date: June 1997
This game is old old. I remember playing it before I was even in high school back in the 8th grade or some nonsense like that. I honestly have no idea how I was able to acquire this game... as it has a Mature rating of 17+. So either I tricked my dad into buying it with some money I had squirreled away or the shop was very lax with the rules at the time... either one is equally possible.
1) What
What I do remember is noticing that your imps (worker slaves) legit paint softcore porn on the walls when you fortify them against attack. That was just as crazy as everything else. Of course it's very pixilated and akin to ascii porn but whatever it was still nuts, especially as an 8th grader... that's when I realized I couldn't let my parents watch me playing this game, and they really never did other than afar which you can't really tell that from that distance all the mature content being served to literal children.
Yes, this game has black-leather clad unit called Dark Mistress who tortures themselves for fun getting whipped in a sexual type why within the torture room. This game was no holds barred.
Both this game and Diablo 1 had the darkest most evil vibes that have never been created since. Ever since those days game developers have been candy coating their products more and more to appeal to wider audiences to make more money. I've always hoped that one can crypto could break this mold and create niche games for niche communities once again... but we'll see how that works out.
THE INTRO!
Now remember that this was back before games even had 3D cutscenes, so the ones that did were revolutionary. This one having a heavy metal riff on top of a fight scene and a decapitation was enough to hook a lot of hardcore gamers back in the day... if only for a moment.
So I played through the campaign.
The version being sold on Steam was the "Gold" version. This game is so old they had to reverse engineer it onto Dosbox to even get it to run on modern operating systems. Back then it would have ran on Windows 95 or 98, but the newer OS just don't support stuff like this anymore.
The experience was full of lag an annoyance. I questioned whether it had always been that way and just forgot, but I'm quite sure it's just the Dosbox implementation being laggy and glitchy as hell. Then after I beat the entire main campaign I watched a video on YouTube of someone else doing it... and there was zero lag...
And that's when I found the FX version
Short for "Fan eXpansion" it might sound crazy but this game has such a cult following that super dorks are still working on it to this very day. The last stable version of this hack released on October 2024, which is just crazy to me... over 25 years later people still like this game enough to code on it for free.
Windows executable
This program allows you to import the game that you own into a hacked version of the game. It's the first hack of a video game I've seen that actually respects the intellectual property of the company that owns the product. You point this menu to where the game is installed, and then it upgrades it into the FX version... which is such a massive upgrade it felt like a completely different game. I felt a bit silly playing the Gold version from Steam after realizing what I had been missing out on.
The crazy thing is... is that all the music for the game played from the CD and was never downloaded to your hard drive... so the music for this hacked version doesn't work unless you have the CD in a drive (not happening) or download the music separately and throw it into the game folder (which was weirdly easy). The documentation on the FX website is pretty good.
With this version there is a slew of new content and campaigns, which are quite hilarious because they remind you just how bad amateur voiceovers really are, as they are all created by random fans of the game, and every level requires someone to talk about how good and carefree the realm is that you're about to destroy.
The game is pretty difficult on certain levels.
This is one of those games where you'd have to manually save every five minutes because any random thing could kill you. Dig into the wrong room with a bunch of enemies that you can't kill? Dead. Lost half your army? Dead. All your imps died being idiots? Dead. Ran out of gold? Dead. There's a lot to manage.
This game was pre-Google
There's a lot to know in this game... and back when it launched it was impossible to look stuff up on Google... because the Internet itself was just a barren wasteland. There were no webpages on Dungeon Keeper. There were no community wikis or Redit posts. Nah. All of the information was in the manual, and even then a lot of the best stuff was left out.
https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Keeper_Manual/mode/2up?view=theater
A 76 page manual... for a video game... lol.
And if you wanted to know how stuff worked you'd better read this thing. Just playing the game does teach you most of this stuff but there are a lot of Easter eggs floating around that require actual digging in the weeds.
The Temple
Certainly the most mysterious building is the temple. The game barely tells you what it does. It can cure debuffs like disease or being polymorphed into a chicken. It can stop your creatures being scavenged and head hunted by the enemy. You can also sacrifice your creatures here and upgrade them into different/better creatures, but it doesn't tell you which ones and instead opts for the player to "experiment". I'll tell you right now when I was a kid I never figured out what to do with this building.
But here are the key recipes:
- sacrifice a fly & beetle to get a warlock
- sacrifice a beetle & spider to a mistress
- sacrifice 3 spiders for a bile demon
- sacrifice a bile demon / troll / mistress for a horned reaper (best unit)
And again this was before the Internet could help you so... basically needed a subscription to PC gamer magazine and hope they tell you this information, as the game developers kept it hidden.
Conclusion
Well I could write another 2000 words on this game but I'll spare my poor readers. I don't expect anyone to play this gem unless they already played it back in the day. It's very much a nostalgic purchase because it's so dated and annoying in a lot of ways. But who knows maybe I'm wrong maybe one of you will take the plunge for the first time just to see how hardcore games really used to look. Just make sure to put in the extra effort to upgrade it to this FX version because I'd say it's basically a non-optional deal breaker without it.
https://keeperfx.net/
