This is the twenty-fifth post in our Game of the Day series.
Gigantic budgets and buggy releases are the norm for today's game industry. It's no wonder when it is led by corporate giants with the cash to spend 2/3 of a title's costs on marketing. People bemoan this, but it's not particularly new -- just more widespread. Just take a gander at the development of the ill-fated Stonekeep as an example!
The project started out with just two people, Peter Oliphant and Michael Quarles, was intended to last nine months, and was to cost $50K. But the initial stages of the game looked so good this was extended, and eventually had a production crew of over 200 people, took five years, and cost about $5 million.
-Wikipedia
Now let's talk about bugs. Back when my highschool girlfriend bought this game, based on the box of course, neither of us had internet connections. I had cashed out a savings bond my dad had given me to help buy the P75 we played this on and we were basically stuck with whatever problems this came with. Add to that the lack of strategy guide meant that we spent countless hours, her more than me, trying to unveil the secrets of its repetitive dungeons.
The game is one of those faux-3D games that are just pre-rendered portions of passageway. Unlike previous NES versions of the same concept, there was animations of turning and moving, so it didn't feel so static. The motion-captured creatures and peoples were also drawn on top of this, so the result was some very decent graphics for the time. Unfortunately since everything had to be pre-rendered and fit within the tiny constraints of the time, there wasn't much variety either. And the gameplay mechanics were disappointingly stiff.
However it was an experience I generally remember and helped define what more I wanted in perusing underground structures and plots claiming to be epic. We never beat the game, because if you did something the wrong way then it became unbeatable; a bug released with the game. In essence the developers published a game with no end, depending on what you tried or in what order. After finding this out via a 900 number and realizing our saves were completely useless, we stopped playing and never again picked it up. I've been more curious lately, especially after re-watching the intro:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ20Id6E6VM]
