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      Toiling in the dungeon    —
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            <h2 itemprop="description">I remember not liking this game, until I played this passion project version.</h2>
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      <a href="https://arstechnica.com/author/kevinpurdy/" itemprop="url" rel="author"><span itemprop="name">Kevin Purdy</span></a>
    -    <time data-time="1700006782" datetime="2023-11-15T00:06:22+00:00">Nov 15, 2023 12:06 am UTC</time>
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  <img alt="If it were me, I would simply not burrow my way directly to where all the creatures are gaining levels as fast as my gold allows them. But I'm not full of grog and adventuring spirit." src="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/dk1-800x632.png"></img>
      <figcaption><p><a data-height="1095" data-width="1385" href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/dk1.png">Enlarge</a> <span>/</span> If it were me, I would simply not burrow my way directly to where all the creatures are gaining levels as fast as my gold allows them. But I'm not full of grog and adventuring spirit.</p><p>EA/KeeperFX</p></figcaption>  </figure>

  





<p>In <a href="https://gamehistory.org/ep-119-karateka/">an interview</a> about <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1163060/The_Making_of_Karateka"><em>The Making of Karateka</em></a>, a wonderful interactive documentary and game-about-a-game, Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse notes that, based on the company's data, people don't actually play the games inside "classics" collections. Maybe they spend 5 minutes inside a few games they remember, but that's about it. Presenting classic games, exactly as they were when they arrived, can be historically important but often falls short of real engagement.</p>
<p>That's why it's a thrill to see (as first spotted by <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/ea-might-not-care-about-dungeon-keeper-anymore-but-this-open-source-4k-remake-spent-15-years-in-the-making-to-reach-version-10/">PC Gamer</a>) <a href="https://keeperfx.net/news/11/2023-11-10/keeperfx-100-has-been-released">a triumphant 1.0 release from <em>KeeperFX</em></a>, an open source "remake and fan expansion" of <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper">Dungeon Keeper</a>, </em>the 1997 Bullfrog strategy game that had players take on the other side of a dungeon crawl. The project had already, over 15 years, carried the game quite far, giving it modern Windows support, hi-res support, and loads of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements. Now, <a href="https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx/compare/Release050...Release1.0.0">says the team</a>, all the original code from the original executable has been rewritten, freeing them up to change whatever they want in the future. There can be more than 2,048 "things" on the map, maps can have more than 85 square tiles, and scripting and mods can go much further.</p>
<p>But take note: "Ownership of the original game is still and will always be required for copyright reasons." You can, like I did earlier today, rectify that with <a href="https://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper">a $6 GOG purchase</a>, at least while it's on sale today. After downloading <em>KeeperFX</em>, you unpack it, run its launcher, point it to where you've installed the original <em>Dungeon Keeper,</em> and launch it. And then you get ready to click.</p>
<p>I distinctly remember trying to play <em>Dungeon Keeper </em>a few years ago after reading one retrospective or another about how it was, like many titles from Bullfrog and game designer Peter Molyneux, hugely influential on so many games. I gave <em>Dungeon Keeper</em> more than 5 minutes, but clicking over and over again on sprites that looked like graphical errors (while listening to audio samples from the Sound Blaster heyday) grew old before an hour was out. Computers had changed, I had changed, and I no longer felt like beating my head against a heavily pixelated wall.</p>                                            
                                                        
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                    I'm still a bit foggy on what I should do if I'm feeling overrun by heroes, but <em>KeeperFX</em> makes learning this deep game far more tolerable.                  </p>
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                                          EA/KeeperFX                                      </p>
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                    Your job is to keep the adventurers from reaching the heart of your dungeon. You're gonna need a lot of imps.                  </p>
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<p>Loading up <em>KeeperFX </em>felt instead like I was playing an homage to <em>Dungeon Keeper</em> in the best possible sense. I guessed about half the game's shortcuts, could easily configure the rest, and wasn't surprised by how any button or keyboard click responded. The art style was the same, but on a 4K monitor, the game wasn't painful to look at, and it ran at a pace that didn't feel like a retro race car. The primary campaign and its tutorials are still a bit opaque, but the game feels smoothed out. The release notes for 1.0 and prior versions suggest a lot of little tweaks to both enemy and drone behavior and perhaps some more fair behavior by the computer opponents. Nothing is spelled out, but unlike my first foray, learning as I go doesn't feel quite so cumbersome.</p>
<p>I only intended to play one map of <em>KeeperFX </em>for the purposes of this post, but I ended up playing … a few more than that. Each level in the primary campaign introduces a new mechanic, some new voiceovers, and a non-patronizing increase in difficulty. That's in addition to the little jolts of nostalgia for that late-90s Bullfrog mix of dark humor, deep systems, and deeply rewarding strategy challenges.</p>
<p>Current IP holder Electronic Arts hasn't done much with <em>Dungeon Keeper, </em>besides r<a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/07/british-regulator-ea-misled-by-calling-dungeon-keeper-free-to-play/">ework it into a micro-transaction sinkhole</a> so bad that regulators demanded it stop calling itself "free to play." <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/10/molyneux-id-like-to-do-another-syndicate-or-populous-game/">Molyneux said back in 2008</a> that, while he'd love a chance to take another crack at <em>Syndicate</em>, <em>Populous</em>, or perhaps <em>Dungeon Keeper, </em>he wouldn't hold his breath waiting for EA to call. "I've got no qualms of somebody else doing it," Molyneux <a href="https://www.videogamer.com/news/molyneux-id-revisit-populous-or-syndicate-if-i-could/">told VideoGamer.com.</a> "I'd just love to see it updated, the concept kept alive."</p>
<p><em>KeeperFX</em>, and projects like it, are keeping foundational old games alive beyond simply shoving their code awkwardly forward into our era. It deserves praise, maybe a few bucks, and as few <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/github-reverses-takedown-of-reverse-engineered-gta-source-code/">roadblocks</a> as possible to doing so.</p>

        <p><em>Listing image by KeeperFX</em></p>
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