Dungeon Keeper

About the game

Dungeon Keeper flipped a decade of fantasy gaming on its head: the plucky heroes tunnelling into the dungeon are the invaders, and you are the darkness they're invading. As a disembodied evil, you order imps to dig out halls, lay down lairs, hatcheries and torture chambers, and lure monsters — from beetles and warlocks to horned reapers with anger-management issues — to live, train and fight under your (loosely obeyed) command.

The brilliance is that villainy runs on housekeeping. Creatures demand food, wages, sleep and entertainment; unpaid trolls riot, cramped dark elves sulk and leave. Your hand is literally in the game — a giant claw that slaps minions to work faster, drops them into battles, and casts spells from lightning to the possession ritual that lets you inhabit any creature and stalk your own corridors in first person.

Arriving as Peter Molyneux's last Bullfrog design, it fused god game, RTS and management sim into something still essentially unrepeated, wrapped in the blackest comedy the studio ever wrote. "It's good to be bad" was the tagline; the systems earned it.

Technical notes

Real-time 3D-accelerated dungeon rendering with hundreds of autonomous creatures, plus a first-person possession mode inside the same simulation. The archive documents DOS and Windows releases.