Santiago Zapata — Slashie/slashgravatar as he is also, and then variously, known — has been hard at work refining and debugging his implementation of Richard Garriott’s D&D #1:

Finished renaming all obscure variable and line number pseudo functions into their real meanings in order to be able to debug properly.

Played through and all seems to be “working” ok; I think I’m leaving this version as the “replica” one, the one that seeks to be as faithful as possible to the original, I still value any bug reports you can send me tho!

The current version of DND #1 can always be found at this link; do give it another test, if you have previously, and ensure that it works now for you. Or report if it does not.

However, because the good Mr. Zapata seemingly cannot resist a challenge, he has also decided to…remake…the…game:

now that I know quite well what’s going on into this ancient piece of BASIC, I’m up to remake it from the ground up in modern well structured JavaScript. I’m calling it DND #1X, I’ve already started working on it… it should provide peace into my troubled mind after trying to replicate the original with all it’s woes. The idea with this one is trying to extrapolate the original game into a polished version that someone might even play and enjoy. This one will also have a working dungeon generator.

Of course, I’m keeping both codebases apart so people can experience the pain of the original one anytime they want.

I’ve heard of Ultima remakes, and there were even a few attempts to enhance or remake Akalabeth. But remaking Richard Garriott’s first game ever? That’s either absurd or awesome, and quite possibly both.