> Personally, though, I’ll take the second game’s refinement over any such nebulous quality. If I was coming to Dungeon Keeper cold today, this is definitely where I would start.

This was my feeling, too, having no prior history with Dungeon Keeper and buying both titles on sale on GOG in the past year. DKII is definitely easier for the modern gamer to jump into. It also had some gameplay ideas that were novel and not terribly well-developed, but just fun--like being able to possess an individual grunt and suddenly have the isometric real-time strategy shift to a first-person perspective.

I remember Dungeon Keeper was the first time I ever “hacked” something, I had a demo of Dungeon Keeper that I’d downloaded over 56K, and couldn’t afford the game at 14 or so, but by looking at the config files realized all the characters and their stats were in there, so I was able to unlock all of the units, only without their art assets! Invisible giants were walking around my dungeon doing my bidding. I was very proud of myself and spent many dozens of hours playing this demo because of this, and it probably helped lead me to becoming a software engineer eventually.

The critique about the game betraying his trust is something only a contemporary player could come up with.

Back then, this type of complaint would simply not have crossed anyone's mind, not even in people who didn't like the game.

I played it from start to finish when it came out and thoroughly enjoyed it (and did it again about a decade later).

Then I did the same with DK2 in '99, though I mostly remember the "Disco Inferno" gag more than anything else about that game.

I guess the first one made a more lasting impression.

So many fond memories of Dungeon Keeper. Still haven't found a game that compares, similar to the original XCom. We were spoiled in the 90s!

Any hope for a more modern version or something at least in the vein of Populous? I've been looking for years and really haven't found anything...

If Theme Hospital sounds interesting to you, the more-modern Two Point Hospital is not only essentially a remake (but for legal reasons, totally not a remake please stop asking), but perhaps one of the best remakes of a game I know of in terms of updating it while keeping the core feel of the game completely intact. If I had not been aware that it was a separate game I would have had some real spooky moments as I tried to figure out how I could so clearly remember playing a 2018 game as an undergrad in college in the late 90s. (Time tends to upgrade graphics in retrospect.) Quite a few returning designers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Point_Hospital#Development

The whacky hospital hijinks may draw you in, but at its core it is a person-flow simulator; how do you get your patients through increasingly complicated layout scenarios? Which is way more fun than it sounds. Not sure the fun lasts long enough for anyone to exceed the base scenario, though, not sure the DLC is of much value honestly.

(Be sure to poke at the quality-of-life improvements that are a bit buried, such as the ability to template rooms, and copy already-existing rooms, without having to completely recreate them each time. It's worth the time to fiddle with. Also don't miss that you can create non-square rooms.)

Dungeon Keeper has had several attempts at spiritual revival. None of the ones I've tried hit it but I have not tried them all. The original has the Quality without a Name that nothing else, even its sequel in my opinion, has quite managed to capture. Whether or not a modern player coming at it for the first time would agree, I don't know. Mechanically and intellectually, I agree with Peter's own assessment of the game as given in the article, but at the time the QwaN overcame the quite non-trivial mechanical issues somehow. One of the very few games my wife has clocked much time with. I think a lot of the attempts to recapture it end up having the mechanical flaws with the design but without the QwaN they can't overcome the issues.

One of the biggest issues is that digging is too easy in DK, but it has to be to work at any reasonable speed. So it becomes too easy and too permanent to become directly exposed to your enemy, resulting in a situation where the first skirmish with the enemy essentially determines all. This skirmish involved neither strategy nor tactics, either, as the combat engine is not amenable to much beyond "what monsters are allocated to this fight", and often the only practical answer is "all of them, as fast as I can gather them". The first game "solved" this by allowing you to fortify walls, but then the fortifications were completely impenetrable to computer players, which caused its own problems, turning "turtling" into the plainly optimal strategy whenever it is possible. (Humans had a spell that could de-fortify walls so it didn't work in P2P. As with many games, P2P sort of by default fixes a lot of balance issues by simply ensuring that the humans are on the same level by default, even if the underlying game is itself dubious.) The second game tried to fix it by making the fortified walls not be impenetrable, but merely "slowing down" the enemy somewhat effectively has no result. The game mechanics are very effective at building dungeons, and the "survive waves of adventurers" levels work OK, but the mechanics are not very good at combat between two dungeon masters and it's not clear to me that it is fixable without an overhaul so major it's not the same thing anymore.

Dungeon keeper is a game that I was perhaps slightly too young or slightly too impatient to really enjoy the gameplay of.

I loved the concept, and spent many hours playing it, but actually progressing properly never really clicked with me, I generally resorted to either playing early easy levels or cheats to experience more of the game.

Unfortunately it's also a game that's slightly too flawed to enjoy as a "remastered" game.

But the aesthetic and the general vibes of the game were great.

If anyone is yearning to play, DK is alive and well: https://keeperfx.net

It's really fun to read through all the work they have done https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx

I played dk when it came out - most of my friends ( tabletop rpg fans) were really excited, and enjoyed the humor as well. It didn’t click with me, and I found the graphics hard to read and ugly.

I think populous or theme park were better games.

I have very fond memories of Dungeon Keeper. The devious traps, the torture chambers where you could convert your goodly hero prisoners, the way you could backslap your imps into working a bit faster, the way you could take possession of any minion to turn the game into an FPS... all of these, plus many more, were just genius-level design elements that made the game what it is.

The 90s were a special time when it came to video games. I'm a bit saddened that we are unlikely to repeat that era. There are some great games today too, but none of them capture that same zeitgeist.

Magic Carpet 2, what a throwback