One man’s nearly 40-year, 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodore 64 RPG
Enlarge / The disks and diagrams Mike Brixius has to work with in finishing his 1984 CRPG project. (credit: YouTube/RavenWolf Retro Tech)
There are stories that some of us, at a certain stage of adulthood, should never hear. Not if we value our time or our storage space. I regret to inform you that Mike Brixius, on his RavenWolf Retro Tech channel, offers just such a story about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from 1984. He will be able to do it, too, because he kept all the disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented assembly code print-outs ever since his teenage project.
"It's one of those loose threads in my life that I deeply regret," Brixius says in his video. He hopes his Patreon supporters and YouTube community can give him the "moral support and accountability" he needs to complete his game after all these years.
RavenWolf Retro Tech's video, launching his campaign to restore his 1984 C64 CRPG, Digital Dungeon Master (DDM), to its proper glory.
Digital Dungeon Master (DDM) was based partly on the Avalon Hill tabletop games Brixius loved at the time, but more so on Avalon Hill's foray into dungeon-crawling RPGs, Telengard. Brixius wanted to re-create Telengard's limited line of sight but add in a surface world, akin to that of another favorite of his, Ultima IV.