Dungeon Explorer

1989 · Action RPG · TurboGrafx-16

Overview

Dungeon Explorer is an action RPG that allowed up to five players simultaneously to explore dungeons and battle monsters in a quest to recover the ORA Stone and defeat the evil King Natas. The game's aggressive multiplayer focus and Gauntlet-style top-down combat made it the TurboGrafx-16's definitive cooperative experience.

Deep Dive

Dungeon Explorer was Hudson Soft's answer to Gauntlet, taking the arcade game's top-down cooperative dungeon crawling and building an RPG progression system around it. Players chose from eight character classes — Warrior, Witch, Elf, Bard, Thief, Chimney, Bishop, and King — each with different stat distributions and a unique secret power. Character levels increased through enemy kills, with stat growth creating noticeable differences in survivability and damage output over the course of a campaign. The five-player simultaneous multiplayer, enabled by the TurboGrafx-16's multitap adapter, was the game's central selling point. Five players filling the screen with projectiles and melee attacks created a chaotic cooperative experience that no other home console could replicate at the time. The dungeon environments ranged from underground caverns to castle interiors to volcanic landscapes, each with distinct enemy populations and boss guardians. Password saves preserved character progress between sessions, supporting the long-form campaign structure. Dungeon Explorer was a significant commercial success for Hudson and helped drive TurboGrafx-16 hardware sales by offering a multiplayer experience unavailable on competing platforms. The game spawned a TurboGrafx-CD sequel and influenced the cooperative action RPG design that later appeared on consoles like the SNES. Its five-player configuration remains one of the most ambitious cooperative multiplayer implementations of the 16-bit era.

Developer Story

Dungeon Explorer was developed by Atlus and published by Hudson Soft. Inspired by Gauntlet, it lets up to five players explore dungeons together through the TurboGrafx-16's multitap, choosing from classes such as fighter, thief, witch, bard and elf.

Did You Know?

Dungeon Explorer supports five simultaneous players via the TurboGrafx-16's multitap — a player count that no other home console action RPG matched until much later in the generation.
Passwords unlock two hidden characters, the Hermit and Princess Aki.
The final villain, Natas, is 'Satan' spelled backwards.