Stonekeep

About Stonekeep

Stonekeep (1995) is Interplay's first-person dungeon crawler with pre-rendered labyrinths, digitised characters and full-motion cut-scenes, planned as a nine-month project that took five years to finish.

Stonekeep in Depth

Ten years ago the insane god Khull-Khuum, the Shadowking, destroyed the castle of Stonekeep, and the boy Drake was carried from its ruins by a mysterious figure. Returning as a man, Drake is visited by the goddess Thera, who sends his spirit into the ruins to find the orbs in which Khull-Khuum imprisoned the gods of the planets a thousand years before, during the Devastation. Along the way he gains the dwarves Farli, Karzak and Dombur, the dragon Vermatrix, the elf Enigma and Wahooka, King of the goblins, in a quest against Khull-Khuum and his consort the Ice Queen.

In the style of Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master, the player explores underground labyrinths full of monsters, treasure and traps, moving with the keyboard and using a mouse pointer that doubles as an aiming reticle and changes shape to examine, take or use things. Drake starts with a magic scroll that carries unlimited items and a magic mirror for equipping and feeding the party, and finds a six-part journal holding his statistics, clues, notes, items, runes and clickable level maps. Magic comes from inscribing Mannish, Fae, Throggish and Meta runes onto a spellcaster wand; the Meta runes boost the others, so double power turns one firebolt into two.

Making Stonekeep

Brian Fargo and Todd Camasta first discussed the game in October 1988. Producer Peter Oliphant, who wrote the original story and programmed the graphics and AI engine, joined in 1990 and lead programmer Michael Quarles in 1991. Because the early stages looked good, the nine-month plan stretched to five years as PCs advanced from the 386 to the 486 and Pentium, and the crew grew to 200. Oliphant, a contractor, left in the fourth year, feeling his presence was causing constant feature creep, and Quarles saw it through to release a year later. Interplay spent $1.5 million on marketing, and the game placed fourth on PC Data's chart for November 1995, passing 300,000 sales by June 1998, though Erik Bethke later called its performance weak. Next Generation called it "well worth the wait", and Computer Games Strategy Plus named it the best computer role-playing game of 1995.