Revolt of Don's Knights

Revolt of Don's Knights holds a distinction no other game can claim: it is the only Slovak dungeon crawler released for DOS in the entire decade of the 1990s. Published in 1996 by Emerald Software, it arrived when grid-based RPGs were already fading in the West, yet the genre still ruled plenty of Central European home computers. The premise is refreshingly direct: a knight must infiltrate the castle of a rebellious baron, and he has exactly twelve days to get the job done.

Anyone raised on Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder will feel at home right away — first-person view, movement across a square grid, and combat that plays out in real time. The hand-drawn interiors of the medieval castle give the game a homemade charm that its modest production values never manage to hide, and never really need to.

In Slovakia the game is still remembered fondly as the rough-but-endearing home-grown answer to the big Western classics. A note for archivists: the copy circulating under the label of a demo is in fact the complete game — a scene release by the group Celebre from January 1997, originally spread across eleven floppy disks, with data files in both Slovak and English. You can play it right in your browser here on OldGame.cz.