Dungeon Master

Dungeon Master, developed by FTL Games, was a landmark first-person dungeon crawler that first appeared on the Atari ST in 1987 and reached DOS around the end of the decade. It took the grid-based dungeon exploration of earlier RPGs and made it real-time and tactile, and in doing so it reshaped the entire genre and inspired countless imitators such as Eye of the Beholder.

You guide a party of four adventurers, resurrected or reincarnated from portraits of fallen heroes, down through the levels of a treacherous dungeon toward a final confrontation with the wizard Lord Chaos. What set it apart was its immediacy: instead of turn-based menus, combat and movement happened in real time, so monsters would advance and strike while you scrambled to react. You manipulated the world directly with the mouse, physically dragging items, food and torches, and picking locks or throwing weapons.

Its magic system was famously experimental, built around combining runes to form spells that you had to discover and remember yourself, rewarding curiosity and note-taking. Managing torches for light, food and water for survival, and character skills that improved through use all made the dungeon feel like a genuine place to endure. Demanding and occasionally cryptic, it remains a hugely influential and atmospheric crawl, and its innovations echo through dungeon games to this day.