The story behind Gateway to Kutha
A basement, a Commodore 64, and a dungeon that would not let go.
1983
I was thirteen years old in 1983. The year before, a VIC-20 had arrived in our house, and I had already pushed it about as far as it would go. Then came the Commodore 64, and with it a game called Gateway to Apshai.
I played it in the basement. For hours. For far more hours than anybody should have, and long past the point where a sensible thirteen year old would have gone to bed. You crept down corridors you could not see the end of. You fought things in the dark. You grabbed whatever treasure you could carry and you tried to make it back out, and mostly you did not make it back out.
What got under my skin was not really the game. It was the thing standing behind the game. Somebody had built this. A person, a team, had sat down and decided how fast the monsters moved, how much a sword took off, what waited behind the next door. The machine on my desk was running one person's or a team's rules.
So I taught myself to code, for no better reason than that I wanted to make games and there was no other road to get there. That hunger never really went away. It just found bigger machines.
VIC-20, Commodore 64, Amiga
Every one of those machines taught me something I still use, forty years later.
VIC-20
That a computer does exactly what you tell it and absolutely nothing else. It was on this machine I started to learn how to code.
Commodore 64
That limits are the interesting part. 64 kilobytes, a handful of colours, and people were still making worlds inside it. Constraints do not get in the way of the work. They are the work.
Amiga
That when the constraints finally lift, taste is the only thing left holding you up. More power just means more rope.
I have been working as a software developer since 1990. In 1999 I started my own company, Dood Interactive. It changed form in 2008 and has been Dood AB ever since, and in all the years between then and now I have been building my own software ideas rather than somebody else's. Dood Games is the name I put on them when they turn out to be games.
None of which would have happened without a basement, a beige computer, and a dungeon I could not stop thinking about.
Why this game exists
Gateway to Kutha is my homage to the dungeon crawls of the early eighties. Not a remake and not a port. Every line of code, every tile, every monster in it is new. What I wanted to bring back was not the pixels, it was the feeling: walking into a dark room, not knowing what is in it, and going in anyway.
So it keeps the things those games got right. The dungeon is genuinely dark, and it only opens up as far as you have walked. There is no timer counting down and nobody rushing you. Going deeper is always your own decision, and it is always a bad one, and you always make it.
What Gateway to Kutha actually is
It is a free retro dungeon crawler that runs in your browser: part role playing game, part roguelike, and an indie RPG built by one person in the evenings. You play a warrior's last child, sent down by old Merlis the priest to bring back the lost Relics of Kutha. You descend one delve at a time, and in the roguelike tradition every dungeon is generated fresh, so nobody can hand you a map and no two runs are the same.
The delve
- Find the glowing Gateway in each dungeon to descend deeper. The deeper you go, the better the loot and the worse the things guarding it.
- Collect the Relics of Kutha: glittering Stars, coloured Keys, ancient Scrolls. Carry a key of the right colour and the sealed vault gates simply open as you walk up to them. Behind the bars are rooms full of treasure.
- Pick up lanterns and eyeglasses to push the darkness back a little further.
- Slaying beasts earns XP. The RPG bones are all there: levels raise your health, and with it your Strength, your Agility and your Luck.
The right tool for the right beast
This is the part I care most about. Nothing in the dungeon dies to brute force alone, and working out what kills what is most of the game.
- Rats, bats and spiders will go down to anything you swing.
- Snakes are fast and venomous. Keep them at range with the bow.
- Armoured crabs shrug off a dagger. Bring a sword.
- Oozes cannot be cut at all. Only fire unmakes them.
- Wraiths let steel pass straight through. Venom bolts are their bane.
- Ghosts flicker and blink about, and blades miss. Fire bombs banish them.
- Mummies are slow, tough and extremely flammable.
- And from the third delve down there is a cache of poison darts somewhere. One dart fells anything in the dungeon. There are never many. Save them for the worst thing you meet.
Free, in your browser, on anything with a screen
There is no download and no install. No app store, no launcher, no account needed to play. Open the page and you are in the dungeon. It runs on a phone, on a tablet and on a desktop: on a touch screen you get a thumbstick that follows your thumb, and on a computer the arrow keys and WASD do what you would expect. You can add it to your home screen and it will behave like an app.
Make an account if you want your scores kept and your name carved into the Hall of Heroes. If you would rather just play, then just play.