Dark Castle

The game begins with a vista of the castle set against a backdrop of storm clouds in the distance. The opening notes of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor play, accompanied by thunderclaps. The title, along with the programming and development credits, is shown on this screen.

Movement within Dark Castle is typical for most platformers. Duncan can run, jump, and duck, and he can throw a limited supply of rocks at his enemies. More rocks can be found in small bags along the way, as well as bottles of an elixir that provide a one-time antidote to bites from the many rats and bats encountered throughout the castle.

When the evil Black Knight terrorizes the townspeople, Prince Duncan resolves to overthrow him. To accomplish this, he must navigate the four sections of the castle: Fireball, Shield, Trouble, and Black Knight.

After collecting the Fireball and Shield, Duncan proceeds to the Black Knight's throne room, where he topples the Black Knight's throne. The Black Knight then stands, shaking his fist, as a gargoyle carries Duncan to Trouble 3.

Mark Pierce was based in San Francisco with his own company, MacroMind, while Jon Gay and the rest of the Silicon Beach team were located in San Diego. After an initial launch meeting, most of the collaboration between Pierce and Gay was conducted remotely. Pierce designed the animations using MacroMind's "VideoWorks" (the direct predecessor of Adobe Director) and then mailed the files on floppy disks to Gay, who coded the game in 68000 Assembly Language on an Apple Lisa. A few components, such as the high-score system, were written in Pascal. The digitized sound was created by Eric Zocher, who worked with voice actor Dick Noel.

Silicon Beach advertised Dark Castle as being "arcade quality on your Mac".

Computer Gaming World stated that Dark Castle was "the best arcade game I've seen for the Macintosh, and perhaps the best I've seen on any microcomputer, ever." The reviewer praised the sound and graphics, noting that he did not know the Macintosh was capable of animations of such quality. He said Dark Castle "is filled with lots of little touches that show it's one of the first steps toward what Silicon Beach likes to call 'interactive cartoons'." BYTE compared the game to Lode Runner, writing, "There's nothing new about the basic concept, but the execution is impressive."

The magazine praised its "slick animation and realistic digitized sound," concluding that it "is a perfect way to fritter away those long winter evenings when you should be doing something productive." Compute! praised the Amiga version's "brilliant graphics, sound, and atmosphere" but criticized the keyboard/mouse control system and gameplay as too difficult. The reviewer also expressed concern about the disk-based copy protection, which caused him to fear damage to the disk drives, crashes when loading the game, and slow level loading.

In 1987, the sequel Beyond Dark Castle was released, in which Duncan must return to defeat the Black Knight, who is still alive. To access the Black Knight's tower, the player must first gather five magic orbs, which are placed in various hard-to-reach locations. The orbs must then be returned to the Ante Chamber and placed on five pedestals for the gate to open, allowing Duncan to confront the Black Knight.

Beyond Dark Castle featured an engine similar to that of Dark Castle, but with improvements and additions, such as a health bar, bombs, and other items. It also introduced levels where the player could control a "personal helicopter." These levels and maze levels were designed as side-scrollers rather than being limited to a single screen. Players could also save their progress in a "computer room" level. As with all versions of Dark Castle, if the player completed the game on the advanced difficulty, they were presented with a special ending.