Dark Chambers

Dandy takes place in a maze-like dungeon, seen from an overhead view. The goal is to reach the exit in each dungeon and warp to the next. Dungeons are labeled "A" (the first) through "Z". Portions of the mazes are blocked by locked doors, which can be opened with keys found throughout each level.

Each player is armed with a bow and arrow which can be shot in eight directions. Monsters come in several varieties, though the differences are strictly graphical. When hit, the monsters "devolve" to the next less-powerful state, before eventually being killed and disappearing. Some monsters are placed in the maze during its pre-game creation and appear as soon as that level is entered, while others are produced in skull-shaped monster generators.

The game that eventually became Dandy was written in the fall of 1982 as Thesis of Terror, Jack Palevich's MIT bachelor's thesis. The concept was for a five-person game: four players using an Atari computer as graphical terminal, and a fifth player acting as dungeon master controlling the action from a separate computer. The machines would communicate via serial ports. Time constraints prevented the dungeon master role from being implemented. The second machine, a Hewlett-Packard Pascal Workstation in the HP 9000 family, was used as a file server, sending new maps to the Atari on demand.

The gameplay design of Thesis of Terror was heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons; Palevich had never played D&D, but he had read through the manuals and watched campaigns in the lounge of MIT's New House II dormitory. It was also influenced by the arcade video game Defender (1981), which contributed the idea of the smart bomb (potions), and by several "half-forgotten" maze-exploration arcade games, which contributed the idea of using keys to unlock doors. Dandy was not influenced by any of the roguelike games, as Palevich was unaware of Rogue at the time.