Black Crypt
Black Crypt was the first game by Raven, who later became famous for Heretic and Hexen. Brian and Steve Raffel had the concept of doing an RPG game in the late 1980s. The actual work began in April 1990 when programmers Ben Gokey and Rick Johnson joined the project. It was released on 1992-03-20.
Black Crypt was designed for 1MB Amigas. It uses the EHB (Extra HalfBrite) mode which allowed 64 different colors to be shown on the screen, a basic palette of 32 colors and those colors in half the brightness. Copper effects were used to do special effects as the teleport or water ripples. It was distributed on three 880k disks and could be installed to harddrive.
Black Crypt is an RPG in the style of Dungeon Master. Character creation is rather simple: Just as in Gauntlet, your party is fixed, a fighter, a cleric, a mage, a druid. You can adjust the stats within limits, give your heroes names and choose between a dozen character portraits for each class. Combat is in real-time.
In general, Black Crypt was received well and is remembered well.
Amiga Joker called it Advanced Eye of the Beholder
for its
simple interface, good title music, realistic effects and tough
puzzles, and it is generally agreed that it had the better
graphics.
When the Microsoft GameSDK for Windows 95 (later known as DirectX) became available, Rick Johnson started working on a Windows port, on 1995-10-21 to be exact. It took about three years to finish, but for some reason it was never published, just as a planned Sega Genesis version never camer to be. In the end, the developers decided to release the first two levels as freeware. It is not really a demo, since there is no full version to buy, but it's the only available download, there was no Amiga demo.
In fact, you could consider it a Windows demo for the Amiga game, which, as far as I know, can still be bought. For the port completely retains the original's look and feel. None of the graphics have been touched or enhanced. Some bugs from have been discovered and fixed. Others, like the Doom Hammer, have been left in.
You might have trouble getting it to run. I sure had. I never got past the intro screen. It froze and even took quite a while to kill. Maybe it doesn't like XP, or too fast computers, or too new versions of DirectX (it is written for 3.0). I don't know, I never tried it on an older computer.
