In 1984, the YouTuber Mike Brixius (RavenWolf Retro Tech) started building an RPG called Digital Dungeon Master for the Commodore 64, inspired by the Avalon Hill game Telengard. Now, almost forty years later, he's returning to the game to finally finish it and wants to have it completed in 2024 (Thanks PC Gamer!).
Obviously, long development cycles have always been a bit of a thing in the games industry, with titles like Beyond Good & Evil 2 and Skull & Bones being some of the more notable recent examples of games that have been delayed and pushed back almost too many times to count now. However, it's clear that Brixius has these both beat, with the developer having started the game before the Nintendo Entertainment System was ever released in the US and when Ronald Reagan was still the president.
Brixius made the exciting announcement in a video uploaded on his channel two weeks ago. In that video, he told his viewers:
"I’m a bit older and wiser than I was back then. So I understand what a huge undertaking completing my game is going to be, but it’s one of those loose threads in my life that I deeply regret. So, if I can pull it all together and make an awesome game out of this, it would be a huge item off my bucket list."
To get the project going again, Brixius went digging through all of his old documentation, printed listings, and floppy disks, and it's remarkable just how much he has kept. He also managed to get the map code up and running in exactly the same state that he left off but revealed that he has now switched from programming in BASIC to writing in Kick Assembler (or KickAss for short).
He outlined the plan for the game's development as follows:
"The plan is to do fairly long quarterly sprints with an update video as each one is completed. There will be a theme to each sprint and I will outline the changes that I need to make to get that working and then there will be other changes that you can vote on. There will be two items selected by the community — one by patrons and one by the community at large."
If you want to keep up to date with the project, be sure to subscribe to Brixius and show your support.