Space Dungeon

Did You Know?

• In the Atari 5200 port, most objects are approximately four times the size of those in the arcade original.
• Flux magazine ranked the Atari 5200 version 64th on their Top 100 Video Games in 1995.

Gameplay

In Space Dungeon, you pilot a ship armed with a laser cannon that shoots a steady, pulsing beam in any of eight directions. Each level is a six-by-six grid of 36 rooms linked by open doorways of different sizes. You start in one room called the entrance, and another room holds the Collect Bonus. Other rooms may hide laser turrets, alien enemies, or treasure. Your job is to use an automap to find the Collect Bonus room, grabbing as much treasure and visiting as many rooms as you can along the way. The more treasure you carry out when you leave a level, the higher your score. If you manage to step into every single room on a level, you earn a 10,000-point bonus, even if you didn't collect all the treasure. Every time your score hits 10,000 points, you get an extra ship. If your ship crashes into an enemy or one of their spore shots before you reach the Collect Bonus cube, all the treasure you've picked up falls into that room. That room gets marked with an X on your map. You can go back to pick it up, but if you die again before retrieving it, that treasure is gone for good. In multiplayer, players take turns after one loses a ship. The game runs from level 1 to 99, then rolls back to zero. Before levels two through nine, and before every level that is a multiple of one hundred, a rhyme appears. For example, level two says "The Thief's in view on level 2," and level three says "More to see on level 3," continuing up to level nine. When you reach level 10, the game shows "Sorry. No more rhymes." After you finish level 99, the counter resets to zero at level 100, and the message changes to "You're a hero on level zero." That same message repeats every hundredth level after that.