Programmed by the two Johns at id software, Dangerous Dave in The Haunted Mansion was released for IBM PC in 1991. If you have never played dave2, you may think that this is yet another platformer in the favor of Command Keen; well, if you have played it, you know it’s closer to the Doom frenchise. Master Tom Hall designed this game for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge disk right after leaving Softdisk and founding id. With Adrian Carmack on the graphics, the game featured so much gore (for pixelated graphics, of course) that some of it had to be removed.
It’s true that the year 1991 has seen games with better graphics than dave2. Heck, it’s the year that Another World and Monkey Island 2 were released. Nevertheless, id had to cramp their game to fit in a 360k floppy, and run on 286/386 computers with EGA displays. The platform game engine that runs dd2 was used to make Shadow Knights just before that, so I figure that whatever is said here also applies there.
I strongly recommend the Planet Romero’s The Saga of Dangerous Dave article, and the awesome book Masters of Doom.
On with my story:
Dave has always been one of my most favorite characters. I started the project when I woke up one day with a vision for a new episode of Dangerous Dave. With that idea in mind, I thought that it would be nice to start with the sprites of the original dave2, since I can’t do any pixelart (can anybody here do pixelart?). Before long, I was sucked into it, and ended up reverse-engineering the entire game. I have split the article into several subpages and I wish you a pleasant reading.