The Register reports that Mike
Singleton has died.
I spent many happy hours playing The Lords Of Midnight and
Doomdark’s Revenge as a child. Both were turn-based
wargame/adventure game hybrids drawn from a first-person perspective.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything very like them since, although
there’s handful of reimplementations of the games themselves for
modern computers.
As well as stealing and destroying Doomdark’s Ice Crown, and
sitting out his armies in Xajorkith before taking the war back to him,
I spent a while poking through the saved game format. This allowed
the construction of a map and some experimentation with modifying it
(and the discover that the properties of the characters in the game
were generated from the location of their homes, at least in
Doomdark’s Revenge).
A sad loss.