Doomdark's Revenge

Doomdark's Revenge is a role-playing and wargame video game developed by Mike Singleton and published by Beyond Software for the ZX Spectrum in 1984.

It is a sequel to Singleton's 1984 The Lords of Midnight and has similar game mechanics but adds more detail and complexity with the number of characters and locations increased.

Hostile fortresses or cities may be sacked and taken ownership of, which become important sources of manpower as they slowly generate troops that can be used to replace those lost in battle elsewhere.

The Icemark is a varied environment with forests, mountain ranges, plains and hills, all of which offer some resistance to the distance which may be travelled in each game 'day'.

The land also features pits, palaces, huts, temples, gates and fountains which may contain creatures or magic that harms the player or provides respite and refreshment.

Doomdark's Revenge reverses the first game's victory conditions by giving the computer only a single goal, the death of the main protagonist Luxor.

[2][3][4][5][6] After Doomdark the Witchking was destroyed in the first game, word reaches his daughter, Shareth the Heartstealer, the dreaded Empress of the Frozen Empire of Icemark who is as evil as she is beautiful and powerful.

Enraged by the news, she decides to take revenge on the chief architect of her father's downfall, Luxor the Moonprince, by bewitching and kidnapping his son Morkin.

[10] The game's publisher Beyond Software offered a prize - models of the major characters in an Icemark setting - to the first player who revealed the "Watchwords of Midnight", an inscription on Luxor's Moon Ring that would be shown upon ultimate victory.

The conditions for this to happen was if the player could bring all the major characters including Morkin to the Gate of Varenorn and eliminate Shareth.

The sequel is even mentioned in the game's manual: "The third part of the trilogy, possibly the most exciting yet, is still to come, when Mike will send Morkin down to the warmer lands which lie below Midnight itself, to find the Eye of the Moon".

According to Singleton: "Luxor is dying, it's some years on and he's reached the end of his tether, and he wants to see what is going to happen to Midnight in the future.

So Morkin goes off in search of the magical jewel called the Eye of the Moon which enables people to see into the future, so that Luxor can then rest in peace".