The magic mirror allows the player to equip Drake and other characters with weapons, armor, and accessories, and to consume items to affect their status, such as healing potions or bad smelling Throg food.

The first section records the statistics of Drake, shows the status of his current equipped weapons, and describes the characteristics of his partners.

Drake's statistics are strength, agility, and health, and his weaponry skills include polearm, sword, magick, missiles, and others.

Stonekeep features an elaborate "magick" system where four types of runes are inscribed onto a spellcaster (wand): Mannish, Fae, Throggish, and Meta.

Ten years before the events of the game, Drake's home, the castle of Stonekeep, was destroyed by the insane god Khull-Khuum, the Shadowking.

Along the way, Drake makes many friends, including Farli, Karzak, and Dombur the dwarves; the great dragon Vermatrix; the elf Enigma; and the mysterious Wahooka, the King of goblins.

[1][2] The earliest development of Stonekeep dated back in October 1988, discussed between Brian Fargo and Todd Camasta with the simple title "Dungeon Game".

[citation needed] Stonekeep's final cost was $5 million; its production crew had grown to 200 members by the time of the game's release.

[4] The intro sequence was the most expensive part of the production, costing nearly half a million dollars to produce, which was ten times more than the initial budget for the entire project.

The initial story line was written by Oliphant, who also designed and programmed the graphics and artificial intelligence engine for the game.

He felt his continued presence was resulting in the constant addition of feature creep and changes (he was a contractor, and had initially only signed up for a nine-month project).

Aided by the production company Dia Quest and new digitizing technology, successful filming was finally implemented into the project.

Stonekeep was originally released for the PC DOS and Windows 95 in 1995, packaged in an elaborate gravestone-style illustrated box, and came with a white hardback novella Thera Awakening, coauthored by Steve Jackson and David L. Pulver (all rights of the novel went to Interplay).

The CD-ROM also included a file called "muffins.txt" which contained a recipe for "Tim Cain's Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins".

[9] In response to public reception of Stonekeep's pre-release demo, the company "stepped up the initial release forecast to 200,000 units".

[10] In the days before Stonekeep's release, Next Generation reported: "With store orders already topping 90,000, Interplay says it's set to become the fastest selling game in the company's twelve-year history.

[14] Author Erik Bethke later described Stonekeep's commercial performance as "weak", which he blamed on its five-year development cycle.

[22] Maximum praised the game's "atmospheric 3D rendered world" and sound effects, but criticized the lack of challenging puzzles, low amount of gore and "sluggish" combat.

[25] Petra Schlunk of Computer Gaming World called Stonekeep "successful on many levels; both hard-core and newcomers to role-playing should enjoy this."

She wrote that "a lot of thought and heart went into the game's design and production", and she singled out its writing, characters and storyline for praise.

The editors praised it as "a milestone in computer role-playing games", with "beautiful SGI rendered characters and fascinating story development", but noted that it was held back by bugs.

[26] PC Gamer US's Mike Wolf called it "a decent offering for roleplaying novices [... but] far from the magnum opus you'd expect".

[18] A review by Bernard Yee of GameSpot did not offer similar praises, concluding that "Stonekeep is a dated first-person RPG that suffers from a poor interface, little depth, and few frills.

"[17] In Fusion, Arnie Katz called Stonekeep "a good antidote to the idiosyncratic complexities that pass for depth" among role-playing games, and praised its interface and audiovisual presentation.

"[23] Paul Presley of PC Zone called Stonekeep "a case of gloss but no substance", which failed to offer "something over and above that which Eye of the Beholder was delivering all that time ago.

[20] Butcher comments: "Although the 'plot' as such is somewhat weak, and the game quickly falls into an 'explore the level, kill the monsters, solve the puzzles' affair, Stonekeep is engaging and surprisingly addictive.