The 1997 cult classic Dungeon Keeper is a prime example of an excellent management game mixed with devilish humour, great gameplay, and countless hours of throwing your minions against the wall, but games from 1997 don’t tend to run as well as they did back then on operating systems a little more modern than Windows ‘95.
Tomasz Lis, the original creator of the game, also had this issue and created KeeperFX back in 2008. The idea was just to allow for the classic DOS-based game to run more smoothly on Windows operating systems. However, the project didn’t really go according to plan and hit quite a bit of a standstill until around 2016.
Now, seven years later, we finally have a 1.0 release of KeeperFX, thanks to the open-source dev team that took over way back then.
The KeeperFX 1.0 release is a lot more than just a working Windows version of Dungeon Keeper, though. KeeperFX is a fan-made Dungeon Keeper remake and expansion all bundled into one, well, bundle, for all you old devilish keepers to enjoy.
The game now features Windows 7/10/11 support, higher screen resolutions, modernised controls, many, like so many, bugfixes, additional campaigns and maps, new level script commands, new creatures, textures and sprites, multiplayer and “much much more”. For those inclined to find out about the “much much more”, you can read through all the changelogs here.
Installation of KeeperFX reminds me of the old days when you had to edit .ini files to ensure your resolution and settings were correct, and that hit of nostalgia has me quite keen to jump right into dungeon keeping all over again.
You’ll need a copy of the original game to play KeeperFX, luckily, for those of us who haven’t kept all our old CDs, you can pick the game up from GOG for less than R30. Then, all you have to do is follow the instruction guide found here.
