Atari ST A to Z: Castle Master

The “Freescape” games released by Incentive Software were all rather interesting for a variety of reasons.

Most notably, they represented some of the earliest examples of a multi-purpose, cross-platform 3D engine at work — Freescape was so flexible that it would run on everything from the ZX Spectrum up to Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS PC, though obviously with some limitations on the less powerful platforms!

Castle Master was one of the last Freescape games to be released on 16-bit platforms, and it’s also one of the most mysterious and intriguing. Let’s go for a little explore, shall we?

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

2 thoughts on “Atari ST A to Z: Castle Master”

  1. I had read about this game a lot but never had a chance to play it.. doing it vicariously through your video now! It looks like Castle Master demonstrates many of the ideas and mechanics that modern first person puzzlers are still using which really is a credit to how far ahead of the curve the developers were.

    1. Yeah, I’d never played this before either, so I was excited to give it a try. You’re absolutely right, despite the technical limitations there’s a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on here… and some stuff I totally missed! (Apparently there’s a key attached to the underside of that horse, heh)

      It’s a cool example of a game that isn’t just 3D for the sake of being 3D… you really have to properly think in three dimensions in order to succeed.

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