Castle Master sits right at the very top of my list of favourite games of all time — and I don’t just mean favourite C64 games. Not at all. It’s so good that I genuinely rate it alongside modern masterpieces such as Uncharted, The Last of Us, and Resident Evil. I know plenty of people won’t agree with me, but the Freescape games played a huge part in my childhood, and even today they feel like an early glimpse of where gaming was heading. Long before Doom, Quake, and the wave of first-person shooters that followed, Freescape was already pointing the way forward.
By the time Castle Master arrived, the Freescape 3D engine had been refined and perfected over the four or so years since Driller first appeared. It was astonishingly ahead of its time, delivering a believable virtual-reality experience to home computer users, even those of us with 8-bit micros running at barely 1mhz. I remember spending entire school days watching the clock, waiting for the hometime bell to ring so that I could rush back home and lose myself in its world on my ageing Commodore 64. Yes, it pushed the machine to its absolute limits with solid polygons, and some people were put off by the notoriously slow frame rate. But there was something magical about shooting spirits, exploring a vast castle in search of keys and treasure, and that unbeatable sense of achievement when you unlocked an entirely new room or area. Matt Furniss’s fantastic soundtrack also helped smooth over the sluggish movement, to the point where you could almost forget the game was running at barely a frame per second at best.
As with Total Eclipse, Castle Master was released in two versions: a standard edition containing just the game, and a special ‘deluxe’ edition available exclusively to members of the Home Computer Club. This release also included the sequel, Castle Master II: The Crypt.
Castle Master and Castle Master II would prove to be the final commercial games to feature Freescape. Incentive decided it was time to move on to bigger ambitions, focusing on Freescape’s successor — the Superscape virtual-reality system designed for graphics workstations. That said, they weren’t quite finished with Freescape just yet. Just over a year following Castle Master, Incentive released the 3D Construction Kit, putting the power of Freescape directly into the hands of home users. For the first time, anyone — even those with no programming knowledge — could create their own Freescape 3D virtual reality masterpieces.
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