Tutankham

Overview

Tutankham is an arcade game developed by Konami in 1982; in this game, players control an explorer who is grave robbing Tutankhamun's tomb. Players will search for valuable treasure (a map, an urn, a chest of gold & jewels and most importantly the golden death mask of King Tut) and fight off the various creatures that guard the tomb to ultimately find the way through the catacombs.

It was the first maze-shooter action-adventure, predating games such as Gauntlet and Time Bandit. The developer of Time Bandit cited Tutankham as its inspiration.

Gameplay

Players must guide the explorer through a series of progressively more difficult mazes across four different stages. The explorer may move in four directions, but can only fire in two directions, left and right, making the player helpless in vertical shafts. There are also "warp zones" located in random parts of each maze that allow the explorer to be teleported from one area of the maze to another. There are several different creatures that constantly materialize from “spawning areas” within the maze and attack including asps, vultures, parrots, bats, dragons and curses. Those creatures can be destroyed to score between 20, and 60 points with either bullets or a "flash bomb”. The explorer has a single “flash bomb” per life and stage that destroys all enemies on the screen.

On each stage, the explorer must pick up keys in order to unlock the door to the room where each of the treasures are kept, allowing progress to the next stage. Along the way the explorer may grab optional treasures (Rings, Crowns, etc.) for bonus points. If the timer reaches zero, the player's ability to fire is removed. Bonus points are awarded based on the amount of extra time left over when a level is completed. After players have recovered all four of King Tut's treasures, the game starts over again with increased difficulty.

Ports

Tutankham was ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision, IntelliVision, Odyssey 2, Vic-20, TI-99/4A and most recently the original arcade game is one of the launch games for Game Room on Xbox Live Arcade.

Additional Information

• The game was originally titled Tutankhamen, but the publisher discovered the full name could not fit on the final production arcade cabinet, so the title was shortened
• This game is also known as Horror Maze on Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits for the Nintendo DS.