Ken's Labyrinth
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| Ken's Labyrinth | |
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| Developer(s) | Ken Silverman |
| Publisher(s) | Epic Megagames |
| Release date(s) | 1993 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS |
Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter DOS game, released in 1993 by Epic Megagames (now called Epic Games), and was mostly coded by Ken Silverman, who went on to design the Build engine that was used in Apogee Software's Duke Nukem 3D. It consists of three episodes, the first of which was released as shareware.
Ken's Labyrinth is graphically similar to id Software's Wolfenstein 3D in that the levels were designed using a grid-based plane, resulting in perpendicular walls and textureless floors and ceilings. Arguably its most astounding feature was the existence of interactive sprites and textures, like slot machines. This move towards engines allowing greater interactivity was later mirrored by Silverman's Build engine.
Ken's Labyrinth has since been released as freeware. Several different versions and source code were released and are available for download from the official website.
The first version is known as "Walken," the version which Ken Silverman sent to companies for evaluation. This was the first version created, and therefore it had very few features. There was almost no interactivity, and the code was mostly a test.
Afterwards followed version 2x, which featured 27 boards and an alternate final boss. New enemies, textures and music were added, as well as a money system, with which the player could locate money and use them to purchase a completely random item from a vending machine. Slot machines were also implemented.
The final version (3x) featured 30 boards, and many new features the older version lacked, such as the ability to choose the item purchased from the vending machines, a difficulty option, an episode select, and also new enemies, textures and music.
A Ken's Labyrinth port to modern operating systems called "LAB3D/SDL" was created by Jan Lönnberg and released in 2002. The port is also available to download.
