UNRELEASED GAME - CANCELLED
This game was cancelled in development. Please only submit images if you own a copy or have legal access to this item.
Originally this series was conceived as a trilogy, with the third part already named: Eye of the Moon. The sequel is even mentioned in the game's manual;:"The third part of the trilogy, possibly the most exciting yet, is still to come, when Mike will send Morkin down to the warmer lands which lie below Midnight itself, to find the Eye of the Moon." The Eye of the Moon was to be a magical crystal, or jewel, that allowed its owner to look into the future. According to Singleton "Luxor is dying, it's some years on and he's reached the end of his tether, and he wants to see what is going to happen to Midnight in the future. So Morkin goes off in search of the magical jewel called the Eye of the Moon which enables people to see into the future, so that Luxor can then rest in peace." Some of Singleton's plans included a game canvas four times bigger than the original Lords of Midnight, divided into twelve kingdoms set south-west of the original game, dynamic full-color graphics with black masking to hide any color clashes, unique graphics for all castles, unique, generated, full-scale facial graphics for all characters, a more convincing name generator, interior scenes of keeps and citadels, et cetera. There were even tentative plans to implement a multi-player mode, using the already existing mic/ear sockets to exchange data. Despite having already created a substantial amount of new game code—essentially all the above engines --, Singleton was involved in numerous other game projects at the time and thus put the game on hiatus.
1985 presentation mock-up of Midnight Identikit.
In an article published in July, 1985 in Computer Gamer, Singleton disclosed quite a lot of details of the game. The game was to have 16,000 locations and 131,000 unique views, created with a new technique called Randscaping. The Randscaping engine made every view unique. In multiplayer mode, the two players would each control either Morkin or Tarithel on their quest to find the fabled jewel. His new Midnight Identikit could create personalized faces for all the 256 NPC's roaming the canvas. Some of the NPC's were to have unique capabilities; for instance, one character would have the magic ability to flatten mountains, and was to be a critical reqruitment for one of the mini-quests, allowing the player access beyond an insurpassable mountain range to retrieve an item. Another NPC could control the weather, and so on. At the start of the game, the player(s) would only be able to control Morkin and Tarithel, recruiting more characters to their cause as the game progresses. The recruited characters could be made part of teams headed by a character chosen by the player, making moving the characters around the playing field a lot easier. The last attempt by Singleton to get the game released was in April, 1989.
Today there exists no authentic material for the Eye of the Moon. Some presentation mock-ups were created by programmer Singleton; all still available screenshots—if any—are from these faked mock-ups. While the most serious intention of both Singleton and publisher Domark indeed was to create this third part, the sequel was later indefinitely shelved, partly due to Mike Singleton's other commitments and partly due to the original publisher being bought out by Telecomsoft. Because of this, the new management wanted to change the terms of agreement, demanding two distinct versions of the game--8-bit and 16-bit versions--instead of one. Singleton refused the new agreement and the Eye of the Moon entered the realm of myth.
Doomdark's Revenge would, however, be followed many years later by another sequel, Lords of Midnight: The Citadel.
Eye of the Moon has since been mentioned for a possible upcoming release, with Mike Singleton again involved, a significant amount of work has already taken place.
Source: Wikipedia, "Doomdark's Revenge", available under the CC-BY-SA License.