Swords & Serpents · browser port

SWORDS & SERPENTS

Imagic's 1982 Intellivision dungeon crawl, rebuilt frame by frame from the original ROM. Every wall push, sword sweep and sorcerer's fireball behaves exactly as the cartridge does — now in your browser.

Play now Controls
Press 1 2 or 3 then Enter to begin

This is a keyboard-and-gamepad game — plug in a controller or play on a desktop.

How to play

Two hand controllers, two heroes. The Warrior Prince strikes by walking into his foes — there is no attack button. Nilrem the Wizard (games 2 and 3) casts from the left keypad.

The Warrior Prince

  • Move & face↑↓←→ or WASD
  • Back upB
  • Pick up · store · open stairsEnter / Space
  • Read scrollC
  • Status screen0 / Tab
  • Gamepadstick · A · B · X · Y

Nilrem the Wizard

  • Move & faceIJKL
  • Back upU
  • Pick up · storeO
  • Read scroll · learn spellP
  • Cast spell 1–9numpad 1…9 or F1…F9
  • Second gamepadLB freeze · RB fireball · LT heal · RT fast feet

Release the disc, face the target, press the spell. Or tick CPU plays the Wizard above and let him follow you.

The quest

Find the key on each of the four levels, then press Enter on the checkered marker to open the stairs down.

Carry up to six treasures; bring them back to the chest on level 1 to bank their value — every 300 points earns a reincarnation.

Mystical scrolls teleport you across the fortress. Read them carefully.

Three quests

Pick a game on the title screen. All three run on the same fortress; the difference is who walks beside you.

1

1 Player

The Warrior Prince battles alone, learning the floor plan of the fortress and as many of its secrets as he can.

2

2 Player

The Prince and Nilrem join forces. The Wizard begins with a single spell — Freeze — and learns more from the scrolls he finds.

3

2 Player / Magic

Nilrem sets out already versed in Fireball, Heal and Fast Feet, three uses each.

The fortress

A dying king's last wish sends his son into the Sinister Serpent's fortress: reclaim the conquered kingdom, defy the Serpent, restore the family's pride. Four levels of endlessly scrolling maze stand in the way.

Phantom KnightsSpirits that charge straight through walls, re-aiming every ninety frames. Faster than you. Strike first, or be struck.
Red SorcerersMaterialise in a puff of smoke beside the Prince, hurl one fireburst, and vanish. Your sword can parry the fire — but never the caster.
Scrolls & doorsTransport scrolls fling you across a level. Jawed doors bite anyone who lingers. Torches flicker on the ROM's own clock.
The Sinister SerpentWaits in a ziggurat on level 4 behind a corridor of flame. The box promised a showdown; the cartridge had other ideas.
Early-eighties honesty. Playing the real ROM, the Serpent turns out to be inert scenery, Red Sorcerers shrug off every spell, and six of the Wizard's nine spells can never be learned. The port keeps every one of those quirks — because that is the game.

Built from the ROM

Nothing here is guessed. The original cartridge runs inside an instrumented emulator with real controller input; every mechanic was measured there — sprite bitmaps, sub-pixel speeds, collision rules, timers, palettes — and reproduced in TypeScript. When the manual and the ROM disagree, the ROM wins.

The findings are written up in the repository's handover notes, from the toroidal 128×64-tile levels to the exact sixteen-frame sweep of a knight's sword.

23documented ROM findings
4levels, each a 128×64-tile torus that scrolls forever
16directions of knight pose, every one captured
9spells, three of them the manual lied about