Usurper, 1993 to now

A door from the LORD years

Jakob Dangarden released Usurper in 1993. Legend of the Red Dragon was at the height of its run, and door menus everywhere were filling up with fantasy games.

Most doors of the day were turn-based. You played your turns and hung up, and the other players found out what you'd done the next time they called. Not Usurper. Here, players teamed up and fought in real time, all the way down through the dungeons of Durunghins toward the deepest level. On a multi-node board, with a friend on the next line, that was a very big deal.

*kicking fantasy* Gangwars and partying. Sex, drugs and steroids. Fight monsters and other players in this fascinating game. Be prepared for violent and bizarre nonstop action. Become king, be a GOD or fall in love and have children.The game's own pitch, from its README

One of the popular doors

Release followed release through the nineties. Break Into Chat keeps an archive of them, from 0.01e up to 0.19b6. Like most doors it was shareware. Sysops paid to register it.

A sysop's message reprinted in Door World in November 1995 gives you the flavor. He had moved his PCBoard system to Windows 95, and Usurper ground to "a menacing crawl" whenever the board ran in the background. He wanted it fixed. Badly. "If it weren't for the fact that it is one of the most popular doors on my board, and that I shelled out 35 sheckels for it, I would not worry."

The last release, and the source

Usurper 0.20e came out on 16 October 2009. It was the last version Jakob Dangarden released himself, and with it came the full Pascal source, under the GNU GPL.

That's why Usurper survived. Once the source was out, anyone could fix it or carry it to something newer than DOS.

Rick Parrish and the community releases

Rick Parrish took it up. His 0.21, in July 2010, was a proper Windows port, and Linux builds followed. Dan Zingaro did what the README calls a "massive amount of bugfixing."

More releases came in 2012 and 2013. The source for 0.22 is listed on usurper.info, with a straight face, as "Lost forever." Then on 1 September 2015 came 0.24, the last release anyone shipped. The Unofficial Usurper Homepage still hosts all of them.

Ten years of small fixes

There was no 0.25. The source moved to GitHub and kept getting small fixes. The last few were about keeping the builds talking to modern BBS software, and the very last, on 16 February 2025, sped up the game's ANSI output.

In September 2026 that's still the latest code. It's what 0.25 was built from.

Usurper in PHP

Usurper 0.25 is that source converted into PHP, routine by routine. It began as a native door for ATDT, 0.25/ATDT, which is playable right now on the demo board. 0.25/Web is the same game standing on its own, for anybody with ordinary web hosting.

The conversion started out faithful to a fault. It copied the original's bugs along with everything else, misspellings included, until the rule changed and the repairs began. It ended with 373 of them fixed and the balance left exactly where Jakob Dangarden set it. All 373 are on the repairs page.

It isn't the only new Usurper this year. Jason Knight's Usurper Reborn, a C# remake built around a simulated world, is on Steam. 0.25 goes the other direction: the 1993 game as written, with its broken parts fixed.

Call the demo board. Pick a fight.