Dave's Trophy Run
An EGA-style platformer: grab the trophy, reach the door
Six levels of bricks, pipes, fire and water. Find the gold trophy on each one and get Dave through the door, collecting gems on the way and picking up a gun and a jetpack when the level offers them.
Play now — freeRuns in your browser. Keyboard, gamepad or touch.
Summary
Dave's Trophy Run is a side-scrolling platformer drawn in the sixteen-colour EGA style of late-1980s PCs. Every level has a trophy, and the exit door stays locked until Dave is carrying it. Gems, rings, crowns and wands are worth points, fire, water and weeds cost a life, and enemies can be shot once Dave has found the gun. It also has a cheat console that understands plain English: type what you want, like "warp me to level four", instead of memorising codes.
How to play
- 1Press Enter or tap to start. Dave begins each level with three lives shown at the top.
- 2Explore the level to find the gold trophy, then walk into the door to finish.
- 3Collect treasure for points: blue gem 100, red gem 150, ring 200, crown 300, wand 500, and the trophy itself 1,000.
- 4Keep clear of fire, water and weeds. Touching them costs a life.
- 5Pick up the gun to shoot enemies, and the jetpack to fly over what you can't jump.
- 6Stuck? Open the cheat console and type what you want in plain words.
Controls
| ← / → | Walk |
|---|---|
| ↑ / Space | Jump, or fly up with the jetpack |
| X / Ctrl | Fire the gun |
| J / Alt | Jetpack on / off |
| P · M | Pause · sound |
| ` / T | Cheat console |
| Touch | On-screen buttons on phones and tablets |
The original: Dangerous Dave (1988)
John Romero, Softdisk
Dangerous Dave was written by John Romero in 1988 as an example game for a programming article in Softdisk's UpTime disk magazine, and came out for the Apple II and MS-DOS. Dave collects a gold trophy on each of ten levels set in the hideout of his enemy, Clyde. Romero has said he was deliberately trying to make a Mario game.
Its bigger legacy came in 1990. Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall built a demo called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, which showed that smooth scrolling was possible on an ordinary PC. That demo led to Commander Keen and to the founding of id Software, the studio that went on to make Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Dave returned in Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (1991), which Romero calls the best Dave game, then in Dangerous Dave Returns (1992), Dave Goes Nutz! (1993) and Dangerous Dave's Risky Rescue (1993).
An original game with new levels and art. Its cheat console runs on keyword matching here; with a TypeSafe server it understands free-form requests. Not affiliated with the Dangerous Dave games or their owners.
Screenshots
