Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant
| Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant | |
|---|---|
 The title's illustration in Early Releases on Maxine's Quest: a skull, a clock face and the dragon | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Engine | Phaser 3.87 (prototype level) |
| Platform(s) | Web browser |
| Release | Unreleased; prototype level online since May 7, 2026 |
| Genre(s) | "2.5d-rogue-like" (planned) |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant is a planned video game by Molecular Reality Corporation, the first of eight titles announced in the memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest of about 2022. Its subject is "biomedical gerontology and rejuvenation medicine": players were to run samples bearing the marks of aging through a nanopore while they played.[1] The title comes from the philosopher Bostrom's 2005 fable of a dragon that stands for aging.
As of October 2026 the game exists as level 7 of Maxine's Quest, the company's browser game. The level is a prototype consisting of one wall, placed outside the area in which the player can move.[2]
Premise
The memo gives the title three lines. Its science is "biomedical gerontology and rejuvenation medicine", its inspirations a "2.5d-rogue-like, with 2d hints of Gauntlet, Ultima, and Pac-Man, and 3d hints of Bard's Tale and Dungeons of Daggaroth", and its "Major analytes" are "Glycated collagen, telomeres, oxidized cholesterol, foam cells, age-matched skin and cheek cells, HDL, LDL, inflammatory markers, lysosomal preps, epigenetic age clock markers, hyaluronan".[1]
Each analyte is a way of telling how old a body is. Sugars bond to long-lived collagen and crosslink it, stiffening skin and arteries. Telomeres, the repeated sequences that cap chromosomes, shorten as cells divide. Epigenetic clocks read age from the pattern of methyl groups on DNA. Foam cells are immune cells swollen with oxidized cholesterol, the core of the fatty streaks in diseased arteries, and lysosomes are the compartments in which cells try, and with age increasingly fail, to break such material down. In the company's plan of May 2026 the game appears as "Dragon Tyrant (aging via spit)", one of several skins, or universe wrappers, for the instrument software, with saliva as the sample.[3]
Name
The game was "War on the Dragon Tyrant" in an advertisement the company ran on Facebook in 2021, We're on an epic quest, and "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" on the sign-up form of the same year.[4][5] A later remake of the advertisement calls it "Lab of the Dragon Tyrant".[6] The founder, Kent Kemmish, has said that the game takes its name from Bostrom's fable of the dragon-tyrant.[5]
In the fable, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2005, a dragon demands a tribute of human beings, "to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark". The tribute grows until it reaches "one hundred thousand human beings". For generations the kingdom treats the deliveries as a fact of life and organizes itself around them; only late do its people build "a huge projectile" that can pierce the dragon's armor. Bostrom's afterword states the allegory plainly, "aging is, of course, represented by the dragon", and puts the cost of delay at "approximately 70 lives per minute".[7]
Kemmish worked on aging before he worked on holes. On the LysoSENS project at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute he searched for "microbial enzymes capable of catabolizing intracellular aggregates implicated in age-related disease (notably 7-ketocholesterol in atherosclerosis)".[8][9] 7-Ketocholesterol is an oxidized cholesterol, and three entries on the game's list of analytes, oxidized cholesterol, foam cells and lysosomal preps, are the materials of that project.
Prototype
The level menu of Maxine's Quest offers two levels, Spores and Pores as number 1 and Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant as number 7. Selecting the second runs a function whose comment reads "Just a prototype to set up a wall with collision". It places a horizontal wall of grey bricks, 100 by 20 pixels, at a point 300 pixels from the top and left of the canvas, and writes "Added wall" to the browser's console.[2] The arena is an ellipse 1,350 pixels wide centered more than 1,000 pixels from the left edge, so the wall stands outside it, where Maxine cannot go. The code also sets up collisions with vertical walls; there are none.
Random mode has spawning rules for levels 1 to 5 only. On level 7 the timer still fires every two to six seconds and still marks the ring of signal lines with the white line that announces a new monster, and no monster comes. The only event left is a death at the pore, and ten of them fill the founder's row of the scoreboard and end the level as "Slightly less successful". Each restart adds another wall at the same place, and walls are never removed, so a player who returns to Spores and Pores finds them still standing outside the arena.[2] In Live Signal mode the monsters come from the signal on every level, and the labyrinth fills with the same mushrooms as the first level (see the bestiary).
The company's plan describes an earlier version of Maxine's Quest, written in Python, that had a maze for this level.[3] A sprite of the Dragon Tyrant, a green scaly clay head 1,024 pixels square with orange eyes, sits in the browser version's asset folder, unused. A separate game on the company's site, The Labyrinth, is a maze with two wandering minotaurs and no dragon.
Influences
The memo's five named games come from the first decade of home and arcade dungeon games: Ultima (1981), Dungeons of Daggorath (1982), Pac-Man (1980), and Gauntlet and The Bard's Tale, both of 1985. The memo spells the 1982 game "Daggaroth". A "rogue-like" generates a new dungeon for every game, after Rogue (1980), and "2.5d" means flat graphics that suggest depth.
Two of the five already treat time as an enemy. In Gauntlet a character's health drains steadily as time passes, whether or not anything attacks. Dungeons of Daggorath, a first-person game for the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer, plays the hero's heartbeat, which quickens with exertion and injury; when it races too fast, the hero faints.
Reception
The 2021 sign-up form asked applicants which early-release game they would choose. In a sample of 135 answers "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" received 26 votes, the most of any title, one ahead of Raindrop Planet.[5]
See also
References
- ^ a b "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ a b c "Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "We're on an epic quest (advertisement)". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ Bostrom, N. (2005). "The fable of the dragon-tyrant". Journal of Medical Ethics 31 (5): 273-277. doi:10.1136/jme.2004.009035.
- ^ "Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr." Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
- ^ "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality". Rejuvenation Research 12 (6): 411-419. 2009. doi:10.1089/rej.2009.0917.