2003 · DKP Effects
Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure
A branching D&D adventure that played out on your DVD remote
Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure is an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons interactive film, released on DVD by Rhino Theatrical on June 10, 2003 and produced by Dan Krech’s studio DKP Effects. Rather than a game played on a computer or console, it ran on an ordinary DVD player: viewers steered the story with the remote control, continuing the tradition of the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks under a D&D banner.
How it played
The disc holds more than 200 minutes of 3D CG animation cut into branching segments. At roughly twenty decision points the film pauses and offers the viewer a choice — which path to take, whom to trust, how to face a threat — and your selection determines which scenes play next. Across all those forks there are around 990 possible route combinations leading to one of four distinct endings, so a single sitting only ever shows a fraction of the footage.
Premise
A small band of adventurers is drawn into a quest to stop a gathering catastrophe that threatens the world. The cast covers the familiar D&D party archetypes, and the consequences of the viewer’s choices — alliances made, dangers braved, routes chosen — decide both how the journey unfolds and how it ends.
As a licensed product it sits in the main catalog rather than the unofficial shelf, but it is an unusual entry: a Dungeons & Dragons “game” with no controller, no save file, and no screen of its own beyond the television it was played back on.
Screenshots
Click any shot to enlarge. Platform tag shows where each image is from.