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Shovel

The shovel is a temporary item located in the King’s Landing area of the The Catacombs. Once picked up, you can use it from your inventory to “dig up” dirt piles around the Catacombs. This is only useful in unblocking the entryway1 to a superfluous lore-dump room in the Barrows, and disappears from the game following the level.

History

The shovel was meant to be so much more. Originally, in order to differentiate the game in the oversaturated games market, Mipsco programmers in early 1995 wanted to actively involve the player as an archaeologist, digging up buried pathways lost to time. It would’ve brought an entirely new dimension to the game.

Unfortunately, when EXPERITEC inserted themselves into the project, they completely scrapped this idea to limit scope. EXPERITEC designers significantly pared down the level, killing what made the game unique, and opted to go for a more standard dungeon crawling experience.

  1. YOU DON’T EVEN NEED THE SHOVEL TO GET IN. If you start in the left corner, you can sort of shimmy yourself onto the dirt slope and cleanly walk over it. So they completely mangled the shovel. ↩