Paranormal Deathmatch
Paranormal Deathmatch is an online PvP arena where you build, level, and battle characters against other players to claim top rank. It was originally released on 4th October 2001 by Simon Betts and ran until 27 May 2003 when it had to close due to mounting server costs.
You can play the game here: paranormaldeathmatch.co.uk.
Simon made the source code available after the game went down so there were people who rehosted the website elsewhere over the years. In 2015 I went looking for the game and it turns out that the domain was up for grabs so I went along and bought it and had my own go at reviving the game.
How to play Paranormal Deathmatch
There’s quite a bit to to the Paranormal Deathmatch game loop, so let’s go bit by bit.
Character creation
You start the game by creating a character and choosing their type. There are three races you can choose from with four avatars each.
Each character has its own unique strength, defense, speed and HP levels, but at the end of the day it’s negligible so pick whichever you like the best.
Fighting
The core of the game is in its fighting. Most of it is done automatically, so all you need to do is pick an opponent and the rest is done automatically.
Players trade blows one at a time until one loses all their health or until the time runs out. Once the winner has been decided, they get a cash prize and experience. It’s really as simple as that.
You don’t throw all your HP into every match. Instead, you decide what percentage to risk. For example: 1,000 HP + 50% risk = 500 HP used in the battle. If you lose, your total becomes 500. In the next match, 50% of 500 means you fight with 250 HP and so on down to a minimum of 10. If the loser loses all the HP in their pool, then they get knocked out and the winner steals all the money in their wallet.
Strategy
Since the fighting is mostly automatic, winning is all about preparation.
There is a rock-paper-scissors style of gameplay. You need to pick the right enemy type to fight against in order to have a higher chance of winning.
Then you need to estimate what percentage of health the opponent has. Typically they start with 100x their level, so you can estimate based on how much they used in their first battle. Characters with high percentages are good for a knockout, and low percentages are good for grinding experience and cash.
Ideally, you’d want to fight someone of the class you’re strong against that’s a few levels above you.
Banking
You can keep all your money in your wallet if you like, but you risk losing it if you get knocked out. To overcome this, you can drop your money in the bank for safekeeping. You can only deposit once per day, but withdraw as often as you like. Therefore it’s best to deposit only once you’re done playing.
Shopping and items
Having money is useless if you can’t spend it. The shop has several categories of items that you can use to boost your performance. They come in a few categories:
- Health reset – Resets your health to 100x your level, giving you some energy to keep on fighting.
- Bag of health – If you want more health than what is provided by the reset, use this to boost it even further.
- Disguises – Lets you impersonate another class so you can get an advantage over classes you’re naturally weak against. One use per battle.
- Stat boosters – Boosts your stats at a very high cost. Good for taking down someone significantly stronger than you. One use per battle.
- Weapons – Improves your stats for attack, defense and speed. Kept forever until you buy another one.
- Ninja Monkey – makes you much stronger and almost impossible to kill. Only 5 are available for all players, and the monkey leaves back to the shop as soon as you lose a battle.
- Evo Pill – Evolves your character to a more powerful version of itself and updates its avatar. Kept forever, but can only be bought twice.
Ranking and clans
This section is purely optional. There is a league ranking showing which players are the top in their rankings based on the experience points they have. It’s just bragging rights really.
You can also join other players into a clan to join the clan league table. This makes it so that you can pool together points on the league table.
What’s new in my version
Most of what I mentioned above is what was came with the original 2001 game. I made several changes to it, so let’s go through them.
Adapting to new technology
The original version of the game simply did not run. A lot of it was written with PHP version 3 in mind, and I had to adapt it to work with PHP5. This meant rewriting all the SQL queries, updating functions and whatnot.
Expanded game elements
I took the structures built by the original author of Paranormal Deathmatch and expanded them a bit while maintaining the original feel.
I know that it seems short to describe, but this took a lot of work to just get the whole thing up and running again.
Characters
Each class of characters originally had three different avatars to choose from, so I decided to add in my own three:
- Spirit: Mummy
- Alien: Tentacle monster
- Magic: Shaman
Upon further inspecting the code, I learned that each avatar had a boost in either strength, defense or speed. These new characters had to have their own boost, so they got it in health points instead.
Vanessa the Witch
Some of the original avatars for Paul Daniels, ET, Vanessa, Foo fighters and Debbie McGee were photographs, so they were more difficult to upscale to the new resolution. Luckily there are better scans of of the same pictures available today, but I couldn’t get any for the pictures of Vanessa the Witch. So I redrew her pics in the new style.
Items
Similarly, there are some new items added to the game. Originally, there were four tiers of weapons for attack and defense. I added a fifth tier as well as an additional speed-boosting weapon for each tier. This helps give players a bit more variety in the late-game.
Alien
| Stun Gun | Plasma Shield | Joint Lubrication |
| Ray Gun | Radioactive Slime | Jetpac |
| The Foo Fighters | Warp Drive | Phone home |
| 2.0 GTI UFO | Crop Circle of Death | Flying license |
| Atomising beam | Bio-organic skin | Flux capacitor |
Magic
| Playing Cards | Vanisheing trick | Bunny in a Hat |
| Broomstick | Magic Wardrobe | Levitating boots |
| Fireball spell | Debbie McGee | Hoover |
| Ring of Fire | Ring of Steel | Ring of Speed |
| Philosopher’s stone | Impossible Cube | Hogwarts Express |
Spirit
| Small axe | Rattling Chains | Bedsheet with holes |
| Big axe | Wooden Coffin | Bat Wings |
| Vampire Teeth | Lead coffin | Horseless Carriage |
| Wailing Banshee | Haunted Castle | Flaming motorcycle |
| Electron Pack | Resurrection | Flying Dragon |
Interface changes
Responsive design
The original version of Paranormal Deathmatch didn’t have any css besides some link styling, and I wanted to modernise it a bit to make it more useful on modern devices.
It’s a great kind of game to play on a mobile phone because of its simplicity, so I made it work responsively. I added different width stylings so the elements relocate depending on the size of your screen.
New elements
There are a few new things I added to make the game a bit more comfy to play.
The most important of which is a player list at the bottom of the screen which allows you to pick a fight without having to return to the main fight screen. It saves on load time and player time, automatically eliminating any pre-filtered players from being displayed.
Auto login
There is now an auto login feature that allows you to stay logged in even if you close your browser.
Notifications
You get notified when another player challenges you to a fight, you are KO’d, or if you get a new message.
Front page updates
The front page now also displays a changelog of everything that was changed throughout time.
Bots
I added a new class of players into their own clan: bots. These are ‘dummy’ characters meant to infuse life into the game even if there aren’t any people playing it.
You can fight them like any other character, but no class has any advantage over them so they’re harder to beat and they provide 50% less exp.
They also have a rudimentary AI which allows them to start a session, fight, buy items and use the bank. This way they can level up like a player would and give human players some random fights while they are not playing. This means that every player would have some cash in their pocket (even if it is just a little) to justify giving them a KO.
Analytics
Admin-only but there are some statistic visualisations to see how many of each character a re made, how many fights are done daily etc.
Conclusion
I did enjoy working on this project quite a bit. It’s kind of like being able to bring one of your childhood heroes back to life and make him current so that he’s popular again.
It’s nice to see that a lot of the people who enjoyed the game back in the day were able to enjoy it still, including some of the new additions I put in. There was some community feedback, many of which demanded a server reset which I did in 2019, maybe we’re due for another one sometime.
Over time the problem I came to solve (updating to work on new systems) came to bite me since I had to keep my own version of the game updated in order for it to keep chugging along. It became a hassle to come back to this game every year, re-learn how it works and fix whatever issue came along.
Nowadays it barely gets any attention, especially since the reset. I think that most of the people who were hungry to play this game again have had their chance and are satisfied with the experience so there’s not much to revisit especially in a day and age of games like this being packaged as mobile apps.
