This is the story of King of Dragon Pass, an uplifting tale of a man you probably wouldn't notice who bet big on an obscure game a long time ago - and lost. It's uplifting because he got a second chance, a bit like when Lieutenant John Spartan got a second chance in Demolition Man to catch the villain Simon Phoenix after having been cryogenically frozen in time.

Our story starts in 1996, three years after Demolition Man, and in the brain of David Dunham. He liked playing tabletop role-playing games in the setting of Glorantha - ring any bells? - and made computer software for a living. He happened to be friends with Glorantha creator Greg Stafford - renowned for his work on role-playing game Pendragon, and also a shaman - and the two of them decided to make a computer game based in that setting. And so David Dunham set about making "a game that had never been done before".

Not that he had a particularly springy springboard to launch his game making endeavour from - his computer software company A# employed only two staff: him and his wife. I'm a bit surprised, then, when David Dunham tells me King of Dragon Pass cost, in the late-'90s, half-a-million dollars to make! "Heh, it was quite expensive actually," he almost blushes. "It was very ambitious."

In the end it took three years to make. Pre-production began in 1996, production a year later and release was originally planned for '98, but slipped to '99. At peak development, 12 people worked on the game, mostly on the art. Some 430 pieces were drawn to frame the scenarios the story-book-like game presents you with. The team was scattered but coordinated in Seattle by the ambitious husband and wife team.

The money for development came from private funding, and Dunham had hoped that King of Dragon Pass would catch the eye of a publisher that would do the rest - print CDs, put them in boxes, get them on shelves and tell everyone about it. But he was to have no such luck, and his back-up plan was to do it all himself, which was just about possible for a small team back then using mail order. "I had to learn a little bit about boxes and CD mastering," he says in a fit of understatement - but what else could he do? It wasn't like he could release a 450MB game on the internet in 1999.

"It was going to happen, so in one sense it wasn't stressful - it was within capability to do. I did eventually have to scrounge and take out a loan to fund the CD production. But at least I was able to pay that back."

"Heh, it was quite expensive actually" David Dunham

Yet with no publisher to buy shop shelf space, King of Dragon Pass never made it into true US distribution - you could buy it in hobby stores but not in Electronics Boutique. There were broken promises from distributors - "that was a big disappointment" - and it all amounted to under 8000 sales for the original release of King of Dragon Pass, a sum that does not repay $500,000. "We have not made money," Dunham admits.

Thankfully, "Everyone was paid, and we'd already paid all of the development team, the artists and all. That was always something - we wanted to treat people right and not make 'em, 'Oh we'll give you something out of the royalties.' Which never happens."

The saving grace for King of Dragon Pass was its reviews, which surprised Dunham. "Pretty much every review was really good," including Eurogamer's brief 2001 review, which has somehow lost its score. Unfortunately the two negative reviews were in influential US print magazines. "If those two bad reviews would have been in the UK market, which is smaller, we could have sold a lot more copies," he rues.

"What we did get was a glowing review in a magazine called Pelit, which is the premier magazine in Finland. In its market it was only number two behind Donald Duck, which is a huge craze in Finland," obviously, "so all of a sudden we were getting bulk orders from Finland. It's still a very small country, but I think it was our number-three country after the US and the UK.

"It kept selling - I think it was two years in Finland that the distributor kept ordering."

King of Dragon Pass wasn't a commercial disaster, unlike some other more expensive games at the time - "at least we weren't those guys!" - and sales trickled on for years. Even when the print-run inventory ran out, the tenacious husband and wife team carried on, fulfilling orders with CD-ROM copies of their game.

"People were still wanting the game and we were still sending out several copies a month. Even up until recently - believe it or not I sent out a CD master yesterday! Someone insisted that they wanted the CD."

"That was kind of it. Like most games, they don't last forever"