Duck Quest

Duck Quest is a 1997 Macintosh action-roguelike from Executive Duck Entertainment in which the player steers a duck through randomly generated dungeons, fighting off poultry farmers and grabbing rubber ducks to refill hit points. It carries the deliberately absurd tone of late-1990s Mac shareware and keeps generating levels well past its nominal twenty-five-floor finish line.

Premise

You are a duck. Your enemies are poultry farmers. You descend through procedurally laid-out dungeons one floor at a time, and the rubber ducks scattered through the rooms double as healing items. Reaching level twenty-five does not end the game; the floors keep coming as long as the player keeps surviving.

Design notes

The randomized layouts and tile-based exploration place Duck Quest in the loose family of Mac action-roguelikes that flourished alongside Ambrosia's Cythera-era output and the wider shareware boom. Executive Duck Entertainment leaned into the joke premise rather than against it, which is part of what kept the game memorable in Info-Mac retrospectives.

Version

The Macintosh Garden listing archives version 1.3, the maintenance release that most users encountered.

Running it today

Duck Quest is a Classic Mac binary and runs well under SheepShaver or Basilisk II with a System 7.5 / Mac OS 8 environment.