I have spent a good four years hunting down this old home-brew dos game. The reason behind it taking so long is that I only knew the game by its executable name Karel3.exe rather than by its full name Kareltima III, I am not even entirely sure how I came about finding it in the first place although I do remember searching for home-brew back in 1998 and collecting a vast number of home made dos games to play on my old Toshiba laptop after having played as many of those available on DosBox that would play on my laptop (I would download them at school and then play at home, we didn't even get 56k for a while).
I found my copy of the game on an old floppy disk which had once contained Omnis 7 (1994) that I had obtained from somewhere in 1998 and formatted for my own use, once I had the games full name I googled it and found much to my surprise the game creators personal website (moved from the original homepage).
It is really an amazing feeling to find something after years of searching and yes I know that spending so long hunting down a home-brew video game is a little bit sad but it is really worth it in the end. The game concept was put together by Gandalfs friend Morgul in two initial versions Karelitima I and II, of course those are just their aliases and indeed the man responsible for this games pointless inception is Alexandros Karelas whom according to Alexios Chouchoulas (Gandalf) developed them as part of learning how to code games in Turbo Pascal even the name Kareltima is a link to the creators name.
In any case Alexios wrote Karelitima III himself in addition to the previous two and published them into the open source scene. You can download various ports of Karelitima III from their project page, however the source for the original two games has been lost to history, much like I thought this game had been.
The game play wasn't really the point of the game, however it is a typical ASCII dosgame, which in itself is a joke. It is Set in a supposedly mystical world, where Gandalf the Grey is in the fake ID business, pub landlords know their calculus, malacks roam the towns (beware!), and bored priests are, well, very bored. The game is full of inside jokes between the two original developers and is very rude and crude in parts, however the game is still suprisingly very fun to play and I wasted entire afternoons attempting to beat it. I am still not sure if it's actually completable or if that is part of the joke but it is well worth playing if you are a fan of dos rogue-like games and have a sense of humour/irony.
Download
Click here to download Karel III.