Welcome to the Castle of the Winds shrine. This site exists to document, preserve, and celebrate one of the earliest graphical roguelikes ever made for Microsoft Windows — a game developed almost entirely by a single Microsoft employee named Rick Saada, working nights and weekends between 1989 and 1993.

Castle of the Winds predated Diablo by years. It introduced drag-and-drop paper doll inventory, optional permadeath, weight-and-bulk encumbrance, and a mouse-first interface to a genre that previously ran entirely on keyboard commands. It sold 13,500 copies at a time when shareware was still a novel distribution model, and it remains one of the most beloved small games of its era.

Rick Saada released the game as freeware in 1998. In 2025, he released a native 64-bit port on Steam — free to play — so that anyone can experience it on modern hardware without emulation. This shrine documents the game as we found it: in the original 16-bit NE executable, with its hand-crafted Norse world, its elegant dungeon generator, and its deeply satisfying magic system intact.

Use the navigation above to explore.