COVER ART: Shard of Spring (1986)

 Art by Joe Chiodo. Despite the rise of epic fantasy through the 80s, the classic Frazetta-esque swordsman still lingered and was often even in the forefront.

Venture (1981)

 

Venture can probably lay claim to being the very first instance of dungeon-crawling in an arcade game. At a distance, it might appear to be a fantasy-themed variation of Berzerk, with its overhead view of combat and happy-faced character, but it's slightly different.

The player takes control of the crossbow-armed Winky, the aforementioned happy-face character, sort of a heroic version of Berzerk's Evil Otto. You start out in a dungeon, the halls of which are patrolled by fearsome and invincible monsters. Avoiding the monsters, you duck into individual rooms, at which point the game zooms into a more detailed view of the room. Each room includes a certain type of monster - such as our old friends the skeletons, snakes, spiders, etc. - and a treasure to be claimed. Unlike the monsters in the halls, Winky can use his crossbow to vanquish the denizens of the treasure rooms, but he has to be quick because if he takes too long the monsters from outside will invade the room and chase after Winky. If you can claim the treasure and escape the room, the game will fill its outline in the broader view, marking it as complete, and the process repeats until the entire floor has been cleared, all the treasures collected, and then Winky descends to the next, more difficult, level of the dungeon. Not unlike Gauntlet - you're killing monsters, taking their stuff, and exploring deeper and deeper - but without the multiplayer aspect.

The game was designed by Exidy co-founder Howell Ivy, not a household name today but his list of credits is nothing to sneeze at. Among his other games were Death Race, an unofficial Death Race 2000 adaptation that was the first game to ignite a moral panic, Circus, Mouse Trap, and Pepper II. The graphics in Venture are a bit Space Invaders-like in how they balance abstraction, menace, and an odd cuteness, and the game has well-rendered, high-tempo music that wasn't yet a common feature in 1981 games. Winky might be a far cry from Conan and his various clones and offshoots, but he was probably about as good as 1981 gaming could manage.

The game is exceptionally difficult because of the combination of its controls and enemy AI. Instead of being a smoothly maneuvering, agile character, the controls for Winky are unusually sticky in that pushing the joystick in a direction will cause him to first aim his crossbow and then move a moment later, but the enemies aren't bound similarly. They flit about rapidly like water bugs and will deliberately evade shots from the crossbow, and in the event they can be pinned down for a killing shot, their corpses will remain deadly until they decompose and vanish after a couple of valuable seconds. Not only do you have to kill them, you have to make sure they don't die in a spot where they'll block your path and slow you down. Despite its level of challenge, the game is addictive because of its pacing and the dopamine hit that washes over you after you've cleared a room and maybe even an entire floor, and the discovery of new types of treasure.

Diablo (1996)

 

Diablo is something of a video game precursor to the grimdark movement that has been prevalent in modern fantasy. It begins with the player (players if you're playing online with friends, a big deal on its release) choosing a class - warrior, rogue (archer/thief), or sorcerer - and then entering the town of Tristram. You chat up the few inhabitants and are directed to the nearby church to investigate a case of the archbishop leading many of the townspeople to their deaths in the catacombs beneath the church. Soon you're fighting through hordes of creatures, going back to town to rest up and sell valuables, being given more things to investigate, and are gradually lead deeper and deeper under the earth until you're effectively in Hell. It turns out the source of the town's troubles is that a major demon, Diablo, has been confined deep under the surface but is now stirring and drawing evil to it. Success in conquering the Diablo only results in a downbeat ending. Some popular saying about gazing into an abyss might be relevant.

Reading the game's manual reveals an extensive backstory that describes a Manichean and Moorcockian conflict between angels and devils who represent Law and Chaos, with man somehow being the key to swaying the war one way or the other, and then a history of the town and how it got to its present state. It would probably be better to avoid reading the manual's story, though, as the game's atmosphere is much thicker if the player simply explores and discovers things along the way. Despite being a sword-swinging dungeon crawler, the game feels akin to supernatural horror films like Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy, where things follow a sort of nightmare logic and there is no happy ending but just an impulse to push ever deeper in a hope to survive or at least find some answer along the way.

As a game, Diablo was intended by David Brevik to take the old concept of Rogue and its imitators, the randomized dungeon delving, and to simply make it digestible to mainstream audiences. Slick graphics  and audio instead of ASCII characters and PC speaker bloops, and easy, streamlined controls based around the mouse instead of numerous keyboard commands. See something you want to attack or someplace you want to go? Just click on it. (There will be so much clicking that you will take a few years off your mouse's life by playing Diablo.) The emphasis is on being able to jump right in and start beating up skeletons instead of wringing hands over rolling up the best character and fussing over their appearance. It was very successful and represented another major step in Blizzard's march to the top of the game industry. To some it also heralded a decline in classic computer role-playing games, another example of video games becoming simpler, dumber, and more action-oriented while claiming to be more highly evolved because of improved graphics and sounds. One way or the other, after Diablo it was common for "action role-playing games" to mimic Diablo's interface, with a red health orb on the left, a blue magic/mana orb on the right, and a hot bar running along the bottom between them.

Diablo does have a certain strategic element, despite its simplified gameplay, which is its emphasis on optimizing a character through picking which stats to upgrade with leveling up while also outfitting the character with the most effective combination of equipment. Another way in which Diablo was highly influential was its stressing of looting the environment even beyond what most traditional RPGs encouraged. Playing Diablo in some respects feels like shopping in how you slaughter a group of enemies and then quickly riffle through whatever they drop to determine what would be good to sell back in town and what would be good to swap for whatever you're currently wearing. By the end of the game you'll be discarding some absurdly effective items because you've already got epic armor and weapons and can't be bothered to even pick the stuff up to sell.

Diablo had one highly regarded sequel, another sequel that was highly controversial, and another sequel that just released that is also highly controversial. The general trend has been toward less grittiness, more epic storytelling, and the kind of broader, more exaggerated art associated with Blizzard's later, post World of Warcraft games, but the original game still has a foreboding and more personal mood and style.

COVER ART: Nightstone (2001)

 

This cover to a Spanish-made Diablo clone looks familiar...

The English version for a comparison:

Surely many who have viewed Frazetta's paintings thought they could be improved by pasting a couple of CGI women along the edges.