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.