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.

Necromancer (1982)

 

We've looked a number of games involving sword-wielding heroes cleaving through their enemies, so it's probably time to start highlighting the Sorcery side of the genre. The side where Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance liked to play much of the time. Necromancer, created by Bill Williams and published by Synapse, has the player control a druid whose task is "to grow an army of trees in the enchanted forest, and to march with this army through the necromancer's vaults, and then finally to destroy the evil in the necromancer's foul lair." Although the concept is heroic, the game is uniquely dark compared to most of Williams's other games; e.g., Salmon Run and Alley Cat are each about animals trying to reach a mate and victory is signaled with a loud smooch that is so well-rendered by the Atari 800's sound chip that it's easy to think it's a digitized sample, not something crafted by Williams's audio mastery. Necromancer is dark (literally, with its black backgrounds) and features an underdog hero battling a dominating figure who lives in a graveyard, flanked by armies of giant spiders and ogres. The opening theme (composed by Williams, as he usually did everything in his games) sounds like a horror movie theme. It's easy to complete a cycle of Salmon Run or Alley Cat and enjoy the happy ending, but it's extremely difficult to make it through Necromancer and enjoy its happy ending.

The opening level features the druid standing in a pentagram at the screen's center, where he will remain. The player controls a cursor called the Wisp, which can reach any part of the screen. The job in this level is to plant magic seeds and watch them grow into tall trees, using the Wisp to protect them from the ogres that race across the screen and try to cut down the trees when they're still in the sapling stage. Even when the trees reach maturity, it's still important to protect them because the spiders start racing in and trying to poison them. Even with the Wisp's ability to home in on nearby enemies, the spiders are particularly difficult to hit because of their rapid, helter-skelter movements. More seeds can be obtained by hitting a creature called the Eye Pod. The gameplay here is frenetic and the player must grow as many trees as possible before his strength is exhausted from killing and being hit by enemies. Some degree of success is nearly guaranteed, but a major aspect of the game is that how you do in one level influences your success in the next.

In level 2, the druid needs to navigate through a series of vaults containing the spiders' eggs. The druid can use the Wisp to command his tree army, which has the ability to walk like Ents, to move to a vault and then plant roots in the vault's roof. Before long, the roots will disintegrate the roof and the tree will plunge down, crushing the eggs. The player must account for hands of fate that descend from the roof and try to grab the druid or the trees, and for spiders that freshly hatch from flashing eggs. The druid must grab an item that lowers ladders to deeper vault levels, and must survive through the five screens worth of vaults (with eight eggs per screen), survive being a crucial word because, unlike level 1, running out of strength here ends the game. The player always has the option to simply race for the bottom and not worry about smashing spider larvae, but this will cause a brutal disadvantage on the final level...

The druid confronts the necromancer on the graveyards of level 3. The druid uses the Wisp to kill the necromancer, but until the player clears the screen of 13 gravestones, the necromancer will continue to rise from the dead. Meanwhile, the druid is being attacked not only by the necromancer but by all the spiders he failed to kill in level 2. If the player rushed through level 2, the druid will likely be overwhelmed quickly by the swarm. Meanwhile, there's another spider, a She-Lob-like Mother, that patrols and makes the spiders immune to the Wisp. The player must somehow clear five screens worth of graves before the necromancer is finally vanquished.

An idiosyncratic feature of Williams's games is that they tend to involve randomness in both controls and gameplay; multi-faceted "series of minigames" designs; and an encouragement of players to resist their instincts. Modern players raised on predominantly Japanese design philosophies such as consistent and predictable core gameplay ("he jumps and attacks exactly this way every single time and the enemies are always in this exact place...") could very well find Williams's style infuriating, and perhaps assume the games are broken or weren't playtested. As one review said, "With a Bill Williams game, you knew you'd always have to learn to use the joystick in a way that you hadn't used it before -- always interesting, always challenging."

Despite being action games, the philosophy is almost more akin to how Rogue-like games are made in that it's better to develop a strategy and understand that the strategy can only improve the player's chances instead of guaranteeing victory. Sometimes the random element is just too much to overcome. Necromancer is no different. You can have a plan (e.g., it's a good idea to plant trees in the corners and along the edges because adult trees block the paths of the ogres) but sometimes the game just doesn't cooperate. Sometimes the trees fully grow almost immediately but other times they take what seems like an eternity considering the action happening all over. Similarly, in level 2 the length of time it takes for the trees to collapse the vault seems to be random, sometimes happening almost immediately but other times taking so long that the egg starts flashing and hatches before the tree is even halfway through the roof.

Graphically, the game looks okay for 1982. The C64 version is slightly prettier for getting a bit more detail and color in the druid's sprite (it also seems to be slightly easier, although like most Synapse games, the Atari version is a bit smoother in motion). The trees are especially nice-looking with the way their leaves flicker to indicate a gentle swaying, and their anguished faces that appear when they've been poisoned by the spider. 

Necromancer is the kind of game that can be exhausting to play because it can get frenzied to the point that it could give Eugene Jarvis or Jeff Minter pause, but like those men's games it also has a punchy quality that keeps you coming back. No matter how many times you lose, you still feel that if you play just a bit better and if enough things break your way, you might finally overcome it (but you probably won't). 

Supplemental reading: Empire of the Necromancers, by Clark Ashton Smith

Supplemental viewing: Warlock (1989)