HUNTING FOR TREASU RE

This isn’t to say that there weren’t popular RPGs, or RPGs worth remembering. Sierra’s Betrayal at Krondor was a fun attempt at a heavily narrative driven one. Jagged Alliance 2 combined strategy and RPGs like no other game before or since. Most big names, though, did eventually become watchwords for failure. Even Ultima blotted its copybook with the eighth game, Pagan, by switching to a terrible engine and a tiny world full of frustration. Interplay’s Stonekeep largely nailed the coffin shut on dungeon crawlers, due mostly to taking five years to make and only having a generic-but-pretty game to show for it. By far the biggest failure of the era was Descent To Undermountain, a game that spent years in development, and used an already outdated engine—designed for 3D shooter series Descent— to make an RPG. This went about as well as could be expected. In the end, Interplay just shipped what they had and washed their hands of it. (A couple of years later, their far better game Fallout 2 openly mocked it. One of the lines that could randomly pop out of a Magic 8-Ball, along with the likes of “Reply hazy, try again”, was “Yes, we KNOW Descent To Undermountain was crap.”)

Despite this, the ’90s produced some amazing RPGs. 1994’s System Shock was Looking Glass attempting to go beyond Underworld by thinking differently. The designers had been unhappy that, for all Underworld’s detail, much of it was artificial—like how conversations pulled you out of the game into a whole other interface. The solution? Kill everyone. That allowed the player to explore the devastated Citadel Station without ever being forced between interfaces, character interaction replaced by one-way communications between them and SHODAN, the evil AI controlling the station. It was done so well that the absence of people wasn’t felt at all. The only catch was that telling the backstory by means of audio-logs—then a genius idea—is now overdone to the point of South Park: The Stick Of Truth not so much mocking as murdering the entire concept.

Even things that didn’t work out are worth remembering. Just about everyone knows System Shock, but few remember Psygnosis’s Sentient from 1997—a similar idea, only on a living space station full of characters who go about their lives both automatically and based on a complex conversation system that allows you to give orders. It’s janky, it doesn’t always work, and even when it does, it’s not that much fun. But it’s a great demonstration of ’90s ambition in action. So too was Robinson’s Requiem and Deus, from 1994 and 1996. Both are survival games, the first about surviving on a hostile planet and the second about being a very easily wounded bounty-hunter. Both are notable for their complex medical systems. Get an infected leg? You’d better hope you have the tools you need to sort it, or you’ll swiftly collapse. You might find yourself amputating your own limbs, or having an eye pecked out—spending the rest of the game staring at the side of your nose.