We talk to Peter Molyneux for a behind the scenes look at the devilishly brilliant Dungeon Keeper

Remember Ultima Underworld? It’s been a while. 17 years, in fact, but let’s face it, no game since has made scuffling through the sepulchral so compelling. Classy as Underworld was, however, like every other RPG ever made, it missed a very important opportunity.

While virtually all fantasy-themed videogames can trace their lineage back to the late Gary Gygax and his tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons – and every designer of every fantasy game aspires to recreate the freedom and dynamism afforded by a human D&D dungeon master – none has ever focused on the experience of actually creating the titular dungeons. None, of course, but Peter Molyneux, who turned a trite old genre on its head and managed to create a game that remains unique to this day.

It started with frustration. More specifically, Molyneux’s incredulity with regard to an unassailable fact about fiction: bad guys don’t win. And because videogames are all about winning, you never get to play the bad guy. “It just dawned on me,” he says, “and people I told suddenly said, ‘Hey, you’re right’. And the bad guy is always really stupid, isn’t he? He always gives away his entire plan right at the end.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d felt a little sympathy for the devil. In 1993 Molyneux and Bullfrog created Syndicate, which venerated the sociopathic exploits of soulless anarchocapitalist androids. But that was different: in Syndicate mythology, you weren’t the leader. You were your company’s marketing manager, and the drones over which you exerted direct control were so low on the food chain that brand new, functionally identical replacements would be made instantly available in the event one of them got incinerated. In Dungeon Keeper, the game born of Molyneux’s aforementioned grievances, you were the dungeon master as envisioned by Gygax – the all-powerful, world-sculpting mastermind whose plots are only ever undermined by the incompetence of his minions, who always fail to see the big picture.

“I really thought being a bad guy would be hard,” Molyneux laughs. “Everyone wants to kill you, you have all these staffing problems – it would be a real challenge. You have your minions, who are often incompetent or insubordinate, and you have to manage your dungeon and protect your treasure. There are all these things to take into account that the hero never has to worry about. And from thinking about that, the idea for this game emerged.”

Where the gameplay model for the venturing hero is the RPG – as Molyneux later explored with the Fable games – he found the bad guy’s duties were much more suited to a strategy/ management game. Not altogether unfamiliar territory, but Dungeon Keeper also acted as a sort of real-time level designer. After all, it was your responsibility to carve out, furnish, and populate the finely tuned deathtrap into which wayward heroes were wont to wander.

“In my opinion,” Molyneux says, “the best thing about Dungeon Keeper was how you dig out, instead of building up. So it’s the exact opposite of what happens in normal strategy games. You carved out your dungeon, filled your rooms, and in a sense you built the level – you could build your dungeon so that, in your mind, no hero could ever get inside. I really wanted players to feel as if they were creating the greatest dungeon ever.”

… continued