[I recently discovered that I missed out a large number of #1 games from earlier in the ’90s, and with help I’m working through one a week. Like Starwing, this post is written by Martin of anaccidentalman.]
It is hard to approach Dungeon Keeper without having something to say about the nature of evil, and its depictions in video games and the media at large. The game does raise some pretty deep philosophical questions… and then answers them with fart noises. In the world of Dungeon Keeper, evil is better than good, because evil has more fun. Don’t think too hard about it, just build a nice big torture room so that you might coerce some hapless would-be heroes to join your legions of the damned.
Certainly, it does a good job of making its evil seductive. Before you even start playing the first level, you are greeted by the incredible narration of Richard Ridings (known these days as the father of both Freya Ridings and Peppa Pig), voice dripping with disdain, describing the idyllic village of Eversmile upon which you are about to wreak havoc, and how its people are “plagued only by aching facial muscles, and not anthrax as we had hoped”. Every level has a similarly pithy introduction, as well as an epilogue describing the fate of the hamlet in question once you have had your evil way with it, and they are all outstanding.
Past that, the seduction comes in the form of a well-paced set of tutorial levels, which each dole out enough new concepts to keep from becoming stale, while avoiding an information overload from throwing in too much too fast, as well as the basic satisfaction of watching a group of cackling, shrieking imps dig out tunnels and chambers to your specification at the click of a button, the sounds of their pickaxes chipping rhythmically at the rock providing a constant and pleasant feeling that things are being achieved. In fact, sound in general is the one area where Dungeon Keeper most clearly excels, with moody industrial music providing the perfect background atmosphere for the cries and cheers and, yes, fart noises of your busy minions as they spar in the training room or do research in the library.
Before too long, though, you will have built all the rooms available to you, brought in a suitably motley crew of underlings and prepared them for combat, and started to exhaust the limited gold supplies needed to pay for all of this. Around this time, at least in the opening levels, the first bands of intrepid adventurers will start to descend into your den of villainy, the gentle rumble of productivity in the soundscape giving way to a cacophony of chaos as your loyal subjects go to war. Ostensibly, these adventurers are here to end your reign of terror over the land, but the truth that becomes fairly evident as you play is that maintaining a proper evil lair is a full-time job, and frankly, you are providing paid employment, as well as food and lodgings, to a group of willing volunteers. Any harm that is being done here is done purely in self defense. Anyway, eventually, you’ll slaughter enough of these low-level rubes to attract the ire of the Lord of the Land himself, a self-important blowhard who serves as the final boss of any given level. Given that he is invariably a pompous aristocrat with delusions of grandeur, it makes it very difficult to see why anyone would root for the nominally ‘good’ side in this conflict.
In that last paragraph I have, obviously, stacked the deck ludicrously in favour of one particular reading. I could instead talk about the clearly exploitative labour practices you are made to endorse. Imps, the creatures who do all the actual physical work involved in constructing your dungeon, are the only ones that don’t get paid a wage and are treated as completely replaceable — other minions enter your dungeon through a portal at intervals defined by mystical and unknown algorithms, but new imps can be generated by a simple button press. Or we could get onto how the only female-coded creature in your roster, the Dark Mistress, is a leather-clad BDSM enthusiast defined entirely by her sexuality in a game that is otherwise decidedly lacking in anything remotely resembling sexual content. In one light, Dungeon Keeper is a knowing and smartly transgressive takedown of the whole concept of ‘good vs. evil’; in another, it’s banal edgelording of the worst kind.
Another approach is to examine Dungeon Keeper‘s enduring legacy in the world of video games. It serves, in a sense, as the last part of the trilogy that began in Theme Park; a series of simulations of the day-to-day management of some kind of business, be it amusement park, hospital, or the dark pits of Hell. Alongside the continuation, Dungeon Keeper also introduced some new and unique elements. Elements like waves of steadily more troublesome enemies assaulting your base, which would ultimately serve as the formative DNA for a whole genre that took off once the concept of ‘mobile gaming’ became commonplace — that of the tower defense game. Perhaps, given this, it should come as no surprise that in 2014, a mobile version of Dungeon Keeper was released in this mold. It was roundly panned for particularly predatory implementation of microtransactions to monetize gameplay. The banality of evil proved even more powerful than the fun parts.
