The Fifteen Finest Dungeon Games
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It's hard to think of a meatier or more epic game than Skyrim, and with more than 150 dungeons in the game, Bethesda was really spoiling us. They weren't just generic, either, plonked down to break the monotony of traversing lush, fertile countryside and meticulously designed towns. Oh no: the vast majority of them had keenly observed storylines, and offered sufficient rewards for us to become obsessed with visiting them all. Indeed, given Skyrim's overarching scope, you could probably spend an entire virtual lifetime checking them all out.
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Ultima Underworld's subtitle - The Stygian Abyss - gave an inkling that it might be heavy on the dungeons, and indeed it didn't disappoint on that front. The first Ultima game without any input from Richard Garriott (although Warren Spector was involved as producer), it was also the first proper RPG with a first-person perspective. In other words, it's a great big slab of dungeon history. The likes of Ken Levine and CliffyB have cited it as an influence. Years ahead of its time.
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Time to head back to the Stone Age of videogames: 1987, to be precise. A time when RPGs were turn-based and graphics resembled bad ASCII art. But not Dungeon Master. Released for the mighty Atari ST (it was the ST's best-selling game ever), it broke ground by being both real-time and 3D (after a fashion). If you're looking for the point at which RPGs as we know them were born, then Dungeon Master is it - its influence has been acknowledged by a number of faithful fan-made ports to more modern platforms. Given that Dungeon Master's dungeons were the first ones that actually looked convincing (and therefore possessed that essential scuzzy atmosphere), you could argue that all of those dungeons you've trawled over the years could be traced back to here.
