Gaming Made Me: Ken Levine

2K Boston’s Ken Levine reveals the games that influenced him most during his early years in Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s latest “Gaming Made Me” feature. Apparently Ultima Underworld was a big one for him:

Ultima Underworld has got to be my next game. Other games have sort of tried to put you in a place but the technology just wasn’t there. Ultima Underworld was the first game where you could have different elements that the designer created, coming together to interact with each other in totally amazing and surprising ways.

I always remember one of the first true immersive experiences I had as a gamer; I was being chased by some goblins, and of course the world was really crude, but I was seeing these bit mapped goblins chasing me down a corridor and I was low on health so I was fleeing them and I turned this corner thinking (I got away from them!). I turned the corner to find this giant spider and all of a sudden I was in a scenario that the designers probably never contemplated.

The designers trusted their system enough to know all they needed to do was put a goblin down in one place and they put a spider further down the hall. The game (and the gamer!) would handle the rest.

Unlike Wizardry where all of the combats were in these sort of discrete blocks, the game system in Ultima Underworld allowed these interactions to happen that were unpredictable. You could kite the goblins to the spider and I had never encountered anything like that before. The world was so convincing. It was a very limited but sort of rich space and it stunned me. It opened up my eyes to what could be done with videogames as not things you play but things you experience.