Fantasy is one of the most popular genres and is covered in books, movies and video games. PC Games Hardware takes a look at how the Fantasy games developed over the years.
The Fantasy genre is extremely popular among gamers and if you take a look at the bestseller rankings or the movies that have been successful in the past year, it becomes obvious that this actually is a general fact. Several game developers are aware of the trend and make use of the Fantasy genre since the theme gives them almost infinite possibilities.
That's Fantasy But what actually is Fantasy? The roots of the Fantasy genre are linked to myths and sagas. The genre itself can be split up in several subgenres like Dark Fantasy, High Fantasy or Science Fantasy (Steampunk). Today Fantasy is used as a modern genre for all themes and topic that contain supernatural, fabulous or magical aspects. Almost any Fantasy game, and especially the RPGs, comes up with some sort of dwarf, sorcerer, vampire or whatever.
Fantasy in games With the Fantasy genre game developers have almost no limits for their creation. The story, characters, locations, items, environment and any other element of the game can be adjusted or developed without any restrictions. It is interesting to see that Fantasy is strongest among role-playing or adventure games. Real-time strategy games that use the theme are a lot rarer and you have to search for a long time until you can find a proper first person shooter that deals with Fantasy.
History and evolution The Fantasy genre is as old as the PC itself. One of the first games was The Wizard's Castle from 1981. From the text based adventure the genre evolved along with the hardware. The text based titles were followed by the Point-and-Click Adventures and role-playing games. With the Internet the online RPGs started their career. There had also been some Fantasy games in the strategy genre and even some first person shooters adopted the theme. But the common Fantasy game is still either a adventure or a RPG.
The beginning of a Fantastic journey Today PC Games Hardware wants to present some of the Fantasy games that every gamer should at least have heard about and some that are regarded to be the most representative titles in the genre. What do you think about Fantasy? Is the theme interesting for you as a gamer?
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)..i remember waking up 2 hours before school to be able to play it,forget the name,though you moved an "X" around a sort of 2d maze which revealed itself pixel by pixel,and every now and again you'd encounter a "Y" whereby you would live or die depending on some mind bogglingly simple code(though it probably was totally random)....gr8 game though,loved it.
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