Crumbling late Victorian towns with horrific stories, abandoned houses that hide unmentionable cults, libraries full of forbidden books.
Since 1981, forty (almost) precise years, the atmospheres listed above have been the daily bread of the de players Call of Cthulhu, the first, greatest, most foundational horror RPG in the history of the medium, which over the course of four decades has given a fundamental contribution to building the mechanics of the game in a dark setting, both analog and digital.
Today we celebrate him, with a special on his history, on his legacy, on what his future would be beautiful, above all looking at the context of the video game.
Call of Cthulhu, an RPG classic
On November 14, 1981, in the middle of the golden age of the paper RPG, a new product came to light which, working on the basic regulation of RuneQuest (1978), had the ambition to build a real "horror role-playing game", a break-in scenario a landscape dominated by D&D fantasy.
The core of the operation was a rebalancing of the gaming system - the D100, still defined today as one of the most elementary in the gaming scene - to build a dynamic based on mechanisms of detection, collective narration and interrogation.
All obviously starting from Lovecraft, the famous and wonderful father of weird horror of the early twentieth century, whose cycle of tales still constitutes one of the pillars of the twentieth-century imaginary together with that of other giants such as Tolkien or Asimov.
If heroism, exploration, sense of wonder, magic or combat was the core of the game in Dungeons & Dragons and RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu introduced for the first time the idea of playing ordinary people struggling with supernatural horrors discovered in the most singular ways (for example, the investigation into a theft at the city museum).
Throughout the 80s, The Call of Cthulhu was undoubtedly one of the absolute pillars of roleplaying, with various expansions that allowed you to play in the Lovecraftian canonical setting (the New England of the 20s and 30s), in the "present" or in still in other epochs.
The game still enjoys great fortune, with many players including youngsters engaged in building delightfully Lovecraftian campaigns; Chtulhu was also able to inspire boardgame authors and other RPG "sons" of him (In the Footsteps of Cthulhu, for example), without forgetting, of course, contributions made to the video game.
Playing with fear
Call of Cthulhu is an "important" game.
It is not only for its great fortune, nor for its having built a completely new type of role-playing game for that historical moment, the investigative, from which dozens and dozens of games have been inspired; it is above all for his having built mechanics that have fully entered the language of the horror game, starting from one characteristic in particular: sanity.
For the first time in a game (and, later, video game), with the mechanics of sanity, it was not the life of our alter-ego that was in jeopardy. his psyche, his contact with reality and his ability to resist horrible visions. A small Copernican revolution, as it expanded the characteristics of the character and placed other playful and narrative elements at the center of the table, drawing inspiration from theHP Lovecraft's love of putting the archetype of the reasonable and staid post-Victorian man in check, driven into madness by disturbing events and beyond our reach.
Investigation and sanity have therefore found themselves at the basis of a real gameplay model innovative, an integral part of the way campaigns are run: two elements so well-intertwined as to give way to a perfect combination also for the world of video games.
The brand's video games
The Call of Cthulhu legacy in the video game world is deep and interesting and, above all, it takes place on different levels.
Undoubtedly today, the combination of sanity and investigation encompasses numerous products, the most recent of which is The Sinking City of Frogwares, so much so that "Lovecraftian game" has become a real sub-genre (see the "Lovecraftian" label on Steam to believe): games focused on a set of narrative elements and atmospheres that have to do with elements such as cosmic horrors as distant as they are threatening or mysterious cults of possessed with the aim of annihilating humanity, sometimes with direct links with Lovecraft's work (see The Sinking City, which reworks part of his narrative canon), sometimes simply paying homage to those atmospheres.
In this context, the presence of the RPG of The Call of Cthulhu in the videogame market is much more limited than we might think. To exist it is an entire line of official games bearing the title “Call of Cthulhu": A couple of graphic adventures from the early 90s (Shadow of the Comet e Prisoner of Ice), two first-person games (Dark Corners of the Earth del 2005 e Call of Cthulhu del 2018) and finally two per piece of furniture (The Wasted Land e Cthulhu Chronicles).
These are very different games, which have more or less followed the evolution of the videogame market; the two graphic adventures of the 90s for example seem a typical choice of the period (remember that it was the golden age of the genre), and perhaps still today one of the best adaptation solutions imaginable. Any typical Call of Cthulhu adventure is in fact the story of a group of investigators who must investigate a crime or a mysterious fact which almost unconsciously brings them into contact with the horrors of the Myths.
Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice largely echoed this setting, with the obvious replacement of the group of PCs with an investigator PC / alter ego of the protagonist and the use of settings that recalled the CoC setting manuals.
Partially different speech should be done instead for Dark Corners of the Earth e Call of Cthulhu: with the evolution of the videogame as a medium, more and more immersive and impactful, lhe licensed tries the adventure game path by binding to the first person perspective, with the aim of making the player feel the protagonist of cosmic horror and its effects.
Obviously it was not a question of real FPS, which would have distorted excessively the approach of the role-playing game, but of games that blended elements of the latter genre, of survival horror (if we think about it, anticipating the vogue of this genre in the first person, made official with Amnesia: The Dark Descent only in 2010) and investigative. To date, the two games - unfortunately considered by many to be unsatisfactory as they are affected by numerous design defects and problems - are the only attempts to fully and impactfully transpose the famous RPG line, with all its fundamental characteristics: the licensed setting, the detection as the engine of part of the game, obviously sanity and other mechanics of "consummation" of the PG.
Unfortunately, it is clear that the license has not been able to show all its power, mostly due to a question of budget and production difficulties.. Evidently, The Call of Cthulhu has been seen as a brand to invest in up to a certain point, and this is singular, especially if we think that as mentioned before Lovecraft and his poetics are true protagonists of the contemporary video game, and their traces are found in various masterpieces, from Silent Hill to Doom, going through whatever else you can think of.
Evidently, regardless of his success and that of The Call of Cthulhu, in the videogame the “official” Lovecraft continues to have a similar fate to that which affected him in the cinema. As in the seventh art, perhaps due to its dark and nihilistic poetics, Il Solitario has always been seen as too difficult or depressive to deserve a transposition "from triple A", and with him, alas, the role-playing game that made him known in the world.
Sandy Petersen, between game and video game
If already the story of The Call of Cthulhu was not exciting on its own, the icing on the cake of this story is linked to the author of the game, the aforementioned Sandy Petersen.
And why, you will say? Only because he created a great little masterpiece capable of founding an entire canon of play?
No, not only that.
The point is, Petersen was not only an analog game designer, but a digital one as well.
Digital, yes. Joined Chaosium in the early 80s as an author, the good Sandy continued to devote himself to role playing for about a decade, until 1989, when he also began to play the role of digital game designer, working on various games: Darklands (fantasy rpg with a medieval setting), Hyperspeed (space combat simulator), and real hits like Syd Meier's Pirates, Civilization, but above all Wolfenstein 3D, Doom II and Quake. And again, in the middle of the following decade, on his curriculum we find a collaboration with Ensemble Studios for Age of Empires, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings e alle loro espansioni Rise of Rome e The Conquerors.
Disoriented?
I can tell you without problems that I myself, reading this highly respected curriculum years ago, was nothing short of stunned. It is a figure multifaceted to say the least, committed so much in the courageous and successful enterprise of giving life to the first horror role-playing game in history, moreover with the ability to rework a myth of contemporary horror literature, and subsequently both to decline some of those atmospheres in games with similar atmospheres such as Quake and Doom and then completely change register with you work on turn-based and real-time strategy.
Figures like Petersen, suspended between analogue and digital game without solution of continuity, have in fact studded the sector in those years of transition that were the 80's, suspended between two moments in the history of entertainment. And yet, the more we read that curriculum the more the impression is that Petersen is really one of the pillars of "game design" at three hundred and sixty degrees, capable of declining his talent in a thousand different streams.
And precisely for this reason, however, the absence of a Call of Cthulhu video game that has managed to emerge as truly solid appears strange.
And the future?
At this point it would be easy to talk about desired, about games we would like, of hopes in tail shots of Call of Cthulhu in the digital environment that make people say "it's the right time!", but it would also be a difficult hope to see concretely with certainty. We can only reflect on the state of things.
Absurdly, one of the most beloved "brands" of RPG of all time has not had a really solid videogame transposition and it seems that it may not have it for a long time, at least at the moment. It is a situation that paradoxically shares with many other RPGs, whose digital twins are often uncertain and poor, but that looks tragic when we think that Petersen himself was also a (co) protagonist of a great phase of the videogame market.
Will things change?
Perhaps, as we recalled in this article last year, all it takes is a brave and crazy team, able to radically tell the world of Lovecraft and Petersen.
Or maybe, simply, no one has the courage to challenge Cosmic Madness.
In the meantime, best wishes again to The Call of Cthulhu.
On the cover: reworking of the cover artwork of the seventh edition of The Call of Cthulhu
