Vampires in games

As a well-known and iconic creature type, vampires are central to a variety of games, including board games, role-playing games, and video games.

These include a number of games where vampires are either incidental villains, or the primary villain of the game, as well as games that allow players to play as a vampire. It has been noted that vampires are "supernatural beings with a laundry list of fantastic abilities and a need for feeding on the living, which would presumably give numerous options for a plot".[1] As late as 2014, however, it was lamented that there were not enough video games featuring vampires, with one commentary noting that "Vampires have never lent themselves readily to video games" due to their combination of cerebral and passionate characteristics, which "need something that most video games can't handle at the best of times, great writing".[2]

Board games and card games

The Fury of Dracula is a board game for 2-4 players designed by Stephen Hand and published by Games Workshop in 1987. Fantasy Flight Games released an updated version in 2006 as Fury of Dracula, and a third edition in 2015 by the same name. WizKids Games released a fourth edition in 2019. In the April 1988 edition of Dragon (Issue 132), Jim Bambra liked the first edition of the game, saying, "[It] takes some of the best elements of role-playing games and neatly transposes them into an intriguing and fun board game." Bambra recommended the game, concluding, "Steeped in Gothic atmosphere and tinged with the unexpected, The Fury of Dracula game deserves to be in every gamer’s collection."[3]

In the trading card game Magic:The Gathering, vampires are quite iconic creatures of the colors black and red. Most of them share the ability to fly and to grow stronger (via +1/+1 counters) by dealing mortal damage to other creatures or to the players(according to the idea of gaining power from the blood of their victims). Shadows over Innistrad, a Magic: The Gathering expansion block consisting of the sets Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon, features vampires along with other horrors such as werewolves and demons.

In Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, vampire are all zombie-type monster cards: "Patrician of Darkness", "Vampire Lord", "Vampire Lady" and "Red-Moon Baby" ("Vampire Baby" in Japanese version). In Yu-Gi-Oh! R manga, the character Tilla Mook uses the card monster "Curse of Vampire".

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (published as Jyhad in the first or "Limited" edition and often abbreviated as V:TES) is a multiplayer collectible card game published by White Wolf Publishing, set in the World of Darkness.[4][5] The game was designed in 1994 by Richard Garfield and initially published by Wizards of the Coast and was the third CCG ever created.[6][7] As Garfield's first follow-up to his popular Magic: The Gathering collectible card game, he was eager to prove that the genre was "a form of game as potentially diverse as board games".[8] In 1995 the game was renamed from Jyhad to Vampire: The Eternal Struggle to increase its appeal and distance itself from the Islamic term jihad.[9]

Role-playing games

Dungeons & Dragons

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, the vampire is an undead creature. A humanoid or monstrous humanoid creature can become a vampire, and looks as it did in life, with pale skin, haunting red eyes, and a feral cast to its features. A new vampire is created when another vampire drains the life out of a living creature. Its depiction is related to those in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood Dracula and monster movies.[10] In writing vampires into the game, as with other creatures arising in folklore, the authors had to consider what elements arising in more recent popular culture should be incorporated into their description and characteristics.[11]

The vampire was one of the first monsters introduced in the earliest edition of the game, in the Dungeons & Dragons "white box" set (1974),[12] where they were described simply as powerful undead. They appeared again in the Greyhawk supplement.[13] The vampire later appeared in the first edition Monster Manual (1977),[14] where its description was changed somewhat to a chaotic evil, night-prowling creature whose powerful negative force drains life energy from victims.

One popular Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, Ravenloft, has as a central character a vampire named Strahd Von Zarovich, who is both ruler and prisoner of his own personal domain of Barovia. How Count Von Zarovich became the darklord of Barovia was detailed in the novel, I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire.[15]

Other role-playing games

The role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade has been influential upon modern vampire fiction and elements of its terminology, such as embrace and sire, appear in contemporary fiction.[16]

GURPS Cabal, a book that features a customizable campaign setting for the GURPS role-playing game system, depicts a modern-day secret society composed of vampires, lycanthropes and sorcerers who study the underlying principles of magic and visit other planes of existence and was integrated into Infinite Worlds, the "default" (core) setting for GURPS's 4th Edition. The Third Edition GURPS supplement Blood Types lists 47 different "species" of vampires describing 30 of them from both folklore and fiction in 23 listings (several are simply different names for the same type of vampire; for example the Burma's Kephn is considered a male version of the Penanggalen)

Shadowrun features vampires whose existence is explained by a resurgence of the Human Meta-Human Vampiric Virus. As such, the afflicted are not undead, but instead are still alive but radically changed by the retrovirus. They normally do not suffer from the supernatural limitations such as crosses, but still are vulnerable to sunlight. In the tabletop wargame Warhammer Fantasy, Vampire Counts are one of the playable forces.

Video games

One of the earliest video games featuring a vampire as the antagonist is The Count, a 1981 text adventure for various platforms, in which local villagers send the player to defeat Count Dracula.[17]

A number of video game developers "have taken inspiration from the vampire myth to create unique gaming experiences that have players hunting down the beasts as well as playing as a member of the undead".[18] Popular video games about vampires include Castlevania, which is an extension of the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula, and Legacy of Kain.[19]

A number of websites have compiled "best of" lists of vampire games, with games frequently mentioned including Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Darkwatch, Infamous: Festival of Blood, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.[1][18][20]

While most vampire-themed games involve some kind of combat between the player (either fighting vampires, or as a vampire fighting other foes), some games incorporate vampires without including those elements. In particular, The Sims 4 features the game pack, The Sims 4: Vampires, which includes Vampires as a life state, with Gothic-themed objects, outfits, interactions, aspirations, foods, and a Vampire Lore Skill. It is only available for digital download. The pack also features a new neighborhood called Forgotten Hollow which, fitting with the vampiric theme, has longer nighttimes than other neighborhoods. It takes elements from The Sims 2: Nightlife, The Sims 3: Late Night and The Sims 3: Supernatural.[21]

See also

References
  1. Drake, Jeff (March 17, 2020). "The 15 Best Games That Let You Play A Vampire". The Gamer.
  2. Hartup, Phil (April 17, 2014). "Why it sucks that there are so few vampire videogames". New Statesman.
  3. Bambra, Jim (April 1988). "Roleplaying Reviews". Dragon. TSR, Inc. (132): 14.
  4. Kaufeld, John; Smith, Jeremy (2006). Trading Card Games For Dummies. For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0470044071.
  5. Owens, Thomas S.; Helmer, Diana Star (1996), Inside Collectible Card Games, p. 66.
  6. Savage, R. Hyrum (2007). "Vampire: The Eternal Struggle". In Lowder, James (ed.). Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Green Ronin Publishing. pp. 345–347. ISBN 978-1-932442-96-0.
  7. Miller, John Jackson (2003), Scrye Collectible Card Game Checklist & Price Guide, pp. 248–249, 607–618.
  8. Garfield Reminisces on the Jyhad Archived December 16, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (interview with Richard Garfield, by Robert Goudie, July 2001. Retrieved January 10, 2008.)
  9. Ancient Influence - Peter Adkison Comments on the Early Days of Jyhad/V:TES (interview with Wizards of the Coast Founder and former CEO Peter Adkison, by Robert Goudie, February 2004. Retrieved March 26, 2010.)
  10. Weinstock, Jeffrey, ed. (2014). The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 192–193.
  11. Grebey, James (June 3, 2019). "How Dungeons and Dragons reimagines and customizes iconic folklore monsters". SyfyWire.
  12. Gygax, Gary, and Dave Arneson. Dungeons & Dragons (3-Volume Set) (TSR, 1974)
  13. Gygax, Gary and Robert Kuntz. Supplement I: Greyhawk (TSR, 1975)
  14. Gygax, Gary. Monster Manual (TSR, 1977)
  15. Kibblewhite, Gideon (December 1995). "The Great Library". Arcane. Future Publishing (1): 80.
  16. Jøn, A. Asbjørn (2001). "From Nosteratu to Von Carstein: shifts in the portrayal of vampires". Australian Folklore: A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies (16): 97–106. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
  17. Matthews, Ken (December 1984). "Scott Adams' Classic Adventures". Micro Adventurer. Sunshine Books (14): 17, 19.
  18. Cooper, Dalton (October 24, 2017). "10 Best Vampire Video Games". GameRant.
  19. Joshi, S. T. (2007). Icons of horror and the supernatural. 2. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 645–646. ISBN 978-0-313-33782-6.
  20. "10 Best VAMPIRE Games of All Time". Knnit. February 24, 2020.
  21. "Carl's Sims 4 Guide for Vampires Pack". Carl's Sims 4 Guide. Retrieved January 8, 2018.
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