Descent To Undermountain – a first-person dungeon-crawler based on the technology behind Interplay’s popular shooter series, Descent – is often regarded as Avellone’s first developer credit in the videogames industry, which is unfortunate, as the game was basically terrible. “I didn’t know what I was getting into!” he laughs. “I was very happy to work on it at the time, though. They were trying to add gravity and first-person combat into the Descent engine, you know, so they could create something [like] Ultima Underworld. The engine just wasn’t set up to do that, and we didn’t have the sheer amount of programming power available to make that happen. I want to be clear and say there was nothing wrong with the Descent engine, per se, it was just that we didn’t have the know-how or the resources to make it into an Ultima Underworld-esque experience.”
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