by Brown Robert
All players must now vote on which of them is going to be lynched as a suspected Werewolf, and the majority vote always wins (which means it is usually easier when you have an odd number of villagers because a tie doesn’t count). Once this has been done, the Game Master points to the lynched player and says, “You have been lynched and are now dead.” This player now reveals her card. Needless to say, the Villagers do not want to lynch the Seer.
When this has been done, the Game Master says, “All players close your eyes. It is now night,” and the cycle begins again. The game will end in one of two ways. If the Werewolves manage to kill enough Villagers that they outnumber them, then the Werewolves win. If the Villagers succeed in lynching both of the Werewolves, then the Villagers win.
The Birth of the Arcade Werewolf
One of the first werewolf-themed video games to hit arcades was Sega’s 1988 hit Altered Beast. The game was originally released in Japan under the title Juoki, or “The Beast Lord.” Altered Beast was later adapted into versions for the Sega home game system, other home game systems, and personal computers (though many of these were unable to offer the same level of game play, with the available computers of the time). In most of these different versions, Altered Beast was designed to be a one-player game. The game was part of what has come to be called the “beat-’em-up” genre of scrolling games, in which the character walks from one side of the screen to the other and employs combinations of basic moves in order to defeat enemies.
The Curse
Though Altered Beast was based on certain characters from Greek mythology, no such story exists where Athena is kidnapped by Hades. There is a story in which Persephone, the daughter of the earth goddess Demeter, is kidnapped by him. However, Zeus did not send a resurrected warrior with werewolf powers to save her.
The game is set in ancient Greece and begins with the goddess Athena being kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld. Zeus searches for a hero to save her and decides to resurrect a fallen warrior. Zeus then grants this warrior the ability to shapeshift into a powerful beast so that he will be able to do battle with the many terrible creatures of the underworld.
The warrior leaves on his quest and encounters legions of monsters that he must defeat in order to continue on. When certain monsters are defeated (usually the ones that are flashing), orbs are released. As the warrior collects these orbs, he begins to transform. Once three orbs have been absorbed, the warrior assumes his full “altered beast” form, making him stronger, faster, and (for whatever reason) allowing him to throw fireballs. After he defeats the boss at the end of every stage, however, the warrior returns to his human form.
Werewolves of London
The game Werewolves of London was created by Viz Design, with versions to fit home computers of the time like the now-obsolete Commodore 64. The 8-bit game (which is a laughably low graphic quality in modern times) was originally scheduled for production and subsequent release by Ariolasoft in 1985, but the company went bankrupt before beginning production on the game. Two years later, the game was finally picked up for production by Mastertronic and released.
The Savage Truth
One special version of Werewolves of London was stored on a special tape medium called a “Flippy,” which could be used with both the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC home computers. This allowed purchasers to simply “flip” the data cassette to either side, depending on which of the two computers they owned. Basically, these tapes allowed for dual compatibility at a time when software was still being designed to work only for specific computers.
Werewolves of London is, as one might expect, set in London. The goal of the game is for the player, as a werewolf, to kill eight particular people. The targets were each members of an aristocratic family that cursed the player character with lycanthropy. However, the resulting transformations occur nightly instead of just during the full moon.
Werewolves of London offered players an interesting mix of action, role-playing, and strategy game elements. The game was even designed to adapt to the individual player’s reactions to certain situations. One could not simply go on a rampage and hope to win the game, for example. One element of the game was to avoid being found out by Scotland Yard, and more unnecessary murders would lead to increased police activity.
If the player, while in werewolf form, is touched by a police officer holding handcuffs, then the character is held in prison until the following day (when, in a situation only possible in the gaming world, the character is inexplicably freed from the cell and returned to human form). However, there is also a window of opportunity for the player to escape from the jail if a crowbar and torch can be found. These items allow the player to break out of the cell and escape via the prison’s underground sewers.
Beastly Words
NPC stands for “Non-Playable Character,” and refers to characters in a video game that cannot be controlled by the player. Such characters include assistance characters and opponents/”Bad Guys.”
Another interesting element of the game is that health is awarded for every person the player eats (whether it is one of the eight target characters or just some random NPC). When the character gets shot, the health meter begins a slow but steady decline, represented by an icon that is supposed to be a bag full of blood (but it’s hard to tell that’s what it is supposed to be, especially if you don’t already know). Finding and using certain items in the game, such as bandages, can slow this down (but not stop it). Once the player’s “blood bag” is empty, the character dies and the game is over … then it’s back to square one.
Werewolf: The Last Warrior
Werewolf: The Last Warrior was developed and released by the Data East Corporation in 1990. Originally released in Japan under the title Choujinrou Senki Warwolf, this game was designed for use with the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was the most popular home gaming system of the time.
In the game, the player assumes control of a character simply named, somewhat amusingly, “Werewolf.” This Werewolf guy has his hands full with saving a postapocalyptic wasteland from the clutches of his evil nemesis, a most atypical mad scientist named Dr. Faryan. Apparently, Dr. Faryan has nothing better to do with his time than to create monstrous, man-eating mutants in order to make the situation even worse (after all, the game is supposed to take place in a postapocalyptic world). Using his mutant-monster minions, the game explains that Dr. Faryan has managed to imprison every person on the planet (except you, of course).
To make the situation even more hilarious, the player’s character starts out the game as nothing but a normal dude just walking around the wastelands without a shirt on (and, due to the old graphics, he looks a lot like a hunchback). But have no fear because, once the player leads the character into contact with a big “W” (which, for reasons that are left fairly unexplained, is just sitting out in the middle of nowhere), he transforms into a werewolf. Even after a random homeless guy explains to the player what has happened, it still doesn’t really make sense how touching a big letter gives the character lycanthropy. Regardless, Werewolf now heads off to save the imprisoned inhabitants of the world and spends pretty much every second of the game kicking the snot out of some serious mutant-monster-minion booty.
Perhaps the most hilarious bad guy character rears his ugly head now and again throughout the game. He is a big bald guy, also with no shirt on (apparently, shirts were mostly optional after the apocalypse), whom the game dubs the “Giant Head.” This is funny because his head isn’t any more giantlike than it should be for his size. In fact, it’s pretty proportional. This character, many players have commented, is perhaps the easiest one to kill in the whole game. Every time the Giant Head is defeated, the player’s werewolf powers are given another boost … which also occurs for unexplained reasons.
In the end, Werewolf comes face-to-face with the evil Dr. Faryan, who immediately drinks some crazy concoction of werewolf juice that he whipped up in the lab. Of course, now he turns into a werewolf, too … o
nly he has giant blades for arms (unlike you) … because he’s a mutant werewolf … that makes sense, right? Werewolf: The Last Warrior may not go down in history as one of the greatest games ever to bless the many consoles of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it is certainly good for a laugh or two.
Wolfchild
The game Wolfchild was developed and released by Core Design Ltd. in 1992. Several console-compatible versions were created for a plethora of systems such as the Sega Genesis, Super NES, and Atari ST, to name just a few. Wolfchild, like many werewolf games of its kind, is of the side-scrolling, “beat-’em-up” style.
The story of the game follows the adventures of Saul Morrow to rescue his kidnapped father, Dr. Kal Morrow, who is a genetic scientist specializing in human-animal hybrids (because, apparently, you are supposed to believe that such a field of science exists). Saul’s entire family was murdered during the kidnapping, which was carried out by a terrorist group called CHIMERA, leaving him as the sole survivor.
Using his father’s experiment notes, Saul manages to find a way to transform himself into a wolf-man hybrid (though apparently only in certain circumstances because he only changes when a certain number of the right enemies have been defeated). With his new powers, Saul Morrow heads out on a mission to save his father and take his revenge on CHIMERA for murdering his family.
Wolfsbane
The PC game Wolfsbane was developed by Moonlight Games and released by Merit Studios Inc. in 1995. The game was meant for DOS- prompt computers, a now-defunct operating system that required the user to type in routing and execution in order to open and operate its programs or software. While the game had a “point-and-click” style of play, the computers it was designed for certainly did not.
In Wolfsbane, players assume the role of a traveling merchant who is attacked and bitten one night by a werewolf. He survives but now has the curse of lycanthropy. The goal of the game is for the player to follow clues and solve puzzles in order to discover a cure for the merchant’s werewolf curse before a set time limit expires.
The Beast Within
In the 1990s, third-person interactive games were considered a breakthrough in gaming. Unfortunately, however, the “interactive” part was usually limited to pointing and clicking on one choice from a list of options. While this allowed the game to have several possible outcomes, the player could not directly influence or take part in the resulting action sequences after each choice. These games used combinations of preshot video clips of live actors that linked together like a movie that could have a number of different plot twists and, sometimes at least, different final outcomes.
One such game was called The Beast Within, which was the second installment of a series called Gabriel Knight Mystery. The game was developed and released by Sierra On-Line, Inc. in 1995. The main character of the game, Gabriel Knight, looks and acts sort of like a mix between the detective Sherlock Holmes and a younger Abraham Van Helsing. The plot explains that Knight is descended from an ancient bloodline of “shadow-hunters,” men who are destined to battle the forces of evil.
After the first game, Gabriel Knight moves to his family’s castle in Bavaria. Shortly after settling in, a group of local villagers come to him and beg his help. They explain that a little girl from the village was mauled to death by a wolf, and they believe the wolf is actually a were- wolf. Knowing that Gabriel Knight is a shadow-hunter, they ask him to destroy the creature. His investigation leads him into a shaky alliance with an ancient Bavarian group of monster hunters, aptly named the Hunter Society.
Underworld: The Eternal War
Based on the Underworld movie franchise, Underworld: The Eternal War was developed by Lucky Chicken Games and released by Play It Ltd. in January of 2004, soon after the successful run of the first film of the series. The game is designed in the now rather popular “third-person shooter” format. This means that the player controls the firing and other actions of the played character from an elevated view.
Underworld: The Eternal War offers the player a choice between the two sides of the war between vampires and werewolves, on which the movie plots are based. On one hand, the player can choose to be the werewolf-killing vampire Selene. On the other hand, the player may choose to be the powerful werewolf named Raze. As far as game play goes, this one is very much a “shoot-’em-up” but with three dimensions of movement thanks to the wonders of modern gaming technology.
White Wolf’s Werewolf RPG Series
Probably the most popular werewolf-based role-playing game in history began with Werewolf: The Forsaken from White Wolf Publishing.
The developers of this game went all out in order to create a new and unique depiction of werewolves. The game offers a number of different werewolf types and tribes in order to suit the tastes of just about any lycanthropy enthusiast.
In the game, the werewolves refer to themselves as the “Garou,” which was taken from the obscure Frankish term that is the latter root for the French word for werewolf, loup-garou. These werewolves, much like the werewolves of Twilight and Underworld, consider themselves to be natural and sworn enemies of vampires. The player creates his or her own Garou character, using any combination of elements that ultimately make up the said character’s conception, origins, background story, and tribal affiliation.
The Savage Truth
In recent years, White Wolf has phased out the original Werewolf game guides and replaced them with a new, more universal system called GURPS: Shapeshifters. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role-Playing System. Since the new game system allows players to choose from a vast array of shapeshifters, Werewolf was slowly pushed out. These days, old copies of the original Werewolf: The Forsaken and Werewolf: The Apocalypse guidebooks can sometimes be found in certain bookstores, comic stores, or online.
The game first offers gamers a choice of three possible origins (or “breeds”) for their werewolf characters, which are as follows:
• Homid: This title refers to werewolves who were raised in human society, totally unaware of their lycanthropy until they experienced their initial transformation. This is the most commonly found breed of the Garou.
• Lupus: These are werewolves raised almost like natural wolves, mostly in the wild and away from people. They don’t fit in very well among humans, often sticking out like sore thumbs. Many werewolves of this breed do not even speak a human language, and usually they are hostile toward humans, believing that most of the world’s ailments are caused by them.
• Metis: This title refers to the sadly deformed and sterile offspring that often result from a mating between two werewolves. They are not as civilized as the Homids but not nearly as wild as the Lupus. Unlike the other two breeds, however, their wolf-human forms are permanent, and they are incapable of shapeshifting.
Once the player has chosen his character’s origin, it is time to choose a tribe. The Garou are divided into 13 primary tribes, thus allowing the player an even larger field from which to choose a group that suits his personality, beliefs, or tendencies. The tribes of the Garou are as follows:
• Black Furies: An almost completely female tribe of tough warriors, they only allow males among them if they are of the sterile Metis breed.
• Bone Gnawers: Basically, werewolves that live and act like homeless people.
• Children of Gaia: A peaceful tribe that seeks to secure a unity between all the Garou, regardless of breed or tribe. However, if forced to fight they do so with all the fervor of religious fanatics … because that’s what they are.
• Fianna: This is a tribe of werewolves from the Celtic regions, most well known for being partiers, storytellers, and very heavy drinkers. However, they are also the keepers of much of the Garou’s lost or forgotten myths.
• The Get of Fenris: Basically, think werewolves mixed with Germanic Vikings. Some members of this tribe hold to the German fascist beliefs of the recent past.
• Glass Walkers: This tribe of werewolves behaves more like a corporatio
n. Glass Walkers really dig technology, and as a result they have very strong connections with the human world … from corporations to organized crime.
• Red Talons: This tribe is militantly antihuman, so it does not allow Homid-bred members. They believe that the only way to heal Gaia (what we would call “Mother Earth”) is to wipe humans off the face of the planet.
• Shadow Lords: This tribe seeks to assume leadership of the Garou and hates the Silver Fangs who continue to claim that the old traditions of birth give them the right to assume that role no matter how poorly they execute it.
• Silent Striders: Werewolf gypsies … enough said.
• Silver Fangs: In the past, this tribe led the Garou. According to tradition, they still do. However, inbreeding with too much human nobility has led their later generations to be fairly incompetent.