Beat The Boss
- Paulie
- Mar 5, 2023
- 7 min read
This article was written by guest writer Jimmy Woodman. Beware spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero and Night in the Woods. I guess also for Lord of the Rings?
“There are fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world,” grumbles Gandalf in the mines of Moria, midway through The Fellowship of the Ring. In the context of almost every game made since 1980, Gandalf is absolutely correct. The logic of video game escalation dictates deeper = worse, scarier, bigger bads than ever. The boss lies at the base, the deepest point. It’s true for dungeons. And caverns. For your caves, shutes, shafts, crevasses, chasms and pits. Mountains even, if you turn it upside down. Mines though, like Moria, ought to sit slightly to the side of all of these. The boss may be at the bottom, but mines after all, are man-made structures, structures for work. People go there to earn a living, to plumb the depths and darkness for treasure. They are not naturally formed caverns, nor labyrinths designed to ensnare or trap explorers, nor ruins of a forgotten civilisation which has been buried beneath the waves of time. Mines are functional. Video games, in general, care more about whether mines are fun to be in for players. The exceptions to this rule, however, engage with far deeper history of labour and people writing about that labour. Let’s take that rickety elevator down together and poke around in the darkness for these glimmering little cultural seams.
From the very start, the affinity between mines, Lord of the Rings and video games has been strong. The early text-based roguelikes The Dungeons of Moria (1983) and its expanded successor Angband (1990) are basically the Epic of Gilgamesh of the dungeon crawl. Developed by a computer nerd who found life so intolerable without his favourite text-based game, Rogue, that he needed to make his own, the player descends deeper into the mine of Moria to fight the Balrog (Durin’s Bane for my fellow Tolkein heads). At first, you battle goblins, then cave trolls, and finally Mr. D. Bane himself. Escalation in this case is primarily structural and Moria’s legendary difficulty sharpens the essence of deeper meaning tougher, scarier, bigger.
Despite the challenge, the shift in medium from book or film to video game has a curious effect that has continued ever since Moria. Where the original heroes of the Fellowship flee in the Lord of the Rings canon, Moria’s self-insert player character is supposed to defeat the Balrog. It may take many hours of trial-and-error, intelligent strategy, and some considerable luck to do so but triumph is the only eventual win-state and canonical ‘ending’ of the game. Much like how my canonical ending is that I will one day descend to the depths of the tunnels I am sure are beneath my workplace to defeat my boss in single combat.
