Over on the OtherSide Entertainment forums, Sara — one of the company’s employees — has posted a question concerning games “spawned from Underworld“:

I’ve seen some discussion on games that are “spiritual successors” and similar in game play. What are some of the games that you play/have played that have given you that same Underworld feeling?

If you think about it, there’s a mismatch between the title and the question actually being posed. If we’re talking about games that Ultima Underworld spawned, we almost have to include the entirety of the first-person shooter genre from 1992 onward. The reason for this is that John Carmack himself has specifically cited Ultima Underworld as the inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D:

“According to id Software programmer John Carmack, the game’s engine was inspired by a technology demo of Looking Glass Studios’/Origin’s first-person CRPG, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss from 1991. Carmack claimed he could make a faster renderer. In this he was successful. The Wolfenstein engine lacks many features present in the Underworld engine, such as height changes, sloped floors and lighting, but it runs well on relatively weak hardware.”

(Actual text taken from here.)

Wolfenstein 3D is rightly known as the “grandfather” of 3D first-person shooters, as it both popularized the genre and defined the basic “run and gun” mechanics thereof. Rare indeed is the first-person shooter that does not take at least some inspiration from Wolfenstein 3D. And since Ultima Underworld directly inspired the Wolfenstein 3D engine, we could almost think of Underworld as the great-grandfather of the FPS genre.

But the question that OtherSide’s Sara poses in the actual forum post is somewhat different, and inquires about games that could arguably be spiritual successors of Underworld instead, offering gameplay and narrative experiences that bear some resemblance to what was on offer in Underworld. This makes for a much shorter list, populated by the likes of The Elder Scrolls games, Arx Fatalis, and a handful of others.

Oh, also: I don’t know if much can be made of this, but I observe that the OtherSide Entertainment Twitter account happens to be following CryTek’s Twitter account. Thus far, no engine has been announced for the game, nor have OtherSide responded to inquiries thereabout. But as near as I can tell, CryTek is the only company that makes a 3D engine that OtherSide is following on Twitter.

It might be nothing, maybe just a courtesy, or the result of a friendship between folks at OtherSide and folks at CryTek. Still, there’s no denying that CryEngine is an amazing piece of game creation middleware, absurdly powerful and capable of delivering gorgeous graphics and gameplay. One imagines that a very amazing dungeon-delving experience could be crafted with just such an engine.