Sydney Morning Herald – While queuing up in the EA business area at Gamescom in Cologne last year, waiting to get hands-on time with the likes of Titanfall and Battlefield 4, I was startled to see a familiar title stuck on one of the area’s many doors. I saw “Dungeon Keeper” and gasped, then turned to the EA staff member who was taking me to my appointments.

“You’re remaking Dungeon Keeper?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“No!” I almost shouted. “How did I not know about this? I love Dungeon Keeper!”

“Oh, would you like a demo?”

“YES!”

The original Dungeon Keeper and its sequel remain two of my all-time favourites. They came out around the time I got my first well-paid 9-5 day job, when I had disposable income and could afford my first gaming PC and state of the art (for the time) games to play on it.

Playing the villain was a rare thrill, especially with the game’s deliciously sardonic sense of humour. Before each level – in which you would tunnel out rooms and corridors and fill them with treasure, monsters, and traps, in preparation for the arrival of some noble hero or other – a delightfully evil spoken intro would describe the idyllic place that was about to be conquered by your slavering hordes. Neatly bookending this would be a second voiceover at the end of the level, describing the destruction you had wrought.

Back in Cologne, my friendly PR rep managed to secure me an unscheduled ten minute session with the new Dungeon Keeper, and within seconds my excitement had shrivelled to nothing. This was not the free-flowing villainous sandbox of the original games. Where I could once dig out a new room in less than a minute, this new version could take up to 24 hours for a single square, always with the reminder that I could spend real-world money to buy gems to speed things up.