The Lantern Hall
Painting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.
TermDigital term

Blobber

A first-person dungeon crawler in which the whole party moves around the grid as a single unit, or blob. Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic and Dungeon Master are classic blobbers; Legend of Grimrock and Etrian Odyssey kept the form alive.

A first-person dungeon crawler in which the whole party moves around the grid as a single unit, or blob. Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic and Dungeon Master are classic blobbers; Legend of Grimrock and Etrian Odyssey kept the form alive.

Quick answers

What does "Blobber" mean?
A first-person dungeon crawler in which the whole party moves around the grid as a single unit, or blob. Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic and Dungeon Master are classic blobbers; Legend of Grimrock and Etrian Odyssey kept the form alive.

Nearby in the archive

First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers')

Digital genre1975

Six adventurers, one square at a time, down a wireframe corridor toward something breathing in the dark: the first-person party crawl that players nicknamed the 'blobber'.

Painting: a party of six adventurers descending into a vast wireframe labyrinth of green lines, the corridors becoming stone.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Dungeon crawler1981

Six adventurers, a ten-level maze drawn in green lines, graph paper in the box, and no saving below ground: the Apple II dungeon crawl that defined the party-based computer RPG in America and Japan.

Painting: a bard playing a lute leads a small party of adventurers through the snowy, frozen streets of a walled medieval town at night.

The Bard's Tale

Computer RPG1985–2019

Mangar the Dark has locked Skara Brae in eternal winter, and only a bard, a few rogues and some junior magic users stand in his way: the Commodore 64 dungeon crawl that out-sold every CRPG of the 1980s.

Might and Magic Book One

Dungeon crawler1986

Jon Van Caneghem's 1986 debut, written almost single-handedly over three years and sold from his apartment: a vast first-person world whose knights-and-dragons surface hides a science-fiction secret.

Dungeon Master

Dungeon crawler1987

FTL's 1987 Atari ST landmark: a first-person dungeon crawl that ran in real time, let you grab objects with the mouse, and made you draw spells from runes while monsters shuffled toward you in the dark.

Eye of the Beholder

Dungeon crawler1991

Westwood's 1991 descent beneath Waterdeep married the real-time, step-by-step dungeon of Dungeon Master to official AD&D rules, and gave PC owners the VGA dungeon crawl they had been waiting for.

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