A history of Devil May Cry (2001 – present)

Words: Karl Smallwood

Devil May Cry is listed as a hack-and-slash adventure game, which is unfair to the game itself as it lumps it with a heap of cheap, pocket money fodder. Whereas most other games rely on endlessly pressing a single button until every enemy falls over from excitement, DMC has some of the hardest and most difficult gameplay known to videogaming.

The games difficulty is so notorious, that in the third game they re-released it with another difficulty level, just for people who sucked too hard to control the power of Dante, but more on him in a second, first it’s important to explain the games order.

The game’s true chronological order is DMC3, DMC1, DMC4 and then finally DMC2. Why? Well the commonly accepted reason is that DMC2 sucked the fat one. The second game was so poorly received the company that created it shunned it into the darkness and released 2 far more awesome prequels instead. If DMC 2 was a person it would be every member of the Jackson 5 without a lead coffin, it’s that ignored.

The game series focusses mainly on Dante, a half demon, demon hunter (yeah he’s all deep and brooding like that), a silver haired wise cracking hero, who has taken more beatings than Chris Brown’s phonebook. To be honest if it wasn’t for the fact he spends the majority of his time punching the denizens of the underworld to death, he’d probably be a great guy to go for a beer with.

Throughout the series Dante clashes with demons, devils, monsters and more often than not, his identical twin brother.

Seen here, setting their sights on shooting Jedward in the face.

 The game itself though, was almost never made. Originally, the game started life as a Resident Evil sequel, which you can see here. The game featured the gothic castles, some of the enemies and indeed a similar white haired hero to DMC; however it was lacking one thing, demons obliterating action.

Shinji Mikami, one of the lead designers saw the game as too much of a departure from the original Resident Evil franchise and wanted the scrap the whole thing; however he noticed some elements could be saved and has an idea. Using the environments and enemies from the failed Resident Evil game, they combined it with a bug discovered in another Capcom title, gave it a few months and boom, Devil May Cry was born.

In fact this bug proved to key to the signature game-play of DMC, it allowed players in another title to infinitely juggle enemy characters, the bug was immediately fixed, but the developers thought it looked really fucking cool and not only implemented it into DMC, but built the entire game around it. Just to clarify, they built an entire game, an entire multi million pound franchise around making one guy look like a total badass.

 
The sofa is reinforced to help hold his steel balls in place.

 In fact it is Dante’s appearance alone that has pretty much sold the series, a fact proven by the newest iteration of the game, a reboot which among other things made the once loveable hero, look like an experiment in how punchable you can make a face look.

The correct answer is, to never stop punching.

The backlash from fans was so negative and so full of venom, it’s rumoured that cobra’s began spewing from the designers computers, finally they caved and redesigned Dante to be more like his original self. Leaving the possibilities for the reception for next instalment up in the air, where no doubt Dante would shoot it 50 times and punch it into the Earth’s core.