The Lost Vikings: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
The Lost Vikings, released April 29, 1993 by the studio that would become Blizzard Entertainment and published by Interplay, handed one player three bodies at the same time and refused to let any of them be spare. Erik runs and jumps, Baleog fights, Olaf carries the shield, and a level is only finished when all three are standing at the exit, so every room has to be solved three times over in the same breath. What makes it an origin rather than a gimmick is the pressure that arrangement creates: your attention is divisible and their safety is not, and the moment you are absorbed in getting one of them past an obstacle is exactly the moment the other two are unattended. It is the origin of the lineage of games in which the player is not a protagonist but a person answerable for several protagonists at once, and of the insight that a party you must personally keep alive is a fundamentally different feeling from a party that fights for you.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
International Designated Anomaly No.123: Abandoned Village Buried gem
The store page lays out the situation in four lines and then stops. Every year a strange uninhabited village called the Abandoned Village appears. Every year exactly one girl is confined inside it as a sacrifice. Three special forces operatives go in. You control all four of them. That is the whole design, and it is stranger than it sounds, because the three going in and the one already trapped are not a squad you switch between for tactical variety, they are four people you are personally responsible for keeping alive at the same time. The store puts the consequence plainly: each time you let your guard down, one more of them becomes a victim of the anomaly. The village is generated randomly each run, the whole thing is fifteen minutes, and the question the game asks is simply whether you get out in that window or you do not. The graphics are deliberately classic-3D so it runs light. There is no official English title; Steam's own name field is in Japanese and the canonical URL it generated just says 123. Made by 727 Not Hound, a prolific Japanese solo horror developer with sixteen titles on Steam; a direct check of every one of those sixteen shows developer and publisher identical on all of them. A Switch version of this game was announced back in 2021, with the developer saying a publisher had approached them, but a search of Nintendo's official Japanese catalogue across ten different query forms returns no title under this name at all, and the developer wrapped up the series in 2023 calling it the end of season one. The console version never shipped. This is also not the first time this site has covered this developer, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise. Released July 25, 2022 at ¥800, it is at 92 percent across 27 reviews (25 positive, 2 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated-content disclosure and Steam's content descriptors completely empty. It grew out of a free version released on the Japanese freeware site Freem. It supports Japanese only, and of its 27 reviews exactly 2 are in English.