What a gamer sees in a game doesn't always jive with what the developer intended. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- as long as the gamer likes what he ends up with, of course.

We recently saw a demo of Hunted: The Demon's Forge, a third-person...well...on the product sheet, publisher Bethesda is calling it a third-person co-op action game for the 360, PS3, and PC -- that much we can all agree on. But it's when the developers at inXile Entertainment start describing their baby that we start seeing things differently.

Before the demo started, they summoned a few great names in dungeon-crawling gaming to set things up for the audience: Baldur's Gate, The Bard's Tale...even Dragon Age: Origins. But we saw something decidedly different in Hunted....

What the developer sees

"This game is about bringing the old dungeon crawl to today's gamer," says Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile. Before you dismiss that as marketing talk, however, know that the industry veteran has been in the biz for over 25 years and has helped bring out such famous classics as The Bard's Tale, Baldur's Gate, Wasteland, Fallout, Icewind Dale, and others.

"Wizardry was the first game I became totally addicted to," he says, explaining his passion for fantasy gaming. Fargo goes on to discuss how the genre evolved from there to The Bard's Tale, the Ultima series, Might and Magic, and Dungeon Master, before they became more action-oriented with Ultima Underworld and even first-person shooters like Heretic and Hexen. "All those games did well, because I think they went back to the original, romantic notion of going into a dungeon, looking for the secret doors, finding the chest, finding the berserkers...all that great stuff."

Anyone who's encountered the room of 396 berserkers in the original Bard's Tale (1985) can probably relate to what Fargo is saying, but might he be a little stuck in the past? "I sit at home with my big TV and wonder what it would be like to play that [traditional] style of gameplay today," he says. "The users who play those products are different today, right? It's 2010. So we want to take who gamers are today and mix it up with the essence of those old, classic dungeon crawls, especially for those who haven't experienced those or who want to experience them again -- and that's how this product was born."

So Fargo sees a little Wizardry, a little Bard's Tale, a little Ultima, Baldur's Gate, or The Elder Scrolls in Hunted: The Demon's Forge, huh?

Sorry, but that's a bit of a stretch....