History of Computer Role Playing Games (1974-1983)

Matt Barton writes "I thought Slashdotters might be interested in my History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part I article on Armchair Arcade. It starts with the birth of the CRPG on mainframes and ends in 1983. I start by discussing tabletop D&D and number games like Strat-O-Matic, move into mainframe classics like dnd and Rogue, and then cover the first CRPGs for home computers. I wrote this article for CRPG fans who want to learn more about venerable old classics like Akalabeth, Temple of Apshai, Ultima, Wizardry, Tunnels of Doom, Dungeons of Daggorath, and Telengard. Please share your own stories!"

Legend of the Red Dragon

I used to get up at 6am to log onto a BBS and play LoRD before school started, it was a classic.

Early Influences - Miniatures

I agree that D&D had a huge influence on CRPG and miniature wargaming had a huge impact on D&D. The first pnp rpgs grew out of existing miniatures rules.

Rumour has it...

I start by discussing tabletop D&D....

Ahh... good old D&D. Better than Sex.... or so I'm told.

Wizard's Crown

Although slightly offtopic (wizard's crown was released in 1985), it is one of my favorite crpgs of all time, and it is obvious from the article where they got some of their ideas from. I still havn't beat the game.

Bard's Tale

That POS was the first one I played, although I saw some geeks playing Ultima I (I guess, or whatever) on the Apple IIe in the back of the classroom.

It was pretty fun as I recall.

Alternate Reality

I hope Part 2 remembers to cover Alternate Reality: The City (1985) and The Dungeon (1987) (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). Those games were amazing for their time. AR had a raycasting engine 7 years before Wolfeinstein 3D, animated background scenery, weather and sun systems, great music with synchronized sing-along lyrics, character alignments, it tracked hunger/thirst/encumbrance/temperaturee/etc. The series had an ambitious Matrix-esque [marktaw.com] 6-game plot scripted out (only the first of which was made, in two parts). It even implemented garbage collection in a literal sense: if your inventory exceeded your free RAM, the Devourer came and ate some of your items at random. A review [ataritimes.com] of the City tells more.

Summary

1974: Freshman year.
1983: Vowed to quit computer gaming.

Stay tuned for Part II (1984-1994), due out Tuesday (patch day!), in which I relate the story of how the now-famous Apple commercial lowered my Con by 2 and lured me back in.

Telengard

I tried getting back to Telengard after ~15 years. While there isn't a problem running a game in real-time, it becomes an issue when you have to wait ~5-10 seconds for the scene to render and only have a short window of opportunity to make an action before being assigned the default "pass". The situation was worse with IBM PCs - since processor speeds kept improving, any old game that relied on a slow processor for delays became almost unplayable (e.g. Ultima III - on a modern system the whirlpool would slag pirate ships before you could see it on screen, which was required to advance the plot.)

As a side note, these games aren't exactly Role-playing games. It's more on par with a combat-oriented red-box D&D (1st edition) where the only interest is in killing off monsters, as opposed to Paranoia where there is a mandatory focus on roleplaying (usually at the expense of the rules.) Regardless, I don't have anything against computer-run adventure programs.

Dungeons of Kairn

Back then I used to play a lot to a CRPG called "Dungeons of Kairn", developed by the same man that did "Aethra Chronicles" later. It was a fun game, and I enjoyed it quite a lot back then. The problem is that it was shareware, so it had only one dungeon. The author posted an university address to send the money to purchase the registered version, but it was no longer his current address when I played the game. Since then, I have tried to find him and purchase the game to play it in Dosbox, but he (and the registered version) seem to have vanished from history.

Don't forget Adventure for Atari 2600

Adventure [wikipedia.org] was a massively addictive game, once you stopped wondering why the dragons looked like ducks.

My childhood was lost to Ultima III

In Ultima III I used to love to create "roads" three chests wide between all the cities/dungeons/moongates so I could travel at will w/o fear of attack by wandering monsters.
Then I learned that I could do the same in the ocean with boats, once I trapped the whirlpool.

L=Land
M=Sea Monster
O=Whirlpool
S=Ship
W=Water
(fixed width font required)

WWWW
LWLL
LSLL
LMOL
LLLL

You could do this in the little fjord just north of Lord British's castle.

Slashdotted already

Database server down. Any reason why slashdot doesn't coralize [nyud.net] or link to mirrordot [mirrordot.org] in every article?

Trinkets

I miss the large boxes with real manuals and a game-related trinket. For example, the Orb of Moons in the Ultima 6 box.

What other games came with trinkets?

....so I'm looking for a couple of old games...

This seems like as good a place as any to ask for info on a couple of shareware titles I played back in the day on my 8088.

The first was, a pretty normal dungeon crawler done up with ASCII graphics. The only thing that really sticks out in my head about this game was a command on the order of "Activate your mad uncle Aleister's device...". I had a lot of fun with the game but lost the disc when my house burned and never managed to find it again. (The device, when activated, was a random teleport which could save your ass -- or leave you dead embedded in solid rock).

The other game was all text and as annoying as hell. It threw you randomly from prompt to prompt, event to event, and you'd have a few options at each prompt. Eventually (if you didn't die of plague beforehand, which happened more often than not) you'd get the Staff of Power (I think it was called) which would convert all of your assets into armies and your army would do battle with the bad guy army and if you won it'd offer you a chance to print out a certificate showing you'd won.

Wizardry

It's a shame that Werdna [slashdot.org] hasn't been active on slashdot for a while... I'd love to hear some inside scoop on the development of Wizardry from its co-creator. Wizardry and Ultima IV are still my two favorite CRPGs.

Temple of Apshai

When I was about 6 years old my dad bought an Atari 800 with a tape deck. I had few cartridge games for the system and we used to get a subscription to magazines with game code you could type in. We would back them up onto tape which failed so very often.

Anyway, when I was about 8 my mom bought me a game on cassette tape for the 800. The game came with a massive manual with a section devoted to descriptions of rooms. It took about a half hour to load the game off the cassette each time I wanted to play, but I would still try and play it faithfully. The game was really fun, when it would actually load. The tape eventually stopped working and I never played it again. I couldn't for the life of me remember the name, but I am thinking it was the Temple of Apshai game in the article as it looks just like it.

Telengard

FTFA:

Telengard was directly inspired by the PLATO dnd game mentioned above, with minimal graphics and randomized dungeons.

This is inaccurate: Telengard's dungeon is not random, but procedurally generated (rather like the universe of Elite).

Out of interest, this map [mazmanian.net] rather entertainingly shows someone's abortive attempt to map the dungeon (they got only a tiny fraction of the way through mapping the first level, tee hee).

Colour me old-school, if you like.

I never got the fascination of Colossal Cave on my Vic-20. But losing a long played Moria character at level 24 (1200 feet) on a VMS box using a 300 bps speed just because of a loss of carrier, really got on my nuts. I mean *really* got on my nuts. Sure, I got my revenge by killing the Balrog seven times over later on my own box, but... As for Nethack, it died, when they added the fountains. Sorry, but that is my view. Even games can get freeping creaturism. Nethack bloated in a spectacular way, when they added the fountains, not even a creep there.

Apshai

I think the DOS versions of the Apshai games are playable on Gametap.

Thanks for the reminder --- Moria

Thanks for the reminder of much time spent playing Moria instead of completing my school work at Rutgers University. I was just able to compile the code under MacOS 10.4.8 with a minimum of effort and it is (of course!) as I remember it :-)

Nethack

Nethack [nethack.org] was originally released in 1987. The last update to the website was in 2004, a total of seventeen years of evolution.
Nethack itself is a branch of Rogue, which itself came out in 1980.

TFA does not even mention Nethack. So much for history...

DUNGEON

I played DUNGEON on a PDP-11. It was the spark igniting the flame that is my raging video game addiction. I have played many clones - Bard's Tale, Diablo, Dungeon Siege, etc., but this is the original for me.

Tunnels of Doom

I remember having to "Kings Quest" from tape. Later I got the expansion pack from Asgard software. It had levels based on Dr. Who, and I think one based on K-Mart. Anyone else have this?

Phantasie & Wizard's Crown

Phantasie I & III for the PC were easy but addicting. The graphics were simple but you really got into the story. On the other side of the fence, Wizard's Crown (& Eternal Dagger which I somehow never saw for the PC) was difficult, focusing more on tactics. I never finished that last dungeon.

All those games were from SSI. Really fun. Ahh the memories.

What, no Zork?

>Turn left
...you have been eaten by a grue. Game over.
Best text game. Ever!

"The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its horrible fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few ever survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale." - Zork I

Re:Rogue used @ for the player, not *

The subject says "used" as though rogue is past-tense...

Lots of people still play rogue. I prefer Nethack, of course. By "prefer", I mean, I prefer its gameplay to any other computer game that I have tried *ever*.

Re:Rogue used @ for the player, not *

And maybe one day you will beat it.

Re:Self promotion

Why is it that everyone has to self promote on Slashdot?

You can't get the news any faster than from the horse's mouth.

Re:Self promotion

And it's not ad-infested. I salute the author.

Re:Self promotion

What the hell is wrong with self-promoting? It's not like it's spamming, it's being submitted for consideratio to a group of editors. If those editors didn't think it was worthwhile it wouldn't have reached you. From your perspective the submitter is irrelevant.

Re:Drupal Sucks!

Leave it to Slashdot to comment on the CMS used to host an article and complain about the fact that TFA is still available *despite* the CMS chosen, rather than actually reading TFA.

You, sir, astound me.

Re:Self promotion

30 people a day read my blog, and they were looking for something else. In the unlikely event I write something worth your reading of it, it could be years before anyone else pushes it here.

As long as the author can only suggest it, and not actually put it on the front page themselves, meh.

They're only slightly less capable, or if suffering from self-esteem issues potentially much more, judges of their work as the next random dude on the internet to run across it.