The History of Computer RPGs

Gamasutra is running a series of articles about the history of CRPGs. The first piece covers the early years, from 1980 to 1983, and deals with with games like mainframe dnd, Wizardry, and Ultima. The follow-up, The Golden Years, touches on the gold box Dungeons and Dragons titles, as well as the Bard's Tale games. "The first Gold Box game is Pool of Radiance, a game which marked an important turning point in CRPG history. The game shipped in a distinctive gold-colored box (hence the nickname for the series), which sported artwork by celebrated fantasy illustrator Clyde Caldwell (Caldwell also designed the covers for Curse of the Azure Bonds and several other TSR-licensed games and books). It was initially available only on the Atari ST and Commodore 64 platforms, though soon ports were available for most major platforms, including the NES."

LSL

[Ikyaat]

Is leisure Suit Larry considered a roleplaying game since its the only time I ever get to be a suave ladies man. That game rocked. Same as Space Quest series and Kings Quest series on the Tandy 500.

TES II Daggerfall

[Drakin020]

Daggerfall was a great RPG in my opinion. So open ended with a large world. So what if it was randomly generated. I think that was one of the games that made a huge success in my world followed by Morrowind and Oblivion. Never played much of Areans though. (TES I)

Re:turning point

[PhilipMckrack]

I disagree as well. I loved Pool of Radiance and probably played it all the way through 6 or 7 times or more on my old C64. I liked the fact that the gold box games all pretty much used the same system, I could go from one to another and gameplay was almost the same. I would liken it to the expansion packs of todays mmorpg games, the later gold box games added to the earlier ones, you could even import your party from the previous games with all stats intact.

I never really tried Ultima games until 7 or 8 so I know I missed out with them, but I did try Wasteland and never really got that far into it. I loved the premise of the game, but the gameplay was just not my style.

I was not a D&D paper gamer, just someone that liked computers and those were the games that had an impact on me. From Pool of Radiance, I played the entire Gold Box series. I even got the PC versions when I finally got a PC.

Atari ST Flashbacks / What about Sierra?

[xjmrufinix]

I remember being young (very young, I was born in 1981) and playing Dungeon Master on my dad's Atari ST 1040...according to my parents, I learned how to read so I could play play Planetfall and Hitchhiker's Guide!

The one gripe I have with this article is that it neglects the now mostly-extinct genre of interactive fiction. Sierra and Lucasarts both expanded on the Infocom format and made games that I think were as much role-playing games as all the hack-and-slash dungeon games. Both were only able to capture certain aspects of table-top RPG's, and I liked both but always enjoyed the adventure games more. You don't see too many RPG's today that don't rely and tons of mindless combat to fill up space, and these were long, involved games which had few or no combat sequences for the most part. Most early RPG's were pretty light on the RP....

Re:For some, the golden age remains.

[6350']

Absolutely - all this represents the evolutionary tree of cRPGs. Diablo in particular is quite interesting: as any roguelike player knows, Diablo was very clearly inspired and heavily influenced by roguelikes. It wasn't until quite recently, however, that I heard a story that demonstrates just direct the inspiration was.

(the following is unsourced, and comes to me from that awesome vector of "some dude at work":)
It seems that Diablo, the story goes, was originally turnbased! Some engineer had the kooky idea of converting the game over to be realtime, which noone he worked with was to fired up about. So, he did it on the side as a pet project. When finished, he checked it in and had everyone give it a shot. They of course realized they had a winner on their hands ...

Re:turning point

[Bieeanda]

This is probably going to get me modded as flamebait, but I felt the same way about their spiritual descendants, the Baldur's Gate series. They were ostensibly Second Edition AD&D to begin with, but used rules that were heretofore only found in the Basic D&D ruleset (weapon mastery and such), had heavily modified critters (mustard jelly is not green slime, and neither of the BG variants are anything like the ones statted in the Monstrous Manuals) and made a travesty of D&D combat by making everything real-time and eliminating any sense of range or radius. There isn't much point in casting a fireball when everything on the screen is halfway toward you by the time you begin to cast, and completely out of the blast radius by the time the effect goes off. Meanwhile, missile weapons have no trouble following fleeing targets around corners and far out of normal range. PC spellcasting was a fool's errand, and THAC0 was clearly the hand of destiny.

D&D has always had its roots in wargaming, from complex range, movement and initiative rules in earlier editions, to the numerous tactical combat examples in 3E and 3.5. In that way at least, the Gold Box games were true to that.

Re:turning point

[Hoi Polloi]

One of my first RPGs was Ultima III on the Apple IIe (yes, old timer). One of the best tricks that I did to entertain myself was the fact that treasure chests dropped by monsters outdoors were obstacles and permanent (until opened). Monsters also blindly followed you. So I put 2 and 2 together and strategically led and killed monsters until I had created a "monster zoo" outdoors filled with all sorts of helpless meanies trapped in treasure box pens.

The other trick I liked was to build boat bridges between islands using boats captured from pirates but that was a bit harder to pull off.

It's always fun to find loop-holes in games.

Tunnels of Doom

[British]

For the small minority of TI-99/4A owners, there was the incredibly fun Tunnels of Doom. It would take forever to load on cassette! Typically, 1st party games were among the worst, but ToD was the exception! It had serious depth for a TI-99/4A game. Later on in life I would meet the author of Legends, another RPG which was pretty fun.

Okay, so we(TI-99/4A owners) had a grand total of 2 RPGs, still, better than none.

Re:turning point

[Hoi Polloi]

I played the first 3 Wizardry's with my brother. He was older so he usally got the keyboard and I manned the graph paper mapping and navigating for him. We occasionally fought over the keyboard too.

I remember getting stuck once and called Sir-Tech in NY in fustration. A person who sounded like a kid answered and very patiently explained what I needed to do. Free of charge too! I thought that was pretty cool of them.

If you played Wizardry 1 you'd remember the "Creeping Coins" which gave big XP points but you needed a mass destruction spell else you'd have to leave your chair and come back in 10 minutes until they finished attacking.

I don't need a "Blue Ribbon" to use the elevators here at work fortunately.