Early Role Playing Video Games

Early role-playing video games are the first generation of computer role-playing games? (CRPGs), produced between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, in which players guided a character or party through a quest, fighting monsters and gaining experience that improved their attributes and abilities.¹ The genre is almost entirely rooted in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D; 1974), the tabletop role-playing game published by TSR, Inc. in which each player takes a role such as healer, warrior, or wizard to battle evil under the direction of a Dungeon Master.¹ Within less than a year of D&D‘s release, computer programmers began translating its mechanics into electronic form.²⁴ While fantasy settings dominated, later video RPGs would also reach into science fiction and the world of espionage.¹

Inheritance from tabletop gaming

Dungeons & Dragons was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and released by TSR in 1974.⁴⁹ It descended from the wargaming tradition, which reached back to tabletop strategy games devised in the late 1700s and early 1800s to train military commanders.⁵ Gygax’s medieval miniatures game Chainmail (1971) added fantasy elements, while Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign introduced levels, armor class, dungeon crawls, and hit points.⁵⁸ Arneson stated in 1979, in Different Worlds #3, that he used Chainmail “to start” for combat rules, and that Blackmoor predated that adoption.⁸ D&D set itself apart from earlier wargames by focusing on players creating and role-playing individual characters rather than controlling entire armies, combining that with rules and statistics governed by dice rolls.⁴ Gygax has said he expected to sell only about 50,000 copies, a figure the game’s popularity quickly surpassed.⁵ TSR did not begin describing D&D as a “role-playing game” until its 1977 second edition, and programmers adopted the term for their adaptations around the same time.³

Early video RPGs kept many of D&D‘s original aspects, including its fantasy world of elves, dwarfs, trolls, goblins, and dragons, and its character attributes of constitution, strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.¹ They also carried over character classes such as “rogue” and “wizard,” multiple races such as “human” and “elf,” a health meter measured by hit points, and the idea of gaining experience after defeating enemies to grow stats and advance from level to level.² The principal difference was that tabletop games like D&D required a Dungeon Master to tell the story and control non-player characters, whereas a CRPG required only a player and a keyboard.²

The first computer RPGs

Three RPG-style computer games of 1975 vie for the title of first: Rusty Rutherford’s pedit5, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood’s Game of Dungeons (also known as dnd), both on the PLATO? system, and Don Daglow’s Dungeon on the PDP-10.³ All three were at least inspired by, if not based on, paper games, particularly TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons.³ Rutherford and Daglow explicitly named D&D as the inspiration for their implementations, and Whisenhunt and Wood based dnd on D&D with the addition of lessons drawn from pedit5.³ pedit5 is described as the first dungeon crawler in RPG history.² Because pedit5 competed for processor time with legitimate uses of PLATO, system administrators repeatedly deleted it whenever they found it; Whisenhunt and Wood, who administered their own PLATO system, faced no such interference and built dnd on its lessons.³ dnd introduced a number of features, including the first “boss” — a dragon guarding the Orb the player must steal — the first level design tool, the first character creation and progression system based on experience points, and increasing difficulty levels.³ It is also credited as the first video game to introduce the concept of bosses.²

Daglow’s Dungeon (1975) was an unauthorized adaptation of D&D for the Digital Equipment Corporation? PDP-10 minicomputer; though largely text-based, it included overhead maps of the dungeon showing where players had explored.¹ Most of the earliest CRPGs of the mid-1970s were text-based games run on mainframe computers, several of which marked significant moments in video game history.²

The microcomputer era

As CRPGs migrated to home microcomputers in the late 1970s, they grew more advanced graphically and mechanically.² Temple of Apshai (1979), designed by Jon Freeman and Jeff Johnson for the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, originated what became the Dunjonquest series; it consisted of four dungeons to explore, tasking the player with fighting monsters and hunting treasure, and was the first CRPG to feature room descriptions, compensating for the absence of a Dungeon Master.² The same year, Richard Garriott — a J. R. R. Tolkien fan who played D&D with high-school friends and wrote the game as a hobby — produced Akalabeth: World of Doom for the Apple II; set chiefly in an underground dungeon where the player defeated a succession of monsters and could visit shops for food, weapons, and magic, it was the first CRPG to use a first-person perspective, rendering its dungeon in wire-frame graphics.²

In 1980 Robert Clardy and Synergistic Software released Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure for the Apple II, a multi-part story spread across several floppy disks that cast the player as a leader of warriors questing to defeat an evil wizard; it combined elements from Clardy’s earlier Dungeon Campaign (1978) and Wilderness Campaign (1979), one of the very first microcomputer RPGs, and was cutting-edge and well-received at the time.² The 1980 game Rogue, designed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman for Unix systems, popularized and gave its name to the maze-exploring roguelike subgenre, which featured procedurally generated levels; it was later ported for Atari, Microsoft, Apple, the Commodore 64, and other systems.²

The first commercial classics

The first commercial D&D-style games were Origin Systems’ Ultima (1980) and Sir-Tech Software’s Wizardry (1981), both originally for the Apple II.¹ Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlords, designed by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead and developed by Sir-Tech, was the first party-based role-playing video game, with a beta released a year earlier in 1980; it became the most successful Apple II game of its year and was hailed by critics as the best D&D-style game on the market.² Wizardry is the game most often credited with popularizing the dungeon crawler.²

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, by Akalabeth creator Garriott, expanded significantly on his earlier work; it centered on a quest to recover the Gem of Immortality from the evil wizard Mondain, who used it to enslave the citizens of Sosaria, with the player summoned from another world as “the Stranger” to defeat him.² It is described as the first open-world computer game and the first to feature conversations with NPCs, and is credited with popularizing the open-world RPG.² Sequels of both Wizardry and Ultima were produced over the following two decades and beyond, for the Commodore Amiga, MS-DOS machines, Mac OS, Windows, and consoles from Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony.¹

The genre soon explored varied combat systems, from menu-driven to tactical to real-time.² Dragonstomper, developed by Starpath for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s, was the first original RPG for a game console and is considered one of the best games for that system.² Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) marked a further advance, making the player’s character directly affected by the ethical choices they made, and stood as an example of the deeper, more complex stories that computer gamers enjoyed relative to early console titles.¹