A Quick History of the RPG

There’s another fun little article to feast upon today, and this time it’s a history/overview of the role-playing game as told by the enthusiasts over at… Gametard. I’ll let these two paragraphs speak for themselves:

In the late 90’s, both Fallout and Baulder’s Gate hit retail shelves, and provided players the first extremely marketable non-linear RPG’s. For once we were able to make ground breaking decisions which could alter gameplay and your stories ultimate outcome. You were truly living the game in a truly interactive world. These two franchises are sometimes credited for shifting the once traditionally Asian-held RPG market over to the West. It took a couple of years, but in 2009, it feels like Asian RPG’s are redundant and completely exhausted. After all, why watch a 40+ hour “game” when you have the option to tailer the eventual outcome?

Recently, we’ve been treated to titles such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, just to name a few. These are all triple ‘A’ examples of an extremely interactive medium, yet the game which really made me question myself and my options was, humorously, a decidedly mediocre title with an extremely limited story arc. The game being Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2; an interactive journey which steals most of it’s plot devices from Marvel’s own Civil War story line, which finished it’s run in January of 2007. It’s still pretty fresh.

You heard it here first: Baldur’s Gate was the world’s first “extremely marketable non-linear RPG”.