Chasing D&D: A History of RPGs

1UP has published a quick but informative history of role-playing games, starting with 1974’s Dungeons & Dragons and then moving on through many of the classic CRPGs created since then – Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, The Bard’s Tale, Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and many others. A few samplings:

While Wizardry and Ultima managed to set certain genre standards, RPGs were still too intimidating for the average player compared to adventure or arcade games. That is, until 1985, when Michael Cranford released Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard’s Tale, the first RPG to score mainstream success.

The Bard’s Tale was still hard, especially in the beginning, and its story — find and kill Mangar the Dark Wizard, scourge of Skara Brae — is just as flimsy as its competitors’. But The Bard’s Tale offered novices an inviting experience with cutting-edge graphics and easy, intuitive rules even a kid could pick up. It was also notoriously addictive — one of the first “just one more level” style games.

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BioWare’s first AD&D title, 1998’s Baldur’s Gate, was a smash hit. It was like the lovechild of Diablo and Daggerfall, with an isometric viewpoint and real-time gameplay that played like Blizzard’s cash cow but with the rich, immersive Forgotten Realms world that felt more like The Elder Scrolls’ Tamriel. Plus, more so than previous RPGs, Baldur’s Gate was also heavily shaped by dialogue and interactions with nonplayer characters, who could join your party to help construct the game’s story.

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First came Interplay’s Fallout in 1997, a postapocalyptic nonlinear game set 80 years after a nuclear holocaust. Strongly reminiscent of the 1988 Interplay title Wasteland, Fallout and its 1998 sequel sizzled with style, snappy writing, and ’50s-era Cold War imagery, offering gamers difficult moral choices to test their role-playing skills.

“I think there are a few reasons for Fallout’s success,” says Chris Avellone, developer for Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment. “It gave you tremendous freedom to let you wander wherever you chose. This freedom — to take whatever quests you want and solve them however you choose — is what an RPG was always supposed to be about.”

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Avellone also designed 1999’s Planescape: Torment, often considered one of the most artistic games ever made. (It’s also one of the wordiest, weighing in at about 800,000 words of text.) Torment’s brooding, challenging story, which brimmed with metaphysics and fallen angels, contrasted starkly with the rest of the RPG genre’s light fantasy fare.

Commercially, Torment flopped. But in the years since its release, it’s found a huge cult following, especially online. “The idea of a game exploring the nature of man, and making that part of the actual gameplay, was really fresh to some people,” Avellone says. “For roleplayers, I think Torment told several good stories — and some bad ones — and that was part of its appeal.”