Confessions of an RPG Developer

Atomic PC has published a very interesting five-page editorial called “Confessions of an RPG Developer”, offering a history of PC role-playing games combined with commentary from industry veterans like Origin’s Richard Garriott, SSI’s Joel Billings, Bethesda’s Todd Howard, and Obsidian Entertainment’s Chris Avellone.

While Garriott was off injecting philosophical and moral depth into videogames, the RPG genre continued to advance in different directions. A year after Quest of the Avatar hit shelves, New World Computing released the first chapter in its highly influential Might and Magic series, Might and Magic: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum (1986). Featuring a ridiculous number of NPCs, monsters, and treasures, and much more importantly, a vast, open world to explore well, as ‘˜open’ as tile-based, maze-like graphics could allow M&M arguably became the first torch-bearer for open-ended RPG design. (Said torch would be passed on to the far more successful Elder Scrolls series just shy of ten years later.) And, as an interesting contrast to M&M’s fluffy fantasy, Interplay Productions released Wasteland (also ‘˜86), the game that would go on to inspire Interplay’s later hit and one of the greatest CRPGs ever made, Fallout. Set in a post-apocalyptic Nevada, Wasteland had players venture out into an inhospitable desert, fighting hideous mutants and working alongside NPCs whose goals often conflicted with theirs.

And then there was SSI. The small company was enjoying incredible success with the release of each Gold Box title Pool of Radiance (1988), Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990) all the while pausing occasionally to develop wargames and take on other RPG franchises. The weirdest? Buck Rogers. The ancient comic strip hero had recently made a comeback with TSR’s Buck Rogers pen and paper setting, and, as TSR was under new management, SSI was tasked with making a game none of the D&D-playing crew could have ever expected.

‘˜That was TSR’s decision,’ Billings laughs. ‘˜The woman who owned TSR at the time, Lorraine Williams, was the granddaughter of the creator of Buck Rogers. And when she bought well, basically, she took control of the company in a very interesting power play with Gary Gygax. She sort of bought the company out from under the guy one day; it was real Machiavellian stuff. Anyway, she ended up owning the company outright, and wanted to bring Buck Rogers back, because of her family history; that’s where her family’s money came from. We did it because we were trying to keep in good with TSR. It wasn’t necessarily because we thought Buck Rogers was going to be this big thing. We sort of reluctantly went along with it, and had we ever done it over again and known that the D&D thing was going to go away, we probably wouldn’t have done the game. Although we thought it might keep them happy for a while longer, ultimately, we didn’t go any longer with the license than our contract allowed us. So we just took the Gold Box engine and slammed out a clone.’

If Billings’ cynicism is any indication, it should be fairly obvious that the relationship between SSI and the company that sold it the winning D&D license was beginning to fester. Before the Gold Box empire truly fell, though, the company published a very interesting property the first graphical MUD, the Gold Box-based Neverwinter Nights. MUDs had first appeared on college mainframes in 1977, and grew in popularity throughout the ‘˜80s as online spaces where players over the world could participate in one giant RPG basically, the first MMORPGs. Until NWN, though, all of them were text-based. The game ran on AOL from 1991 to 1997 coincidentally, the year Garriott released his groundbreaking foray into Web RPGs, Ultima Online.

Highly recommended reading material.