The History Of Role Playing Games.
Role playing Games. The very thought brings about memories of that first time you had slain a dragon, Or those epic battles filled with magic and summon spells that's you have come to love so much, All the while defending your perfect paradise from some arch nemesis that threatens to destroy everything you have come to know and love about your new world, But role playing game, have a unique and rich history all there own. So join me now, For this ultimate quest, To uncover the true history of Role playing games, This promises to be an enlightening experience.
Early role-playing
In the 16th century, traveling teams of players performed a form of improvisational theatre known as the Commedia dell'arte, with stock situations, stock characters and improvised dialogue. In the 19th and early 20th century, many board games and parlor games such as the game Jury Box included elements of role-playing. Mock trials, model legislatures, and the "Theatre Games" created by Viola Spolin arose, in which players took on the roles of characters and improvised, but without the formalized rules which would characterize modern role-playing games.
There is some evidence that assassin-style games may have been played in New York city by adults as early as 1920. A simple version in which an assassination was performed by saying, "You're dead," was mentioned in Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, in a section covering the 1920s.
In the 1960s, historical reenactment groups gave rise to "creative history" games, which probably originate with the founding of the Society for Creative Anachronism in Berkeley, California on May 1, 1966. A similar group, the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia, began holding events on the University of Maryland, College Park in 1969. These groups were largely dedicated to accurately recreating medieval history and culture, however, with only mild fantasy elements, and were probably mostly influenced by historical re-enactment.
The 1970s: The first modern RPGs
The first commercially available tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, was published in 1974 by Gygax's TSR. TSR marketed the game as a niche product. Gygax expected to sell about 50,000 copies. After establishing itself in boutique stores it developed a cult following.
The game's growing success spawned cottage industries and a variety of peripheral products. In a few years other fantasy games appeared, some of which blatantly copied the look and feel of the original game (one of the earliest competitors was Tunnels and Trolls). Along with Dungeons & Dragons, early successes included Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveler, Space Opera and Rune Quest. Live-action groups such as dagorhir were started, and organized gaming conventions and publications such as Dragon Magazine catered to the growing hobby.
TSR launched Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies (later called "first edition" among gamers). This ambitious project expanded the rules to a small library of hardcover books, each hundreds of pages long. These covered such minutiae as the chance of finding a singing sword in a pile of loot or the odds of coaxing gossip from a tavern keeper. Optional modules in the form of small booklets offered prepared adventure settings. The first edition Dungeon Master's Guide published in 1979 included a recommended reading list of twenty-five authors.
Mainframe computers
The earliest computer role-playing games began in 1975 as an offshoot of early university mainframe text-based RPGs on PDP-10 and Unix-based computers, starting with Dungeon and graphical CRPGs on the PLATO System, pedit5 and dnd, games inspired by role-playing games. Other influences during this period were text adventures, Multiple-User Dungeons (MUDs) and rogue like games. Some of the first graphical CRPGs after pedit5 and dnd, were orthanc, avathar (later renamed avatar), oubliette, dungeons of degorath, baradur, emprise, bnd, sorcery, moria, and dnd world, all of which were developed and became widely popular on PLATO during the latter 1970s, in large part due to PLATO's speed, fast graphics, nationwide network of terminals, and large number of players with access to those terminals. These were followed by (but did not always lead directly to) games on other platforms, such as Akalabeth (1980) (which gave rise to the well-known Ultima series), and Wizardry.
Personal computers and graphical RPGs
In 1980, a very popular dungeon crawler, Rogue was released. Featuring ASCII graphics where the setting, monsters and items were represented by letters and a deep system of game play, it inspired a whole genre ("roguelikes") of similar clones. Of particular note was 1987's NetHack, an update of Rogue that arguably surpassed the original's popularity by its advanced complexity and sense of humor, as well as through continuous extensions and updates to the game for nearly two decades.
Early Ultima and Wizardry games are perhaps the largest influence on the later console RPG games that are now popular. Many innovations of Ultima III: Exodus (1983) eventually became standards of almost all RPGs in both the console market (if somewhat simplified to fit the gamepad) and the personal computer market. Later Dungeon Master (1987) introduced real-time game play and several user-interface innovations, such as direct manipulation of objects and the environment with the mouse, to first-person CRPGs.
The earliest console RPG was the Intellivision title AD&D Treasure of Tarmin (1982). Much later, in 1986, Enix made the NES title Dragon Quest (called Dragon Warrior in North America and would remain that way until the 8th game in the series). This was followed shortly by ports of the computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima III, and by Final Fantasy (1987) by Squaresoft. Both of these games proved popular and spawned a series of sequels. Both game series remain popular today, Final Fantasy more so in North America, and Dragon Quest in Japan.
Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy both borrowed heavily from Ultima. For example, leveling up and saving must be done by speaking to the king in Dragon Quest, and in order to rest and get healed, the characters must visit the king (Dragon Quest) or stay the night at an inn (both games). The games are played in a top-down perspective, much like the Ultima games, as well. The combat style in Dragon Quest was borrowed from another series from the personal computer market, the Wizardry games.
Pools of Darkness was the last in a trilogy of Gold Box games that began with Pool of Radiance.
Starting in 1988 with Pool of Radiance, SSI produced a series of "Gold Box" CRPGs based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. These games featured a first-person display for movement, combined with an overhead tactical display for combat. The Gold Box series was published up until 1993, when the game engine had finally become outdated. The Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures game published in that year allowed users to create their own adventures that could be played using the Gold Box engine.
Online RPGs
The first CRPGs offered a single player experience. The popularity of multiplayer modes in these games rose sharply during the mid-1990s. Diablo (1996) was one of the games that heavily influenced this boost in popularity. It combined CRPG and action game elements, and featured an Internet multiplayer mode that allowed up to four players to enter the same world and fight monsters, trade items, or fight against each other. MMORPG's introduced huge worlds with open-ended game play and thousands of interactive characters (both player and computer-controlled).
In 1997, a new Internet fad began. Influenced by console RPGs, a large group of young programmers and aficionados began creating and sharing independent CRPG games, based mostly on the game play and style of the older SNES and Sega Genesis games. The majority of such games owe to simplistic software development kits such as the Japanese RPG Maker series.
A steadily increasing number of non-RPG video games have adopted aspects traditionally seen in RPGs, such as experience point systems, equipment management, and choices in dialogue. The blending of these elements with a number of different game engines and game play styles have created a myriad of hybrid game categories. These hybrid games are commonly formed by mixing popular game play elements featured in other genres, such as first-person shooters, platformers, and real-time strategy games.
Interplay
In the late 1990s, Interplay Entertainment produced several remarkable RPG titles through two new developers: Black Isle Studios and BioWare. In 1997, Black Isle released the groundbreaking Fallout, set in an alternate history American post-apocalyptic future wasteland. The game was notable for its open-ended, largely non-linear game play and quest system. The player was afforded many moral choices to shape the world and how NPCs reacted to the player, reminiscent of the original Ultima games. One of the few successful video game RPGs not set in the swords-and-sorcery genre, Fallout was greatly inspired by Interplay's own Wasteland (1988). Black Isle followed up with a sequel and the critically-acclaimed Planescape: Torment (1999).
Bioware's Baldur's Gate series was no less important, as the most significant D&D games to be released since the Gold Box era. At the time, the games created the most accurate and in-depth D&D simulation to date, along with up to six-player co-op capabilities. Baldur's Gate provided an epic story that continued through both titles. Two games were produced, along with an expansion pack for each title. A slightly more combat-oriented series, Icewind Dale, was developed by Black Isle.
Interplay's games during this time period often shared engines to cut down on development time and costs, and all feature an overhead diametrically projected third-person interface. Except for the two Fallout games, the rest of their titles used various versions of the Infinity Engine. The collapse of Interplay resulted in the shutdown of Black Isle and the cancellation of the third games in both the Fallout and Baldur's Gate series.
New millennium
The new century saw a trend toward ever-improving graphical quality, combined with increasingly detailed and realistic game worlds, particularly in the move to 3D game engines.
BioWare went on to produce Neverwinter Nights (2002) for Atari, which was the first CRPG to use the third-edition Dungeons & Dragons rules with a 3D display in which the user could vary the viewing angle and distance. New game content could be generated using the Aurora toolset, supplied as part of the game release. The game was very successful commercially, spawning three official expansion packs. Bioware also went on to produced the highly-acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which fused the d20 system with a very popular franchise.
During the production of Fallout 2, some of Black Isle's key members went on to form Troika Games, which released Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), followed by the highly-anticipated The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) based on the Dungeons & Dragons Greyhawk setting. The last game was Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004) based on White Wolf's tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade soon followed. Although these games developed a fan base, none of them were financially successful or very popular. ToEE in particular being heavily criticized for shipping with numerous bugs, causing an outcry when Atari dropped early support for the game. 2005 saw Troika Games in financial trouble, and most of the developers left for other studios, rendering the group dead.
When Black Isle closed down, several employees formed Obsidian Entertainment, who in early 2004 released Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the sequel to BioWare's successful game. Obsidian is currently producing another BioWare game sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, which is scheduled for a September 2006 release.
And that My brothers and sisters, Is the history of role playing Games. I hope I managed to condense it seamlessly, There was ever so much that didn't make it into this volume, But if you enjoyed this, Then maybe, ill do volume two soon, The comprehensive history of console rpgs.
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