The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part I

Filed in archive PC Gaming Insights on December 28, 2006

Matt Barton's blog over at Armchairarcade has a series of posts related to how RPG gaming began. Sure, you have played the Oblivions and the Neverwinter Nights of the RPG world but have you ever stopped to think where this great genre came from?



While i havent played the games in his first article when they came out, i was fortunate enough to play them over the years. Nostalgia is beginning to sink in. Even SSI's Pool of Radiance owed some of its magic to these games...

Although most people would probably think it's a trivial matter to trace the CRPG back to its tabletop, paper-and-pencil based "equivalent," doing so probably obscures more than it reveals about the two genres. As anyone who has actually played D&D is acutely aware, the two games are as different as playing intramural basketball and College Hoops 2K7. Indeed, the typical "CRPG" is not a "role-playing game" at all, or, if it is, that's generally the least distinctive thing about it. After all, you "play a role" when you play PAC-MAN or SPACE INVADERS, and even in games like Tetris you're playing a role--the unseen force that causes those falling blocks to shift and rotate. It's probably more accurate to describe first-person "interactive fiction" games like Zork or Myst as a "role-playing games," since in those games the player literally assumes an important fictional role within the game. Likewise, a first-person shooter like Half-Life seems to come much closer to the ideal of "playing a role" than a game like Icewind Dale, in which you only indirectly control a whole group of characters.