The history of computer role playing games

Whether we're talking about a randomized "dungeon crawler" like Rogue or a story-driven game like Betrayal in Krondor, a click-fest like Diablo or a stat-crunching Pool of Radiance, the

The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part I: The

Early Years (1980-1983)

Matt Barton

Welcome, brave adventurer, to the first of my in-depth feature articles exploring the history ofour favorite computer game genre: The Computer Role-Playing Game, or the CRPG For manyavid gamers, the CRPG is the perfect storm of gameplay, story, and strategy Whether we're

talking about a randomized "dungeon crawler" like Rogue or a story-driven game like Betrayal

in Krondor, a click-fest like Diablo or a stat-crunching Pool of Radiance, the CRPG has always

enjoyed a tremendous appeal Even today, when the first-person shooter and sports games

seem to have crushed all opposition, everyday millions of players login to World of Warcraft, and each new installment in the Zelda series sends ripples throughout the entire game

industry Whether acknowledged or not, the CRPG will always play a major role in computerand console gaming The CRPG is the spine of the electronic gaming industry and it's not hard

to see why You just can't have more fun with a computer or a console than when you'reengrossed in a well-crafted CRPG But where did the CRPG come from? From what deep, dankdungeon did they crawl? How has the genre evolved into the amazing games we enjoy today?

If you've ever wondered about these and other CRPG-related questions, of if you just likereading the very best writing you can find on the net about gaming then grab a mug of yourbest ale and prepare to read an article only an author of Armchair Arcade would ever dare todraft!

From Tabletops to Desktops

Although most people would probably think it's a trivial matter to trace the CRPG back to itstabletop, 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.

Strat-O-Matic: Paper-based games like this paved the way for D&D and CRPGs.Taxonomic

quibbling aside, there is no doubt that while they are not direct descendents, CRPGs were

deeply inspired by D&D At the very least, it's obviously more than a coincidence that so many

of the themes and trappings are shared by both genres, and both are highly absorbing andaddictive One wonders if Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson knew the full implications of what

they were doing when they sprung Dungeons & Dragons on an unsuspecting public back in

1974 However, Gygax and Arneson's classic tabletop "role-playing game" didn't come out ofnowhere As near as I can tell, the clearest precedents were war games like Avalon Hill's

Tactics II (1958) and sports simulation games like Strat-o-Matic (1961) However, while D&D

certainly borrowed (whether intentionally or not) many of the conventions of these oldergames (especially an emphasis on caculation), it contained some radical new innovations Forone thing, instead of recreating painfully-accurate historical Civil War battles or the World

Series, D&D was set in a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves, and dragons Although there's some question about how deeply J.R.R Tolkien's Ring trilogy played in the development

of D&D, most players of the game were hardcore fans of Middle Earth, obsessively reading and

re-reading the novels Indeed, for countless Tolkien-enamored teenagers of the 70s and 80s,

D&D was simply a more enthralling way to experience these lavish fictional places After all,

it's one thing to read about Frodo and Bilbo going on fantastic quests, but the appeal of going

on one themselves was simply too much for many teenagers to resist

Authors Brad King and John Borland, authors of Dungeons and Dreamers: From Geek to Chic,

claim that "it's almost impossible to overstate the role of Dungeons & Dragons in the rise ofcomputer gaming." What could be more true? The "gamer" as we know him or her today was

born in the D&D era Although there have always been games, none of them had the drawing power of D&D While cards and dice can certainly become disastrously addictive (see

Gamblers Anonymous), gambling games were always about prizes the players could win, notthe games themselves Strategy games like chess, meanwhile, are so abstract and "mental"that it's often not clear whether they are true amusements or really just exercises in logic.Furthermore, the fact that you can become a professional chess player indicates that chesslost its status as a mere "game." If you can earn a living doing something, you can no longerdescribe it as a "pure amusement" it's become a sport with real earning potential Finally,

board games like Monopoly and RISK, while certainly fun and engaging, are only very rarely

enjoyed over extended periods for any significant amount of time These are games that gethauled off the top shelf of a closet a few days out of the year to keep idle hands busy during

the holidays Though you can find large, highly devoted communities of UNO and ROOK

players, these seem more like exceptions rather than the rule

Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to theoutside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confrontsthem For me, it's a sheaf of xeroxed numbers my father brought home from his law firm when

I was nine Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You

Not so with D&D In so many ways, D&D was more of a lifestyle choice than a "harmless

diversion." Indeed, the closest equivalent I can think of is the children's game of "makebelieve," in which a group of kids pretend to be in various social and occupational roles such

as a father, doctor, superhero, and so on The other kids will "go along" with the fantasy,helping to perpetuate it (generally in return for similar reinforcement from the other children).For instance, two boys will take turns being the "cowboy or the Indian," or I suppose nowadaysthe "Republican and the terrorist" or some such nonsense Often enough, these games can getquite elaborate, with imaginary pals, exotic fictional settings, and plenty of simulated action Imust confess to having played many such games with my younger sister, when we "went onvacation" to all sorts of fantastic locales Of course, once a kid gets to a certain age, playing

"make believe" seems too juvenile or irrational to engage in (at least openly), so all of these

impulses are repressed at least until D&D comes onto the scene Suddenly, playing "make

believe" is back, and players can enjoy the activity without being accused of being immature

or schizo Indeed, the strength of D&D lies in its combination of make-believe, play-acting, and

a logical, math-based rule system As Johan Huizinga illustrates in his book Homo Ludens, such

play is a vitally important part of learning The more kids get to play "make believe," the moreintelligent they become! As Steven Johnson would say, playing D&D makes you smarter!

Sadly, when enough "concerned" citizens realized that so many young people were having somuch fun playing this new game, they began insinuating and then outright accusing players ofengaging in a "Satanic ritual" or, at the very least, dangerously influenced by hiddensubliminal content (for a sickening example, see this analysis of a Chick tract) We might

perhaps be more sympathetic to these folks; they knew just enough about D&D to make them

dangerous For instance, they quickly learned that they involved graphic violence, magic (or,

"witchcraft"), and often demonic forces (dragons, hell hounds, demons) No doubt, walking byand hearing a 7-year old cry, "I summon forth a black demon to annihilate your cleric!" wasenough to convince any well-meaning parent that something odd was going on here.Furthermore, as then as well as now, occasionally news surfaced of some genuinely disturbedgamer performing some horrific crime and then blaming it all on the game The same could be

said about the D&D-themed "heavy metal" music of the era Obviously, Iron Maiden or Judas

Priest was a powerful catalyst for evil during all those dice rolls for initiative The fact that somany people are still willing to buy into this rubbish is far more fearful than any demonic foe

encountered in a D&D session! Ironically enough, many of the friends I played D&D with were

far more devout Christians than anyone else I knew Even the ones who weren't religioustended to live more morally upright and ethical lives than most other folks another reason, nodoubt, for religious hypocrites to despise them

Still, no matter how someone feels about the moral influence of D&D, no one can deny it

played a highly constructive role in developing the computer game industry Besides creating

a new type of person the "gamer," and sowing a generation with seeds of creativity and

imagination, adapting D&D for computers became one of the Holy Grails of early computer programming Although many game historians cite Richard Garriott's Akalabeth as the first

CRPG, we can find earlier precedents in the world of mainframes

The Mainframe Era (The Dark Ages)

Hackers on university mainframes got an early start on developing CRPGs, trotting out games

as early as 1974 (the same year Gygax and Arneson released the first Dungeons & Dragons).

Unfortunately, the history here seems a bit murky (thus the title "Dark Ages"), and declaringwhich game was the "first" seems a bit foolhardy What is clear is that there were several

CRPGs on machines like DEC's PDP-10 and PLATO, a computerized learning system The first of these appears to be Rusty Rutherford's pedit5 for PLATO Pedit5 had most of the basic features

of the genre, such as an explorable dungeon, monstrous foes, collectible treasures, and amagic system Unfortunately, we will likely never learn much more about this game owing to

the short-sightedness of PLATO administrators, who had a rather nasty habit of deleting this

game wherever they found it (the many kids who managed to stay a step ahead of these

party-poopers were denigrated as "zbrats") There may very well have been text-based CRPGs

before Pedit5 that may have simply been lost to history.

Later that year, two programmers at Southern Illinois University named Gary Whisenhunt and

Ray Wood created dnd, also designed for PLATO This graphical game contains many features

that would become staples of the genre, such as the ability to create a character and assignstats for characteristics like strength, intelligence, and so on There was also a "level up"system based on experience points Monsters got tougher the deeper players went in thedungeon This game also marks the first appearance of the "general store" where players can

purchase equipment Perhaps most important, dnd featured a story and a quest kill the

dragon and fetch the Orb It is certainly no surprise that fetching an all-powerful "orb" willshow up again and again as the defining quest of CRPGs! Whisenhunt and Wood's game would

later be the inspiration for Daniel Lawrence's famous Telengard game for the TRS-80 and Commodore 64 platforms We'll have more to say about Telengard momentarily.

dnd (mainframe): Pic from Wikipedia (public domain)Meanwhile, a student at Claremont

Graduate University in California, had designed a game called Dungeon, which ran on the university's PDP-10 mainframes Like dnd, Dungeon featured a level-up system However, one

key innovation was the ability to create and operate a whole party of adventurers rather thanjust a single character To this day, there is debate about whether it's more fun to control a

single character or a whole party of them Dungeon also featured a graphical map system with

"line of sight" vision, which meant that players could only see in the direction their characterswere facing and took lightness and darkness into account (elves and other creatures withinfravision could see in the dark)

Perhaps the most famous of all CRPGs, however, is the UNIX game Rogue Created in 1980 by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold, Rogue was known for its randomized dungeons, ASCII-based graphics, and complicated gameplay Rogue represented the player's character with an at sign (@), and monsters were designated by the first letter of their name (Z for

zombie) The story was simple and would be copied (with slight modifications) in later gameslike The Sword of Fargoal: descend to a specific level of the dungeon (in this case 26), retrieve

a magic item (in this case the Amulet of Yendor), and escape the dungeon However, playersmight have just as much with the game even if they aren't aware of this quest; just wanderingabout killing monsters and gaining treasure and experience points are plenty of fun Still,

Rogue is a very challenging game with a steep learning curve For one thing, there's an abundance of confusing keyboard commands to learn (R for remove a ring and r for reading a

scroll), and players practically need a legend to make sense of the "graphical" display.Secondly, besides dealing successfully with the many monsters and traps in the game, the

character must also be constantly fed Nevertheless, Rogue was so successful that it spawned

a near limitless number of ports and derivatives called "Roguelikes." Several of these games

have also achieved lasting fame, such as Hack, Moria, Larn, and Omega It's very easy to find

a version of Rogue or at least a roguelike on just about any computing platform (indeed, I'm not even sure we could call something that didn't have some form of Rogue a "computer platform" at all!) I spent any number of hours sloughing my way through both Larn and Hack

on my Commodore Amiga computer, even though I also had access to games with "better"graphics A boy with an imagination is content with a warm bowl of ASCII every evening(though ANSI is quite nice once and awhile)

The question that seldom gets asked about these early "CRPGs" is to what extent they really

recreate the tabletop D&D experience Although they do manage to mimic some parts quite

effectively particularly the dice rolling and number crunching they seem to fall rather flat inthe play-acting department Somehow I doubt that anyone sitting down for an evening of

Rogue ever donned a pair of cheap elf ears and a faux leather jerkin, though such accouterments are common enough at real D&D games Furthermore, although dnd players

might belt out an obscenity every so often, I doubt any of them did so in a Dwarvish accent.What was clearly missing was the element of "role play" that was such a huge part of the

tabletop game At best, the computerized versions could simulate the mathematics of D&D

combat and to some extent the strategy and exploration components, but the inherentabstractness and aloofness of the medium seemed to stop true role-playing at the gate.Although later on we'll discuss CRPGs that have tried to address these issues in interesting

ways, it's important to see for now that D&D and its computerized "equivalents" actually have

far less in common than most people think

The Bronze Era (1979-1980)

Although thousands of people may have had their first CRPG experience on a mainframe,most of us would kill our first digital dragon on a personal computer Although exact dates are

hard to come by, we can say that as early as 1979, at least two commercially-published CRPGswere available for home computers One of these was developed by a high schooler named

Richard Garriott, who was sufficiently enamored with D&D to call himself "Lord British." Garriot's game, Akalabeth: World of Doom, featured wire-frame graphics in first-person

perspective (other parts offer top-down perspective), and was, in many ways, far ahead of its

time Akalabeth was only available for the Apple II, and some controversy exists over whether

it was first published in 1979 or a year later Garriott insists that it was released in 1979,although the first disks and cassettes had copyright 1980 on their label The other game was

Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, by Automated Simulations, Inc (later re-named Epyx) Temple

of Apshai was the first of a five-game series, though only the three games making up the

"Apshai trilogy" are well known today Temple of Apshai was first available on the TRS-80

platform, then the Commodore PET, but was later ported to the Apple II (1980), Atari homecomputer (1981), DOS (1982), and finally to the Commodore 64 and Vic 20 in 1983 Let's take

a look at Akalabeth first.

Akalabeth (1980): Kill this thief quickly, or he'll swipe your gear!By all accounts, Garriott was

both a big fan of Tolkien and of Dungeons & Dragons The name Akalabeth, for instance, is taken from one of Tolkien's more obscure works, The Silmarillion The game was written in BASIC, a fact that makes the game all the more impressive from a technical perspective (and

allowed players to cheat or modify the game as they saw fit) As mentioned above, the gamefeatures wire-frame first-person perspective, but switches to a top-down view when the player

is on the surface This innovation would be seen in countless later CRPGs Akalabeth's story is

straightforward enough Lord British, "Bearer of the White Light," has recently driven the evilwizard named Mondain from the kingdom of Akalabeth, but Mondain's monsters still dwell indungeons below the surface The player's task is to descend into these dungeons,slaughtering foes and venturing to the surface to purchase equipment and procure new questsfrom British British will raise the character's attributes upon completing quest as well as give

him (or her?) opportunities to advance in rank, such as from peasant to knight These questsinvolve finding and killing increasingly difficult critters.

When players begin Akalabeth, they are presented with a few text screens with information

about the game The first establishes the back story Subsequent screens tell players what

"strength" and "dexterity" are good for, a list of keyboard commands, and so on Finally,players are given the choice between playing a fighter or a magi As might be expected, thefighter can't use "the magic amulet," whereas the magi can't fight with rapiers or bows(though axes are allowed) The magic amulet was an unpredictable item sometimes it eventurned the player into a powerful Lizard Man Finally, although the players can select adifficulty level from 1 to 10, the game is still challenging since the character gobbles up foodwith every step If the food supply runs out, it's game over a situation that can easily puteven the most powerful players into an unwinnable situation To make matters even worse,thieves roaming about the dungeons are more than adept at swiping your character's gear carrying a few extra of each item is probably a wise precaution

I can't spell, have no grammar techniques, and have read less than twenty-five books in my

life Richard Garriot (Lord British), as quoted in Hackers by Steven Levy

Unlike Akalabeth, which is easily found online and also available in some Ultima compilations, Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai is a very difficult game to come by Epyx re-released three games in this series as the Apshai Trilogy in 1983, which featured updated graphics Try as I

might, the only version of the original game I could find in working condition was the ColecoAdam version! Unfortunately, that version is comparatively crude to the versions offered on

other platforms and probably not very representative The Trilogy is very easy to find on a

variety of platforms, however I played the Apple II version, which I hope is at least similar tothe original

Anyway, I was able to find a scan of the original manual, which is a true treasure for anyhistorian interested in the early history of CRPGs Back in 1979, game developers couldn'texpect players to already be familiar with most of the conventions of the genre (they didn't

even exist, yet!) What's interesting about the Apshai manual is the great lengths it goes to try

to convince players they should give RPGs a chance I'll quote an excerpt here from themanual's introduction:

Did you grow up in the company of the Brothers Grimm, Snow White, the Red Fairy Book, FlashGordon serials, The Three Musketeers, the knights of the Round Table, or any of the threeversions of the The Thief of Bagdad? Have you read the Lord of the Rings, the WormOuroboros, The Incomplete Enchanter, or Conan the Conqueror? Have you ever wished you

could cross swords just for fun with Cyrano or D'Artagnan, or stand by their sides in the chilllight of dawn, awaiting the arrival of the Cardinal's Guard? Ever wondered how you'd havedone against the Gorgon, the hydra, the bane of Heorot Hall, or the bull that walks like a man?( ) If any or all of your answers are "yes," you're a player of role-playing games or you ought

to be

The manual goes on at some length in this vein "RPGs allow you a chance to step outside aworld grown too prosaic for magic and monsters," it claims Although players may be totallosers in the "real world," the RPG offers them a chance to test their true mettle Furthermore,RPGs "can and often do become, for both you and your character, a way of life."

What's even more interesting is how the manual introduces CRPGs as a more convenient way

to role-play "Ordinary role-playing games require a group of reasonably experienced players,

an imaginative dunjonmaster willing to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary toconstruct a functioning fantasy world, and large chunks of playing time." Indeed, "twenty-hourmarathons are not unheard of." What the CRPG offers is a pre-constructed world andautomatic handling of all those complicated math problems "While there are greater practicallimits to your actions that is usually the case in a non-computer RPG, there are still a largenumber of options to choose from." Indeed, many of the more intriguing features of the gameseem to be attempts to bridge the gap between RPGs and CRPGs For instance, instead ofmerely buying items for a set price, players must haggle with the storekeeper Furthermore,much of the in-game text is "in character," with "Medieval" tendencies like using "ye" for "you"and "thy" for "your." The manual also includes textual descriptions of each room of thedungeon probably a concession to the limited memory of early home computers.Interestingly, though, this same "feature" would show up in some later games, particularly

Pool of Radiance My guess is that by then, placing important information in a game manual

was a subtle form of copy protection

Temple of Apshai: Players could get textual descriptions by looking up the "Room No." in the

manual.Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Apshai series is its combat system The

manual claims that the developers were inspired by "historical research, a knowledge ofvarious martial arts, and practical experience in the Society for Creative Anachronisms." Atany rate, a "fatigue" system that limits how often you can attack and how far you can run(your character's wounds and the weight of his equipment also influences the fatigue rate).The character can also "hearken," or listen for the presence of a monster in an adjoining room,and even try to talk monsters out of combat If your character dies, he will suffer one of fourfates either consumption by a roaming monster, or rescue by a dwarf, mage, or cleric If it's

the dwarf or mage, your character will lose equipment Temple of Apshai was quickly followed

up by Datestones of Ryn, Morloc's Tower, and Curse or Ra The other Apshai games included Upper Reaches of Apshai and Gateway to Apshai Epyx released the Trilogy compilation for a

variety of platforms in 1983, but perhaps the best of these was the Commodore Amiga versionreleased in 1986 Anyone seriously desiring to play the series today will prefer the Amigaversion's enhanced graphics and control scheme

I jumped every time one of those swamp rats appeared My sword arm got sore from grippingthe hilt of the joystick, and there are wrinkles in my permanent-press armor from hours in

front of the monitor Steve Hudson on Gateway to Apshai, from COMPUTE! ISSUE 60 / MAY

1985 / PAGE 56

Although neither Temple of Apshai nor Akalabeth are particularly playable today, their

historical value cannot be overestimated Both games were successful in their own right, and

helped launch vitally important series (particularly Akalabeth, which led to the Ultima series).

However, the genre was still crude and left much to be desired in terms of interface anddesign There was tremendous room for extensive development Although the "Golden Age" ofCRPGs wouldn't happen until the mid to late 80s, the "Silver Age" which we'll discuss next introduced some games that are still playable and rewarding today

The Silver Age (1981-1983)

In 1981, the CRPG wasn't nearly as recognizable as a genre as it is today Only a precious fewcommercial games took on the title, and these were cumbersome and hard to play compared

to arcade and adventure games What the genre really needed was a definitive game (orpreferably a series) that would help garner momentum for the genre This boost would happen

in 1980 with the release of Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, developed by Richard Garriott and published by California Pacific Computer Co Ultima, of course, would quickly become the premier CRPG series which enjoyed some two decades of installments Another series that

spawned an important franchise was Sir-Tech's Wizardry, which began in 1981 with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord Wizardry would also enjoy a very long career the eighth

installment arrived in 2001 Together, these two series helped define the genre However,

Ultima and Wizardry weren't the only CRPGs on the shelf Daniel Lawrence released his Telengard in 1982, a game based on the old mainframe dnd game described above Two other important games released in 1982 are Tunnels of Doom for the TI-99/4A, and Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy CoCo Rounding out this era are The Sword of Fargoal, released in

1983 by Epyx, and Ultima III, a game that many CRPG enthusiasts cite as the first modern CRPG Let's start, then, with the Ultima series.

The Ultima Series

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness marks a number of important firsts for the genre Perhaps

the most important is the game's use of tiled graphics Tiled graphics required much less

storage space and allowed for large, colorful environments Like Akalabeth, the game was originally available only for the Apple II platform, though Sierra On-Line released an Atari 8-bit

port in 1982, with more ports to follow in 1986 At the time, the game was hailed for itsimmense size and "evolutionary" aspect players started off in the Middle Ages, but latertraveled through time What other game started with daggers and leather and ended up withblasters and spaceships? It was truly an ambitious game The game also abandoned the

"parser" control scheme of Akalabeth and was played by simple keystrokes like Apshai The

game even features some arcade space combat action!

Ultima I (C-64): Tile-based graphics for CRPGs would become a distinguishing feature of

console RPGs.The storyline is related very much to Akalabeth's, and features many of the

same characters The player's mission is to seek out and destroy the evil wizard Mondain's

"gem of power," which he's used to enslave the lands of Sosaria However, Ultima is a much

more sophisticated game than its predecessor, and players soon learned the values of creativegameplay For instance, players could steal powerful items from the shops that would make

them nearly invulnerable at least at the early stages of the game Of course, successfulthieving might require a few reloads, but for frustrated players, it was a price worth paying.

Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, released in 1982, is an even more ambitious game

than its prequel Like the first game, this one involves both fantasy and sci-fi elements,particular space and time travel The basic plot here is that Mondain's apprentice, Minax, hascome of age and is now threatening the space-time continuum itself The fact that the playerhas to travel to so many different places and times brings to mind Sierra On-Line's colossal

Time Zone, released the same year Unfortunately, Ultima II was riddled with bugs, and some

critics think that Garriott's deteriorating relationship with Sierra led to a less-than-polishedproduct Apparently, Garriott didn't feel that Sierra was playing fair with royalties from the IBM

PC version of the game

The final Ultima game of the Silver Age was Ultima III: Exodus, released in 1983 The game is

aptly named because, by this time, Garriott had left Sierra and formed his own company,Origin Systems It's often hailed as one of the most influential games ever made, both onAmerican and Japanese CRPG development (a fact that's almost painfully clear in console

games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy) The story this time is that Mondain and Minax's

evil progeny, Exodus (after all, anybody who names their kid "Exodus" should know from

whence it came) The game differs from the earlier Ultima games in a number of ways For one

thing, the player controls a party of adventurers rather than just a single avatar The combatsystem is also enhanced and gets its own special gameplay screen, so that players mustbattle multiple creatures and develop much more complicated tactics The player also spenttime talking to townspeople to gather clues and information Furthermore, this game featurescoherent dungeons that don't change across sessions, so that players are encouraged to maketheir own maps on graph paper Finally, the characters' actions are much more unified towards

a single goal than in the other games, where many dungeons were simply "irrelevant." Thegame was a tremendous success for Garriott and Origin, and versions were available for mostmajor computing platforms and even the NES

Wizardry

Although Ultima was quickly laying the foundations of the genre, it wasn't the only kid on the

block A company named Sir-Tech began publishing a prominent rival series in regular

installments starting in 1981 While it had much in common with Akalabeth, it differed in some

key respects First off, it was a party-based rather than a single-character dungeon-crawler

Like Rogue, the mission here was to descend into a dungeon and find an magical amulet,

smashing whatever got in the way However, this game had better graphics and a very

intuitive layout While most of the screen was taken up by relevant statistics and otherinformation, the top left corner offered a first-person, 3-D perspective of the dungeon (or apicture of the enemy during combat) The dungeons were always the same from game togame, so again players were rewarded by making their own maps (or purchasing them).

Wizardy (NES): The NES version has the best graphics and is probably the most reliable

version.The second installment, The Knight of Diamonds, was published in 1982, and required

that players complete the former game to play a "feature" that was quickly corrected in laterversions In modern parlance, the game was an "expansion pack" for the first game.Furthermore, players had to visit every part of the game, collecting six pieces of magical

armor needed to fight off a city's besiegers, to complete the game The third game, Legacy of Llylgamyn, released in 1983, is yet another "dungeon crawler," but this time players begin at

the bottom of a volcano and work their way up The goal is to find a dragon named L'Kbreth,who can save the city of Llyamyn from earthquakes and the volcano's eruption Againcharacters had to be imported from previous games, but were stripped of their experience.Furthermore, players had to choose moral alignments for their characters, a fact thatdetermined which parts of the world could be visited

All in all, the first three Wizardry games are much more consistent across titles than the Ultima series Unlike Garriott, who seemed determined to revolutionize the series with each

installment, Sir-Tech seemed to follow the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage Regardless,

the Wizardry games are still fairly playable today, though perhaps more for historical or

nostalgic value than pure enjoyment

One-Shots

There are at least four other games that make up the Silver Age of CRPGs These include

Telengard, The Sword of Fargoal, Tunnels of Doom, and Dungeons of Daggorath While these

games are perhaps not as well known as the above mentioned series, they are neverthelesssignificant and deserve our attention.

The first of these, Daniel Lawrence's Telengard, was released by Avalon Hill in 1982 for the

Commodore PET (though quickly ported to many other platforms, most popularly the C-64)

Telengard was directly inspired by the PLATO dnd game mentioned above, with minimal

graphics and randomized dungeons The game contains many features that were repeated inmany later games, such as fountains, thrones, altars, and teleportation cubes, all of whichcharacters could interact with (with random and occasionally quite nasty results) The game isalso set in real-time (players who take a bathroom break during their game will likely find theircharacter dead when they return!) One of the game's key selling points was its huge dungeon(50 levels with 2 million rooms!), 20 different monster types, and 36 spells The author claims

that his game "predates" most of the early computer "adventure games, including Temple ofApshai and the Wizardry series." Again, it's very difficult to ascertain precise dates here, butit's hard to see how a game published in 1982 could have influenced games published yearsearlier assuming these dates are anywhere close to accurate It's more likely that Daniel's

mainframe conversions of the aforementioned dnd, which he called DND, may have been played by contemporary developers Regardless, Telengard is a fine game that still enjoys

considerable appreciation today

Perhaps SSI and Lord British and all the others already know how to create such a fantasy But

if they ever did publish a game in which we weren't always concentrating on the details ofhousekeeping, maybe we'd notice the fact that nobody in this whole genre has thought of a

new idea since 1951 Orson Scott Card, from COMPUTE! ISSUE 115 / DECEMBER 1989 / PAGE

92

Telengard is about as close to a pure "dungeon crawler" as you can get There are no ultimate

quests or missions; the focus is entirely on survival and gaining enough experience to improve

your character Jeff McCord's The Sword of Fargoal, released in 1982 for the Commodore

VIC-20 (the more familiar C-64 version followed in 1983), shares many of Telengard's features, but

restores the quest this time, to descend into a dungeon, retrieve the eponymous blade, andescape To my mind, it's one of the more accessible and playable of the early CRPGs Since Ireviewed the game in some detail in an earlier article, I'll focus here on what makes the gamesignificant amidst all this competition One nice feature is the "fog of war" effect, whichessentially amounts to an auto-mapping feature Although the game is set in third-person, top-down perspective, the inability to see parts of the map that haven't been explored add

tension, particularly since the game is in real-time For some reason, The Sword of Fargoal

doesn't seem to get as much attention as its contemporaries, even though its interface ismore intuitive Indeed, I could easily see a version of this game for mobile phones.

If you habitually toss aside the instruction book in a game package, resist the urge this time

In fact, set aside an afternoon in which to play the game Sherrie Van Tyle and Joe Devlin on

Tunnels of Doom in CREATIVE COMPUTING VOL 9, NO 9 / SEPTEMBER 1983 / PAGE 135

Tunnels of Doom, like Dungeons of Daggorath, are relatively obscure titles because they were

released only for a single platform Nevertheless, they became highly successful and are

considered some of the best games for the TI-99/4A and Tandy CoCo, respectively Tunnels of Doom might be best described as a mix of themes from Telengard and Wizardry Like Telengard, there are fountains, altars, and thrones that have random effects on players willing

to experiment with them However, Tunnels of Doom followed Wizardry's example by allowing the player to control a party rather than a single adventurer Tunnels of Doom also predated Ultima III in the use of a separate screens for combat and dungeon exploration sequences.

When the player is merely wandering the dungeon, the view is first-person, 3-D perspective Incombat, the view shifts to a top-down, third-person perspective This mode would show up in

plenty of later games Besides Ultima III, it was also a defining characteristic of SSI's Pool of Radiance and later "Gold Box Games," released after 1988 (For more information about this

game, see my earlier review in Armchair Arcade.)

Tunnels of Doom (TI-99/4A): Separate game/exploration gameplay screens would become

standard in many later CRPGs.Dungeons of Daggorath, developed by DynaMicro, is more like Akalabeth in the use of wire-frame, first-person, 3-D perspective However, this game is in real-time, and features a fatigue system similar to the one found in the Apshai series A

pulsing heart at the bottom of the screen beats faster or slower depending on the stress of thecharacter Taking too much damage or moving too quickly will cause the player to faint, thus

becoming monster meat Dungeons of Daggorath also departs a bit from the D&D convention

by eschewing so much emphasis on math Instead of showing how many "hit points" the

character has left, players must listen to the heart to determine how much damage theircharacter can take before submitting It's a fine system that adds a great deal of realism andintensity to the game! (Again, I'll point eager readers to my earlier review of this game).

Finally, I might mention that by 1983 a number of commercial ports of the mainframe classic

Rogue had appeared on personal computers One set was published by a company named

Artificial Intelligence Design, who released it for platforms as diverse as the Tandy CoCo andCommodore Amiga platforms Later, Epyx bought the rights to distribute these ASCII-basedgames Of course, there were likely dozens (if not hundreds) of "Roguelikes" available inshareware or public domain form, though exact information on these is much harder to

acquire Suffice it to say, anyone who really wanted to play Rogue could do so on a personal

computer after 1983

Final Thoughts

Whew! Now, you have to admit, it takes a writer of some diligence (or should we say,dalliance?) to bite off so much in one chew In some ways, the first three years of CRPGdevelopment on home computers represented more progress than we'll see in the latter 26

Although no single game really contained all of the qualities that we associate with a good

CPRG today, you could already pick and choose the elements from individual games What is

Pool of Radiance, we might ask, but a combination of Tunnels of Doom and Wizardry? What is Diablo but an updated Telengard? How far have we really come from the days of Pedit5, dnd, and Dungeon?

Indeed, it's in this spirit that we should prepare for the next installment in this series the

Golden Age of CRPGs Things really began heating up for the genre as the Ultima and Wizardry series continued to refine their formulas in subsequent installments, but the really

exciting stuff was taking place at different companies most notably, Electronic Arts, SSI, and

New World Computing Next time, we'll talk about classic titles like Phantasie, Pool of Radiance, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Dungeon Master, and Wasteland Do I need to beg

and plead with you to keep your eyes on this site for the SECOND massive installment in ourseries on the history of the CRPG? I didn't think so! So, stay on your guard, friend the best is

yet to come!

The History of Computer Role-Playing Games

Part2: The Golden Age (1985-1993)

Welcome back, brave adventurer, to thesecond part of my history of our favorite genre of computer game the Computer Role-Playing Game (the CRPG) Last time, we explored the CRPG's murky precursors, which

included tabletop war and sports games like Tactics and Strat-O-Matic Of course, I also discussed the CRPG's most direct ancestor, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's Dungeons &

Dragons game, which itself derived mostly from their earlier fantasy-based strategy game

called Chainmail Since so much of D&D consists of mathematics, programmers realized

at once that a considerable bulk of the game was well suited for play on a computer Thefirst CRPGs appeared on mainframes like the PDP-10 and a special educational platform

called PLATO By the early 1980s, these graphically simplistic but technically masterful games had been adapted or ported to almost every home computer on the market Although the first commercial CRPGs for home computers (Akalabeth for the Apple II and

Temple of Apshai for the Commodore PET and TRS-80) are hardly ever played today, they

laid the groundwork for much of what would follow

Throughout the "Silver Age," which lasted from 1981 until 1983, change would comegradually and mostly consist of improvements in graphics and user interface Important

series like Ultima and Wizardry appeared on the market, solidifying every gamer's expectations about what a CRPG should be Meanwhile, innovative games like Telengard,

Dungeons of Daggorath (Tandy CoCo), Tunnels of Doom (TI-99/4A), and The Sword of Fargoal (VIC-20, C-64) offered new alternatives to gamers and new models for

developers In short, by 1983, the field was sown with great ideas and impressiveexamples, but everyone knew that the best was yet to come

Bard's Tale (Apple II): A sensible,

uncluttered layout and an eye-catching

game world helped propel this series to

the top of the charts

By 1985, the CRPG would enter what I have chosen to call "The Golden Age," the periodfrom 1985 to 1993, when the very best CRPG makers were steadily releasingmasterpieces in an orgiastic frenzy of creative development Indeed, the triumphs of thisperiod would not be matched until the "Platinum Age" of the mid-90s, when outstandingdevelopers Bioware, Bethesda, and Blizzard arrived on the scene However, although

Baldur's Gate and Diablo may receive far more attention and interest today than Golden

Age classics like The Bard's Tale or The Pool of Radiance, we must forever keep in mind

that these earlier games were their direct ancestors Later developers would only refine,not re-define, the genre Anyone who truly desires to understand the CRPG must turn herattention to the Golden Age, the era in which towering developers like Interplay, SSI, NewWorld Computing, and FTL released games so superbly designed that they are stillactively played by tens of thousands of gamers even today There are few games that can

arouse more passion than venerable Golden Age titles like Wasteland, Dungeon Master, and Quest for Glory But enough of this build-up; it's time to enter the Golden Age of

CRPGs!

The Transition to the Golden Age

Let's travel back for a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of a hardcore CRPG gamerliving in 1983 If we were asked to wager on which company would dominate the CRPGmarket for the next five years, the sensible choice would be Richard Garriott's Origin

Systems, and indeed, that company did achieve great things In 1983, Origin's Ultima

series was the undisputed market leader, and the games just kept getting better with

each installment Ultima III: Exodus was widely hailed as the best CRPG ever made, and

there was a good chance that the upcoming fourth game would make it look like

Akalabeth If we wanted to hedge a bit, we might put some money on Sir-Tech, whose

difficult Wizardry series was quite respectable and had its fair share of zealous, hardcore fans Like Ultima, Wizardry was a long way from dead and had not yet released its most

famous games In short, if anyone had suggested to us that two hitherto unknowndevelopers Interplay Productions and Strategic Simulations, Inc. would soon challenge

Garriott's throne and put Wizardry in the "where are they now file," we'd have either

laughed or scratched our heads Yet, by 1990, gamers were just as likely to beg their

parents for the next Bard's Tale or SSI "Gold Box" game as anything from Origin or

Sir-Tech In any case, 1985 remains one of the most historically significant years for theCRPG

Oubliette (C-64): Not a pretty game, but who cares

when you have an option to Seduce?

Nevertheless, there was some exciting stuff going on before 1985 More of the oldmainframe games were being ported (ever more faithfully) to home computers Jim

Schwaiger's company Bear Systems released Oubliette for the Commodore 64 and DOS platform in 1983 Oubliette, like so many other mainframe CRPGs, had been

MS-developed for the PLATO system, but is more directly based on the works of J.R.R Tolkien

and TSR's official dungeon guides (i.e., the "real" D&D rules) Oubliette had originally

been a multiplayer game, and the home version retained the ability to create manycharacters and select groups of them for each "dungeon romp." Furthermore, although it

is quite limited graphically, it is quite sophisticated in terms of gameplay You couldchoose among ten classes (including peasant!) when creating characters, and then join

guilds to further refine them In short, Oubliette offers a range of options and depth of

play that really wouldn't be equaled until the Modern Age A company named R.O

Software also ported the mainframe classic DND to MS-DOS, offering it under a

"shareware" license Although the author, a mysterious Digital contractor known simply

as "Bill," charged $25 for his game, he did not bother to get permission to do so fromDaniel Lawrence, the author of the original version Since Lawrence was trying to earn his

fortune selling his own commercial version for home computers Telengard he bitterly

resented what he saw as unfair competition Bill claimed that he deserved thecompensation for cleaning up Lawrence's "spaghetti" code R.O Software released an

update in 1988 called Dungeon of the Necromancer's Domain, a "ground-up rewrite" of

the game that apparently differed enough to avoid future conflict with Lawrence Formore information about this quarrel, see the Unofficial DND page, where, incidentally, youcan also download many of the games in question

Another interesting text-based game from this period is Zyll, a game Scott Edwards and

Marshal Linder wrote while they working for IBM (the game was submitted to IBM's

employee submissions program) Zyll is essentially a hybrid text-adventure with

real-time, CRPG elements Furthermore, it allows two players to either compete or cooperatewith each other to find the Black Orb (the game is of the fetch-the-object variety).Although it was intended for IBM's short-lived PCjr computer, which featured advanced

graphics and sound capabilities, Zyll was a text game that would run on just about any

PC-compatible (though there are issues with the keyboard layout, since the menus arebased on IBM's old PC/XT function key setup).However, these games are of little interest to modern gamers and are more the domain

of historians and older gamers suffering from nostalgia No, it was a new game fromElectronic Arts that was about to strike a new chord, changing the CRPG forever, and inthe meantime, the best CRPGs ever made were looming on the horizon CRPG fans justhadn't seen anything yet

The Dawn of the Golden Age

If you were a CRPG fan living in 1985, you were one of the luckiest gamers in history.Never before had such a torrent of high-quality commercial titles appearedsimultaneously on the shelf Perhaps the most significant of these was the launch of

Interplay's Tales of the Unknown Vol 1: The Bard's Tale, which introduced the famous

Bard's Tale trilogy Although there were certainly excellent CRPGs before it, The Bard's Tale was intuitive and addictive enough to attract a mainstream audience, no doubt due

in part to the marketing might of its publisher, Electronic Arts 1985 also saw the launch

of SSI's Phantasie series, as well as their game Wizard's Crown Although SSI wouldn't

reach its zenith until it acquired the priceless TSR license and began marketing official

AD&D games, their early games are far from shabby

"There was a time when any computer fantasy game became an immediate bestseller due to the genre's popularity and the scarcity of such products That is no longer the case

—computer fantasy games now compete in a buyer's market where they must meet certain standards if they hope to sell." –James V Trunzo, Compute!, August 1987

Other significant games of 1985 include Origin's Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, as well as

Autoduel and Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony Like Autoduel, DataSoft's Alternate Reality: The City offered gamers an alternative to the traditional swords and sorcery

theme of so many CRPGs In short, 1985 and 1986 were some of the most formative

years for the CRPG, and there are many important developments to cover Let's get

started then with The Bard's Tale trilogy.

Down and Out in Skara Brae

Bard's Tale III (C-64): The third game is probably

the best in the series, with great graphics and

just the right level of complexity.

Although the Ultima and Wizardry series did more to establish the CRPG's basic

conventions, it was Interplay that really refined and demonstrated that the genre wasn't

just for "hardcore" gamers Tales of the Unknown Vol 1: The Bard's Tale, released in 1985

for the Commodore 64 and Apple II (ports for other platforms would follow until 1990), is

probably the first CRPG that many readers will recognize from their youth Indeed, The

Bard's Tale's undeniable mainstream appeal was probably not matched by another

company until Blizzard's Diablo in 1997 The game was so successful, in fact, that Baen

Books launched a series of eight novels based on the games, some penned by such

well-known fantasy authors as Mercedes Lackey! Although the final Bard's Tale game was

released in 1991, in 2004 Brian Fargo and InXile Entertainment revived the franchise with

a "spiritual sequel" for the PS2, Xbox, and Windows But what was it about this series thatmade it so enduring?

"When the going gets tough, the bard goes drinking." –from The Bard's Tale instruction

manual

After all, like Wizardry, the first Bard's Tale is a challenging game even for expert D&D

players The difficulty is particularly felt during the crucial initial stage of the game, whenthe player's characters (up to six) are weak, poorly equipped, and inexperienced I can'tremember how many times I created an entire party of adventurers, only to have them allperish in a random encounter before I could make it to Garth's weapons shop! The game

is also rather lacking in terms of narrative or story elements it's a "dungeon crawler"with an emphasis on fighting random encounters with monsters, building up characterstats and inventories, and mapping out dungeons In many ways, the game is merely an

updated Wizardry with better graphics and sound (indeed, some versions of the game even let players import their Wizardry or Ultima characters!) The story find and depose

an evil wizard named Mangar the Dark, who is threatening the town of Skara Brae ishardly novel Perhaps the only true innovation is the addition of the bard character, a sort

of jack-of-all-trades character who could perform party-boosting songs during combat anddungeon exploration The classes available to magic users were also sophisticated;players started off as simple conjurers or magicians, but could eventually upgrade tosorcerers and wizards Truly ambitious players could even combine all these to create

Nevertheless, anyone who has played the game for any length of time discovers that it ismuch greater than the sum of its parts There's just an indefinable quality that seems tohold the game together No doubt, much of the game's playability is owed to the clean

interface and striking color graphics (many of which are animated) Even novice playerscan learn the game's rules in a few sessions, and if the characters can survive to reach afew levels, the difficulty eases up considerably and it's quite rewarding to go aboutwhomping monsters who made a meal out of your former parties Furthermore, the ability

to travel outdoors as well as indoors lends a certain coherence to the game world Unlikeother CRPGs in which cities and towns were little more than places to buy equipment,Skara Brae felt like a real place Again, this coherence is almost surely an effect of thegame's rich graphics Even if the graphics look primitive today, in 1985 they werestunning Each building in Skara Brae looked like it belonged there

Interplay followed up its success with two sequels, The Destiny Knight (1986) and The

Thief of Fate (1991) The Destiny Knight was essentially a rehash of the first game, using

the same engine but expanding the game world to include five other cities (the first gamehad occurred entirely in Skara Brae) and a wilderness area It also added banks andcasinos to the services available in the towns, special spells for archmages, timedpuzzles, and ranged combat Though players can import their characters from the firstgame, the difficulty level is better balanced for new parties (i.e., you have a much betterchance of making it to Garth's store to buy equipment before dying)

Although the characters dispatched the evil Mangar the Dark in the first game, anotherevil mage named Lagoth Zanta decides to shatter the "Destiny Wand" into seven pieces,scattering them across the land Since the wand has protected the world for some 700years, things don't bode well unless your characters can restore the wand and use it toslay Lagoth Zanta (one wonders what the wand was doing during the first game, but so itgoes) Solving the game will require gaining insights from a Sage, a process that utilizes arather infantile and frustrating text parser

The Thief of Fate is probably the overall best designed game of the series, since it

incorporates helpful new features like auto-mapping and the ability to use items to solvepuzzles, thus opening up many interesting opportunities for thoughtful gameplay Thethird game is also the most ambitious in terms of the game world; now the players mustexplore whole different "universes," including a trip to Nazi Berlin!

Electronic Arts also published Interplay's The Bard's Tale Construction Set for

Commodore's Amiga and the MS-DOS platforms This construction set included an

updated version of the first game in the series (rechristened the Star Light Festival).

However, more importantly, the set allowed CRPG fans to construct their own new games

based on the enhanced Thief of Fate engine The construction kit was popular on many platforms, but the most useful version available for MS-DOS, which had support for hard

drives, VGA, mouse, and the usual slew of sound cards Strangely, while music wasplayed through the sound card, all sound effects were delegated to the PC's totallyinadequate internal speaker The two most well-known games created with the set

include The Bard's Lore: The Warrior and the Dragon created by John H Wigforss, and

Nutilan by Dennis Payne Both of these games were for the PC version Of course, there

were undoubtedly many thousands of other "homebrew" titles created by other fans, butthe Internet as we know it had not yet arrived on the scene Since these hobbyistdevelopers had no way to cheaply distribute their games, most are lost to history.Thankfully, at least one ambitious developer is still releasing games built with thesystem see Warrior's Tale, released in 2006.While Electronic Arts' initial foray into CRPGs played a pivotal role in the development of

the genre, The Bard's Tale was not alone Another company that was beginning to flex its

muscles was SSI, an old publisher of war games who had now set their sights on thebudding CRPG market

The Infant Phantasies of Strategic Simulations, Inc: Any Questrons?

Today, Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI) is best known for its fabulous "Gold Box" games, a

series of CRPGs that bore the official seal of TSR, holder of the sacred Dungeons &

Dragon copyrights and trademarks This invaluable license was sought after by nearly

every other CRPG developer, but SSI emerged victorious No doubt TSR's decision wasswayed by SSI's legacy as a developer and publisher of computer-based "war games" (as

you remember, D&D emerged from tabletop war games) SSI's first game was Computer

Bismarck, published in 1979 for the Apple II SSI quickly became the market leader in this

niche, even with the premier wargames publisher Avalon Hill competing against them

SSI's most famous non-CRPG game is probably Cytron Masters (1982), one of the first (if not the first) real-time strategy games It was designed by Dani Bunten, creator of

M.U.L.E

SSI's first CRPGs were published in 1984: 50 Mission Crush and Questron 50 Mission

Crush is more like a traditional war game than most CRPGs, and is probably better

described as a turn-based strategy game The game consists of fifty B17 bomber missionsflown in World War II, and the player assigns each position in the plane to his characters(i.e., tail-gunner, bomber) These characters receive experience points each time theysurvive a mission, eventually gaining competence and winning promotions The magazine

Computer Gaming World published an intriguing review of the game written by an actual

B-24 bombardier named Leroy W Newby, who found it realistic enough to evoke dozens

of wartime memories, which he duly juxtaposes alongside his gameplay narrative (seeissue #35)

Phantasie (C-64) It took SSI a while to really get

away from the model established by Ultima.

While 50 Mission Crush is a highly innovative and even unique game, Questron is an unimaginative Ultima clone Indeed, SSI even secured a license from Richard Garriott for the game's "structure and style." At the time, Questron was noted for being much easier and simpler to play than Ultima, and one contemporary reviewer even remarked that it was a "perfect warm-up" for Ultima III (Michael Ciraolo in Antic Vol 3, No 7) Nevertheless, Questron had some promising features For instance, towns and cities

contained "mini-games" that let skilled players boost their character's stats There were

also casinos where players could gamble for gold Finally, Questron was one of the first

games with monsters that could only be defeated with certain types of weapons Perhapsthe most unusual and disturbing "feature" is the option to "kill self," featured prominently

in the main menu SSI would publish a popular sequel to Questron in 1988, which was

developed by Westwood Associates The game followed the same basic formula as thefirst, but was set in the past The mission this time was to depose six insane sorcerersand prevent the creation of the "Book of Magic." An auto-mapper was added and thedungeons were rendered in 3D, but it's essentially the same game in a new costume

Let's talk next about the Phantasie and Wizard's Crown games, which are more direct

precursors to the famous Gold Box games.

In 1985, SSI published the first of what would become a trilogy of Phantasie games These

games allow players to create and control a party of up to six adventurers, with severalclasses and races to choose from (including unlikable critters like goblins and minotaurs!).Another nice feature is separate screens and menus for purchasing equipment, exploringdungeons, roaming the world map, and vanquishing foes There's even a bank wherecharacters can store their money a nice trade-off for the limited coin-carrying capacity ofthe characters (try saying that three times fast) Furthermore, the game tracks whereyour characters have been, eliminating the need for graph paper There were also newproblems the characters aged, and could even die from old age if the player took too

Combat in Phantasie is handled in much the same way as console CRPGs like Final

Fantasy The player first chooses from a menu what each character will do, then enters

the next round of combat A simple animation shows which character (or enemy) isattacking and how much damage was dealt (or received) If the players win, they do acomical dance which again reminds one of so many console CRPGs Although the combat

system is simplistic compared to Wizard's Crown, which we'll discuss in a moment, it

nevertheless offers players fine control over how characters attack For instance, fighterscan choose to attack, thrust, slash, and lunge These options control how many swingsthe character takes at an enemy, with varying degrees of damage and likeliness of a hit

"Lunge" attempts to hit a monster standing behind the first row of enemies

The story behind the first Phantasie is simple enough kill the "Black Knights" and their

master, the evil sorcerer Nikademus, who supplied the knights with powerful but sucking magic rings (ring a bell?) However, to accomplish this, the characters mustround up twenty scrolls, each of which contains vital clues to help the charactersaccomplish their goal The story is more deeply interwoven into the game than in mostCRPGs, and the player's choices make a real difference in how the game unfolds The

soul-many riffs on Tolkien and occasional humor help distinguish Phantasie from the typical

dungeon-crawler

"Phantasie, from Strategic Simulations, may be the best fantasy role-playing game to come down the silicon pike since Sir-Tech conjured up Wizardry As a matter of fact—at the risk of sounding blasphemous—in some ways Phantasie surpasses Wizardry."—James

V Trunzo in Compute!, December 1985.

SSI followed up the first game with Phantasie II in 1986 The plot this time was even less

imaginative than the first Nikademus is back, and this time he's used a magical orb toenslave an island and its population Naturally, the party must find and destroy the orb.Other than a revamped story, there is little difference between this game and its prequel,save the ability of characters to hurl rocks at an enemies during combat Players of the

first game could also import their old characters The final Phantasie [sic] was released in

1987 for the Apple II, and given the subtitle The Wrath of Nikademus (Westwood

Associates ported it to other platforms) Nikademus has returned, and after two defeatshis ambition has only grown this time he's out to control the world The third gameoffered better graphics and more sophisticated combat, such as the ability to targetspecific body regions, a wound system, and better tactics All in all, the third part isprobably the best game in the series, even if it is noticeably shorter than the first twogames In 1990, a company named WizardWorks released the first games in a "retro-

styled" package called Phantasie Bonus Edition for the DOS and Commodore Amiga

platforms Unfortunately, despite its initial popularity and many innovations, the

Phantasie series has not managed to attain the enduring legacy it deserves, and has

been long overshadowed by SSI's later "Gold Box" CRPGs

Questron (C-64) The game may get

frustrating, but is the "kill self" option

really necessary?

In 1985, SSI released another party-based fantasy CRPG called Wizard's Crown, which

was probably the most "hardcore" CRPG of its time Players could create up to 8 players,and multi-class them as much as they liked (i.e., a character could be athief/fighter/mage/cleric) Instead of "levels," characters improved their stats and skills,such as hunting, haggling, alchemy, and swimming This skill system would show up

again in modern games like Fall Out and Neverwinter Nights Likewise, the combat

system was more dynamic than anything offered up to that time There were over 20combat commands alone, including unusual ones like "Fall Prone," which made a

character harder to hit with arrows but easier to hit with melee weapons Like Questron and Phantasie, different situations called for different weapons However, Wizard's Crown

went a step beyond with added realism shields only worked if the character was facingthe right direction, for instance, and characters were still vulnerable to axes and flails,which could destroy or circumvent a shield, respectively Ranged weapons wereimplemented, as well as an intelligent magic system Although a major battle could last

up to 40 minutes, players could also choose "quick combat," which would automaticallyresolve the combat in seconds While the storyline was droll (find a wizard, kill him, andtake back a crown), the extraordinary attention to character development and strategiccombat made up for it It remains one of the most complicated CRPGs and a strategist's

dream SSI released a sequel to the game called The Eternal Dagger in 1987 Demons

from another dimension are invading the world, and the only item that can seal the portal

is the titular dagger Besides the new storyline, the sequel is nearly identical to the firstgame, though some elements like the "fall prone" option mentioned above were omitted

Wizard's Crown (Apple II) This combat

screen and interface is an early form of

the one SSI employed in the Gold Box games.

There are at least two other early SSI CRPGs worth mentioning: Shard of Spring and Rings

of Zilfin, both released in 1986 Shard of Spring is a game written for the Apple II by Craig

Roth and David Stark, and ported to MS-DOS by D.R Gilman, Leslie Hill, and MartindeCastongrene who did the whole game in Microsoft QuickBasic! It's a bit crude

compared to the other SSI games of the era, and falls somewhere in between Wizard's

Crown and Phantasie in terms of complexity The story is that an evil sorceress has stolen

the Shard of Spring, a magical item that brings eternal springtime to the land Now that

it's gone, the world has fallen into chaos, and the solution is obvious Roth and Stark

wrote a sequel called Demon's Winter, which was published by SSI in 1988 While very similar to the first game, Demon's Winter features an exponentially larger game world

and two new characters classes, the scholar and the visionary Visionaries have someunusual abilities, mostly dealing with reconnaissance for instance, they can view a room

to check for monsters without being seen The story this time is perhaps even morestraightforward than the first the land of Ymros is faced with eternal winter unless thecharacters can find and destroy the evil demon god Malifon Both games feature someinteresting twists on religion, allowing characters to become acolytes of different godsand pray to them for aid during combat Unfortunately, neither game had polishedgraphics or quality sound (even on the Amiga platform), factors that no doubt led tolackluster reviews in most game magazines

The Shard of Spring (DOS) Ah, killing rats with swords The fun never ends.

"Another common problem in CRPGs may be an emphasis in glitz and glamour rather than substance If it is pretty, the assumption is that people will buy it The question is, however, do these beautiful graphics really add anything substantial to the game? " –

David L Arneson in Computer Gaming World, May 1988.

Rings of Ziflin (Apple II) Early cut-scenes

like this helped establish a story and carry

it along.

Ali Atabek's Rings of Ziflin, released in 1986, is a game intended for novices and thus

focuses more on story and atmosphere than tactics and stats It features plenty ofamusing "cut scenes" that establish and maintain the storyline, which amounts tokeeping an evil necromancer named Lord Dragos from finding both rings of power and

using them to take over the world (sound familiar?) Rings of Zilfin puts the player in the

role of Reis (though the name can be changed), a budding magic user who must develophis abilities and take on Dragos and his minions Players are spared the bother of creatingcharacters and rolling for stats, and the combat sequences are more like mini-arcadegames than tactical combat Most of the game is spent traveling between towns, andalong the way the character can collect plants such as magic mushrooms, as well asdrink from pools Overall, it's an interesting game and quite different from most of SSI's

other offerings Atabek would go on to create a trilogy of Ultima-like games called The

Magic Candle The first of these, published by Mindcraft Software, appeared in 1989, with

the sequels following in 1991 and 1992 both published by Electronic Arts Of these, thefirst is generally considered the best, and is known for its creative storyline andabundance of mini quests The gist is that a demon is trapped in a candle, but once the

candle burns down low enough, it will escape and then al hell will break loose Like Rings

of Zilfin, The Magic Candle did not allow players to roll their own characters, but did allow

them to build a party by selecting non-player characters (NPCs) found at the castle Bythe way, an "NPC" means a character that that may assist the player, but cannot be

directly controlled; it is controlled instead by the computer In this way, The Magic Candle series predates the "henchman" system of later games like Neverwinter Nights.

SSI also experimented with hybrid CRPGs, mixing together adventure and arcade

elements to varying degrees of success Gemstone Warrior (1984) and Gemstone Healer

(1986), both developed by Paradigm Creators, are two fairly well-known examples Thesegames are perhaps best described as CRPG/shooter games SSI also released one game

solely for the Commodore 64 called Realms of Darkness (1987) This very rare game,

written by Gary Smith, is a hybrid adventure/CRPG However, these games areaberrations from the type of CRPGs SSI would become famous for making namely, thecelebrated "Gold Box Games," which we'll discuss next

Unforgettable Realms: SSI's "Gold Box" Games

As we've seen, SSI had developed and published several significant CRPGs before it won

the exclusive license from TSR to market official AD&D computer games Questron,

Phantasie, Wizard's Crown, and even Shard of Spring all have elements that show up in

one form or another in SSI's later productions The Gold Box combat system, for instance,

is essentially a streamlined version of the one found in Wizard's Crown However, we're

getting a bit ahead of ourselves Let's back up to the year 1988, when the Gold Box seriesfirst debuted

Pool of Radiance (C-64) The game's smooth,

carefully-laid out interface made up for the

rather "paper doll" look of the characters.

The first Gold Box game is Pool of Radiance, a game which marked an important turning

point in CRPG history The game shipped in a distinctive gold-colored box (hence thenickname for the series), which sported artwork by celebrated fantasy illustrator ClydeCaldwell (Caldwell also designed the covers for Curse of the Azure Bonds and several

other TSR-licensed games and books) It was initially available only on the Atari ST andCommodore 64 platforms, though soon ports were available for most major platforms,

including the NES Pool of Radiance was an instant best-seller, and not just because it was the first officially licensed AD&D computer game Awash with strong competition, SSI

took the sensible approach take the very best elements of its own and rival CRPGs and

pool them together Indeed, the Gold Box engine is essentially a medley of Bard's Tale and Wizard's Crown, which can trace their own ancestry back to Ultima, Wizardry, and

Tunnels of Doom Nevertheless, Pool of Radiance is much greater than the sum of its

parts, and more than deserves its reputation among serious CRPG critics as one of thebest (if not the very best) CRPG ever designed Though later Gold Box games would refinethe engine and address some annoying flaws in the interface, all of the qualities that

made the Gold Box games so legendary are present in Pool of Radiance.

Before I go on, let me put my cards (or, should I say, dice?) on the table here Every critichas those few games that it's just impossible to be truly objective about We all have that

"first love," that first game that taught us that playing computer games was something

we'd be doing for the rest of our lives For me, that game is most certainly Pool of

Radiance Although I had played earlier CRPGs like The Bard's Tale and Ultima, there was

just something about Pool of Radiance that made these other games look hopelessly

mundane I loved the game so much that I bought every other Gold Box game and eventhe pulpy novels that were based on them I would've bought the breakfast cereal and the

underwear if they'd made them In short, Pool of Radiance awakened me to a whole new world the world of D&D, fantasy, Tolkien, Dragonlance, and, most importantly, CRPGs.

How can I be objective about a game that shaped me into the man I am today? I adore

Pool of Radiance, and so should you! After all, you wouldn't be reading this article if I had

However, I'll dry my eyes now, take a deep breath, and try to break this game down intoits constituent parts As I see it, the game's key strengths lie in its game world, story,combat system, and overall game structure Since the game world and story are soclosely related, let's discuss those first In a nutshell, the characters' task is to helprebuild Phlan, a once-proud city that has long lain in ruins The characters arrive at NewPhlan, the part of the city that has already been cleared, and begin acceptingcommissions from the City Council to perform various quests, such as clearing the slums

of monsters and recovering legendary artifacts The quests vary widely and all makesense in the context of the story Eventually, the player learns that an evil dragon namedTyranthraxus is at the root of Phlan's problems, but defeating him is going to take much

Like The Bard's Tale, Pool of Radiance features a coherent game world that feels like a

real place No doubt much of this realism is caused by the 3-D, first-person perspectiveplayers see in "exploration" mode The interface has a rectangle on the top left thatshows where the characters are currently facing, and the rest of the screen is neatlydivided to display pertinent information However, no interface can make a dull andrepetitive game fun to explore SSI was luckily able to draw upon the rich body of

literature TSR had created for its Forgotten Realms universe of tabletop AD&D games The Forgotten Realms world was nearly as well-developed as J.R.R Tolkien's Middle Earth,

and possibilities for new stories were virtually unlimited indeed, novels set in this

fictional universe are still being published, most notably those by R.A Salvatore The

Forgotten Realms are an ideal environment for CRPGs, and added great depth to Pool of Radiance and its sequels.

Pool of Radiance (DOS) The Gold Box games

are noted for their superb tactical combat

system.

When the characters must engage in combat, the screen changes to a top-down mode

very similar to the one found in The Wizard's Crown Each round, or "turn," the player

decides what action his characters will undertake, though these actions are taken

immediately rather than after all the commands have been issued (as in Phantasie or

Wizardry) There are plenty of options available to each character depending on his or her

class For instance, fighters can wield melee or ranged weapons, and magic-usersfunction like artillery or sharpshooters, depending on the spell (fireball vs magic missile,for instance) Thieves also have the option to "back-stab" an opponent, a devastatingmove that requires very strategic positioning Furthermore, retreating characters (orenemies) are penalized by giving all surrounding enemies a free swipe at their backside

An intense battle can easily last 45 minutes to an hour, and even simple battles canquickly turn disastrous if the player rushes through them (or, worse, puts his characters incomputer controlled "quick" mode) If a character's hit-points fall below 0, he or she iswounded and must be bandaged by another character to avoid death

Much of what makes Pool of Radiance different is its adherence to official AD&D rules For

instance, instead of "magic points," magic-users are given a set number of spells tomemorize How many spells they get per slot depends on their level of experience andintelligence (or wisdom in the case of clerics) Although mages receive one new spell perlevel, they will learn most of them by scribing them from scrolls found in the unsettledareas Once a spell is cast, it erases itself from the magic-user's memory and must be re-learned Memorizing spells (and restoring hit points) takes several hours of inactivity,which means setting up camp Although there are many safe spots where the characterscan rest unmolested, many of the more dangerous areas all but prevent it Thus, a playercan't just focus on one battle at the time; she must always plan ahead For instance,

"wasting" all of a mage's fireball spells on a group of wimpy kobolds might leave the partytotally vulnerable to a troll attack Finally, some creatures are more vulnerable (orinvulnerable) to certain kinds of attack i.e., the undead can be "turned" by clerics ordealt extra damage by silver weapons

"Some will undoubtedly see the strict enforcement of these rules as a nuisance, but it seems to us like a logical extension of the kind of resource management which is necessary to any sophisticated strategy game." –Johnny L Wilson in Computer Gaming World, July 1988.

The city of Phlan has many intriguing areas to explore, such as a bizarre pyramid and ahaunted library But eventually players will get to go across country in "wilderness" mode,

which anyone familiar with older SSI games like Questron and Phantasie or Ultima will

instantly recognize Later SSI games experimented with different "wilderness" modes,such as showing the player a large map and having him click on different regions In any

case, the wilderness mode makes Pool of Radiance seem even larger, and gives gamers

something to do after they've completed the game (e.g., slaughtering groups ofwandering monsters)

Buck Rogers (DOS) With a few cosmetic

changes, SSI's Gold Box engine became the

perfect vehicle for sci-fi adventure.

SSI eventually released three sequels: Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the

Silver Blades (1990), and Pools of Darkness (1991) It also spun-off a series based on

TSR's Dragonlance universe These include Champions of Krynn (1990), Death Knights of

Krynn (1991), and Dark Queen of Krynn (1992) While these games give players a chance

to meet beloved Dragonlance characters like Tanis Half-Even and Raistlin Majere, the trade-off is more rigidly linear gameplay There were also two more Forgotten Realms games that took place in another part of the realm: Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991) and Treasures of the Savage Frontier (1992) Finally, as if SSI wasn't already milking its Gold Box engine enough, it released two games set in TSR's Buck Rogers universe: Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (1990) and Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed

(1992)

SSI finally retired the Gold Box engine in 1992, though it would continue to releasevarious compilations for years afterwards Even if SSI was finished with the engine,

players could still create their own "Gold Box" games using MicroMagic's Unlimited

Adventures, published by SSI in 1993 The Gold Box games defined the Golden Age, and

set the bar against which all later games would be judged However, SSI knew it was time

to move on Its next big series debuted with Eye of the Beholder (1991) However, since that game has much in common with an earlier game called Dungeon Master, it's only fair

to pause our coverage of SSI here and talk about other CRPGs of the Golden Age

Sick of Swords and Sorcery: Non-Fantasy CRPGs

Before moving on such important CRPG classics as FTL's Dungeon Master and the later

Ultima and Wizardry titles, we should take a look at some of the CRPGs that departed

from the "swords and sorcery" conventions that dominate the genre We've already

mentioned a few in passing, such as SSI's 50 Mission Crush, set in World War II, the Buck

Rogers games, and Origin's Ultima series, which featured many sci-fi elements as well as

fantasy Another game worth mentioning is Polarware's Expedition Amazon (1983) Although it suffers from some pretty serious design flaws, Expedition Amazon explored new possibilities for the CRPG Set in modern times, the goal of Expedition Amazon is to

guide a team of four explorers (Medic, Field Assistant, Radio Operator, and Guard) as theystudy ancient Incan ruins Instead of dragons and orcs, players fought with recalcitrantnatives and malaria-carrying mosquitoes However, the game wasn't a success, and canhardly be said to have much influence on the CRPG genre Thankfully, other CRPGdevelopers were willing to try to push the CRPG out of the Middle Ages

Alternate Reality (Atari 8-Bit) A colorful

interface and countless innovative features

make this sci-fi themed CRPG a classic.

In 1985, a Datasoft published Philip Price's Alternate Reality: The City, the first of a

planned series of five games based on the same premise: aliens abducting the characterand transporting him to different "realities." Even though only two of the games were

ever published (the second part, The Dungeon, appeared in 1987), the series maintains a cult status, particularly among fans of Atari 8-bit computers (where it originated) Atari

Age even hosts a competition for the game that is still going strong! The games featurefirst-person perspective and nice graphics, and are in many ways much ahead of their

time Both The City and The Dungeon are located on Medieval worlds, so most of the standard fantasy conventions still apply (mages, dwarves, etc.) However, Alternate

Reality is more realistic than most CRPGs of its era the avatar gets thirsty, hungry, and

tired The only way to address these problems (and get better equipment) is to raisecapital Thankfully, players can store their money and earn interest at banks, though thereally profitable investment plans are risky Even the treasures weren't always good;many items were cursed and had dire consequences for unwary players And, as if all thisisn't enough it often rains, which apparently brings out the truly dangerous denizens ofXebec's Demise Frustrated (or evil) players are free to prey upon the innocent In any

case, the high degree of realism and complexity makes Alternate Reality one of the most

challenging of all CRPGs Downloads and emulator information is available here

Another unfinished series is Star Saga, a highly innovative game developed by Masterplay and published by Electronic Arts Star Saga was intended to be a trilogy, but only two games were made Star Saga is interesting because of its determined effort to

more closely emulate tabletop role-playing games (it's allegedly based on a tabletop

game called Rekon) The approach was to heavily integrate extra-game materials, such

as a hefty collection of printed texts ("textlets") and even a game board and pieces Theidea was that players could enrich their computer game experience by referring to thesematerials during game sessions; for instance, by moving the tokens around on the map.All that appears on the screen is text describing the current situation and the effects of

the players' actions Star Saga is intended to be played by more than one player (up to

six), and each player has a unique role and set of tasks In so many ways, the gamefunctions as a robotic "dungeon master," and the real action takes place on the tabletop.Obviously, the game just can't be properly played via an emulator, so anyone interested

in learning more about this game should find an original copy with all the included printedmaterial (nearly three pounds worth!) a collector's dream By all accounts, the writing isquite excellent and the story simply fascinating

"[Star Saga] is probably the most unique and well-written role-playing experience yet to appear in a computer game It will also stand up to any human game-mastered role- playing game on the market."—William "Biff" Kritzen in Computer Gaming World, Aug.

1988

On a side note, one of my favorite science fiction-themed CRPGs of the mid 1980s is

Jagware's Alien Fires: 2199 AD, a very obscure first-person, single-character game that

originated on the Commodore Amiga (1986) but was later ported to the Atari ST and

MS-DOS Almost no one talks about this game today, and I was unable to find any version butthe graphically inept DOS version online Nevertheless, I find its premise interesting (youplay as a Time Lord who must stop a Dr Kurtz from traveling back in time to see the BigBang.) The game is fast and difficult, and involves quite a bit of interaction with a ratherodd and colorful cast of characters (mostly aliens) Furthermore, the Amiga version'sdigitized soundtrack is absolutely hypnotic, and the design decision to use the Amiga's

built-in speech synthesizer adds a distinctly "alien," psychedelic feel to the game Alien

Fires is a quirky and extremely difficult game, and the lack of a good save option

compounds the problem exponentially I certainly wouldn't recommend it to everyone, butI've never played another game that had the same otherworldly ambiance Try to find theAmiga version if you're determined to try this game yourself

Alien Fires 2199 A.D (DOS) The Amiga version has the best graphics, but the DOS port

has a more user-friendly interface.

After fantasy and science fiction, the most popular genre for CRPGs is post-apocalypticfiction Generally speaking, this genre is occupied with the future of civilization after anuclear holocaust (or some other type of worldwide catastrophe) The genre has been

popular in books and movies, such as Mad Max (1979), Damnation Alley (1977), and

Death Race 2000 (1975) The reason I mention these particular movies is that they seem

to have had such a strong influence on the developers of early post-apocalyptic CRPGs,

such as Autoduel (1985), which was itself based on a Steve Jackson game called Car Wars (c 1980) In Autoduel, the point is not to slay dragons, but rather to build the most

deadly vehicle on the road Accomplishing that goal requires forethought, luck, and quick

reflexes think of it as a cross between Bally Midway's arcade hit Spy Hunter and Ultima

Instead of strength, dexterity, and constitution, characters are assigned points for drivingskill, marksmanship, and mechanics

Autoduel (Apple II) Whatever you do,

don't say "cute."

Autoduel is also known for being one of the first "open-ended" computer games (though

of course the mainframe "roguelikes" were much earlier in this regard, and Firebird's Elite

(1984) was a year earlier) At any rate, it's up to the player to decide what goals areworth pursuing and how he should go about pursuing them Players are encouraged toexperiment For instance, the player could stick to "courier" missions, risking life and limb

on the deadly highways Other players might prefer winning money in the arena, orengaging in a bit of vigilante justice or even become an outlaw Likewise, players canbuild fast and highly maneuverable cars, or virtual tanks on wheels In so many ways,

what's enjoyable about Autoduel is not so much being part of a story or completing a

quest, but rather just gaining expertise of the game's logic and creative possibilities Oh,

and if any of this sounds familiar to you Grand Theft Auto fans out there, don't get too

excited there's no "Hot Coffee Mod" in Autoduel Or is there? Autoduel was a very popular and successful game despite its simple graphics, and other

games would follow in its trajectory Interstel's Scavengers of the Mutant World, released

in 1988 for MS-DOS, echoes the nuclear wasteland setting and build-a-vehicle concept.

However, this time the only purpose in doing so is to escape to a radiation-free zone,killing anything or anyone that gets in the way While the game had some good ideas(using old highway signs for shields, for instance), terrible graphics and repetitivegameplay prevented it from achieving much success Furthermore, the monsters grewtougher as the party gained experience and eventually became so strong that the playerhad no choice but to create a whole new party and resume In short, there's more disasterhere than the one serving as the game's premise

In 1987, Origin published another post-apocalyptic game set in the far future called 2400

A.D The story here is that alien robots called the Tzorg have overrun the world of

Metropolis and must be stopped The player assumes the role of a rebel, and must find away to take down the robots' central control (perhaps the developer, Chuck Bueche, was

inspired by the 1984 film The Terminator?) Instead of long swords and chainmail, players

get to play with a whole host of curious gadgets, such as a holoprojector which casts ahologram of the character to confuse the robots, and a jetpack to make travel a breeze.All and all, it's a very creative game that should have been a great deal more successful.Unfortunately, some legal issues prevented the game from ever being released for the C-

64, and apparently the game flopped on the Apple II On a side note, John Romero of

Doom fame is often credited with the C-64 port, though some controversy exists about hisinvolvement

Wasteland (DOS) But Mom, I am playing

outside—see?

Probably the most famous of all the post-apocalyptic CRPGs, Fallout, can trace its roots back to Interplay's Wasteland, released in 1988 for the C-64, MS-DOS, and Apple II, and published by Electronic Arts Wasteland is set in the devastating aftermath of World War

III Players start out with a party of four "Desert Rangers," though up to three morecharacters can be recruited later on However, these additional members cannot becontrolled directly, and have their own goals that play a strong role in how the gameunfolds Two of the developers, Ken St Andre and Michael Stackpole, had designed their

own tabletop role-playing games (Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies, and Private

Eyes, respectively), and many of their ideas ended up in Wasteland As in SSI's Wizard's Crown (1985), character development was based not only on "stats" but also skills 27 of

them, to be precise These abilities range from combat skills to sleight-of-hand andmetallurgy Obviously, sensible players will want to ensure their party has a wide spread

of talents, since there's no telling what they'll be up against though the game is flexibleenough to let players overcome obstacles in a variety of ways, such as picking a lockversus climbing a gate Likewise, the game has several situations in which an individualcharacter must "go it alone," thus further helping players form coherent identities fortheir party

Interface-wise, Wasteland can be described as a mix between The Bard's Tale (for combat and character info screens) and top-down games like Ultima (for travel and exploration).

It's a nice setup that works well, even if it doesn't allow players quite the tactical combat

possibilities of Pool of Radiance or The Wizard's Crown At any rate, the appeal of

Wasteland stems more from its fascinating game world and intricate character

development than combat stratagems

Like Pool of Radiance and several other games of the era, much of the context for the

action takes place in a printed manual with numbered paragraphs The manual warnsagainst reading ahead, but notes that once the game is finished "you can kick back inyour best lounge chair under a shady cactus and read the rest of the fictional vignettes."Indeed, players who did either found some funny paragraphs designed to catch cheaters,including the first one After several torrid descriptions of an impending sex scene, awould-be seductress proclaims, "Stop reading paragraphs you're not supposed to read,creeps Next time I'm going to demand they put me in a Bard's Tale game, this Wastelandduty is dangerous."

Wasteland remains the favorite CRPG of many a gamer who played in back in the late

1980s, and for good reason it's a captivating and highly innovative game that deserves

its place beside (if not above!) Interplay's other CRPG classic, The Bard's Tale It's more than a testament to the game's enduring legacy that the best-selling Fallout, released in

1997, is in many ways little more than a graphical revamp of the older engine Wasteland

is a classic game that remains highly playable and rewarding even today I might note

that Electronic Arts released an alleged sequel to the game called Fountain of Dreams in

1990, but none of Wasteland's developers were involved The publisher made an

uncharacteristic decision to downplay the "sequel" aspect as much as possible, and thegame (which, by all accounts, is something of a lemon) made very little impression on themarket

The last non-fantasy CRPGs I'll mention for now are Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's

Inception and Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic The Crescent Hawk's Inception, developed

by Westwood Associates and published by Infocom in 1988 This top-down CRPG putplayers in the role of Jason Youngblood, whose mission was to locate his lost father andwin back the land of Pacifica In some ways, this game is similar to Origin's much earlier

release Autoduel, in that players spend most of their time trying to build the best mobile

death machines Here, however, combat is turn-based and much closer to games like

Pool of Radiance Although the game was generally well received, other games based on

the Battletech franchise were either strategy or arcade/simulation games (Mechwarrior, for instance) Westwood Associates also developed a game called Mars Saga in 1988 that was published by Electronic Arts Mars Saga is seldom mentioned game today, though it

was Westwood's first game that wasn't based on a license

Sentinel Worlds, developed by Karl Buiter and published by Electronic Arts in 1989, is

something of a cross between The Bard's Tale and Firebird's Elite Players begin by

assembling a five-person crew, who are then assigned "skill points" in areas as diverse asgunnery, bribery, and ATV repair Combat can take place either on the ground or in space,but there was more to this game than who had the bigger gun Players also had to choosethe right options from conversation menus, where a few bad choices could force restoring

to an older saved game Like many other Golden Age CRPGs, Sentinel Worlds included a

book of numbered passages which the players were asked to consult at certain points inthe game These passages added literary texture to the game, but were obviously muchmore of an interruption than the "cut scenes" we so often see in modern games Like

SSI's The Wizard's Crown, Sentinel Worlds is complicated game with a steep learning

curve factors that might explain why the game has not received the appreciation it

deserves Buiter followed up with Hard Nova, released in 1990 and also published by

Electronic Arts This game has more of a "cyberpunk" theme, and isn't an official sequel

to Sentinel Worlds despite sharing most of its gameplay concepts.

Suffice it to say, the Golden Age of CRPGs wasn't just about orcs, prismatic sprays, andvorpal blades There was a smorgasbord of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic games to choose

from, including triumphs like Wasteland Games like Star Saga and Autoduel really pushed

the boundaries of the genre and demonstrated new concepts some of which are nowcliches and others mere curiosities However, we're still not done with the Golden Ageyet Rounding out the Age are a collection of pioneering efforts into a more intense CRPGfeaturing real-time, 3D gameplay

The Late Golden Age: The Rise of Real-Time 3D

In 2007, we might find it difficult to imagine a time when real-time, 3D games were anovelty Although these games had existed for home computers for some time 3DMonster Maze (1981), Dungeons of Daggorath (1982), the great majority of CRPGs wereeither top-down, turn-based 3D, or some mixture of the two However, by the late 1980s,computer gamers were steadily replacing their 8-bit machines with Atari ST and

Commodore Amiga computers These new machines offered better graphics, sound,

memory, and storage options facts that were not lost on aspiring game developers.Nevertheless, it took awhile for real-time, first-person 3-D to really catch-on, and evennow the question of whether it really leads to better CRPGs is open for discussion

Gamers were just as divided in 1988 over games like Pool of Radiance and Dungeon

Master as they are about Neverwinter Nights 2 and The Elder Scrolls IV There has (and

probably never will be) a single, shared vision for a CRPG engine and interface Someplayers seem to privilege the "immersion" experience of first-person perspective,whereas others prefer to see their characters moving about on the screen Likewise, there

are CRPG fans who enjoy contemplative turn-based combat (as seen recently in The

Temple of Elemental Evil), though most modern gamers seem to prefer real-time action.

Dungeon Master (Atari ST) Can you overcome your carpal tunnel syndrome long enough to beat

this game?

"Few games have generated as much affection as Dungeon Master, even to the point of third-party products (hint books and maps) It's hard not to like DM."–Ian Chadwick in ST- Log, February 1989.

Since these issues remain so central to CRPG development, FTL Games' classic Dungeon

Master (1987) is one of the most historically significant CRPGs, and there are many CRPG

critics who consider it the greatest CRPG ever made It was first released for the new Atari

ST, where it became the best-selling game ever for the platform It was promptly ported

to the rival Commodore Amiga, and somewhat later to the MS-DOS and even the SNES

platforms Though it is hailed for its innovative use of sound and a back story by aprofessional novelist (Nancy Holder), for our purposes the most important feature is thegame's 3-D interface The bulk of the screen is composed of a first-person view of theparty's current perspective This screen is updated in real-time as the player explores thedungeon, much like the setup of a first-person shooter On the top of this window are fourboxes showing the current status of the four characters, the items they are holding, andtheir relative position (i.e., who is in front and back) The rest of the screen is dedicated tothe magic system, attack mode, and directional buttons Although the directional keys are

a bit cumbersome on the ST version (players must click them with the mouse), laterversions allow all movement (including rotating) to be executed from the keyboard Unlike

most games of the era, Dungeon Master offers combat in real-time When the party is

attacked, the player must work frantically to issue orders (e.g., attack, cast a spell, quaff

a potion), always taking into consideration how long it will take each character to performand recover Since very few of these actions can be automated or prepared beforehand,players need rapid reflexes and considerable endurance to complete the game Without a

doubt, many gamers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome today have Dungeon Master

However, Dungeon Master is far from a simple "clickfest." Most noticeably, the game's magic system is complex and arguably more logical than simple point-based (The Bard's

Tale) or slot systems (Pool of Radiance, Wizardry) In Dungeon Master, players cast spells

by stringing together runes Although only certain predetermined sequences produceeffects, players can determine the potency of any spell (or potion) and subsequently howmuch magical energy to expend in the process Furthermore, although any character can

try to cast a spell, only practiced mages and priests can pull off really effective feats ofmagic However, the manual doesn't include a magical recipe book, so players musteither find them sprinkled throughout the vast dungeon, experiment in a trial-and-errorfashion, or consult a hint book In any case, it's an versatile if somewhat daunting spell

system for novices A similar (probably derived) system shows up in Dynamix's Betrayal

Adding to the "real-time" aspect is the necessity to acquire food and water for the

characters a gameplay element seen in many earlier games, including Rogue and

Ultima Thankfully, the need to eat drink are infrequent enough to keep this aspect from

becoming a nuisance Hungry characters can even gobble down the carcasses of many ofthe slain monsters, though it's best to collect the turkey legs and other foods left lyingabout the dungeon (sanitation not required!)

Dungeon Master was an unqualified success, and FTL followed up with Chaos Strikes Back

in 1989 However, other developers were quick to follow their example In 1990, SSI

published the first of what would become a trilogy of "Black Box" Eye of the Beholder

games, developed by Westwood Studios (formerly Westwood Associates) and based on

the 2nd edition of the AD&D official rules First available for MS-DOS but later for the Amiga, Sega CD (featuring a famous soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro), and SNES, Eye of the

Beholder was unquestionably influenced by FTL's breakthrough title The games are set in

TSR's Forgotten Realms, the same universe used in Pool of Radiance and its sequels Like

Dungeon Master, the player controls a party of four characters however, in Eye of the Beholder, two non-player characters can also join the group Another important difference

is that players get to create their own characters rather than select them from a "Hall of

Heroes," as in DM Further differences are a built-in compass (players must find the compass in DM) and a slot-style spell system Players select which spells they wish their

mages to memorize or clerics to pray for, then "camp" until they've done so

Eye of the Beholder (DOS) Any resemblance to Dungeon Master is purely coincidental

The story in the first game is quite simple a mysterious evil presence has been detectedunderneath the city of Waterdeep Little is known about the nature of this evil, but thename "Xanathar" seems relevant Naturally, the characters are instructed to investigate,but a sudden cave-in leaves them stranded in the sewers beneath the city The second

game, The Legend of Darkmoon (1991), added outdoor areas and focused more on

narrative and interaction with non-player characters Perhaps most importantly, thesecond game has a much more user-friendly saved game setup; instead of replacing asingle saved game with each save, players choose among six different slots Though thestory starts off as vaguely as the first (you're to explore a mysterious evil in the Tower of

Darkmoon), most fans of the series consider The Legend of Darkmoon the best of the lot.

The final game, released in 1993, was not developed by Westwood Studios, but ratherinternally by SSI It has some nice innovations, such as an "ALL ATTACK" button allowingall available characters to attack with one click, and the ability of characters standing inthe rear to attack with pole-arms However, it is by all accounts a disappointment and aterrible way to end the glorious trilogy The culprits are a lackluster story, repetitivegameplay, and inconsistent difficulty

Hired Guns (Amiga) I'll take four, thank

you very much.

Another company to mimic the successful Dungeon Master formula was DMA Design, a premier Amiga developer In 1993, Psygnosis published their Hired Guns for MS-DOS and Amiga Set in a grim, futuristic world called Graveyard, Hired Guns quickly became many

gamers' favorite CRPG, and can be found on countless "Best Of" charts of Amiga games.The story is simple if a bit twisted four mercenaries are hired to allegedly rescue somehostages, but soon discover they have been selected to test the prowess of deadly,genetically engineered creatures One of the most popular features of the game is itsmultiplayer mode, which allows up to four players to play at once, and a "deathmatch"mode provides enjoyment long after players complete the campaign Although manyCRPGs claim to have "multiplayer" options, what this usually amounts to is one playersitting at the keyboard taking orders from the assembled group Only a few games prior

to the rise of LAN and internet gaming allowed more direct controls Though Hired Guns is one of the most famous of these, a very early example is Quality Software's Ali Baba and

the Forty Thieves (1981!), an Atari 8-bit game (later ported to Apple II) which allowed

simultaneous play for up to four people A later but only slightly less obscure example is

Swords of Twilight, developed by Free Fall Associates and published by Electronic Arts in

1989 An Amiga-only title, Swords of Twilight is a real-time isometric RPG that allows up

to three simultaneous players Also appearing in 1989 was Mirrosoft's Bloodwych, published by Konami Bloodwych, a first-person game in the vein of Dungeon Master, was

available for a variety of platforms, and features a split-screen option for two players toenjoy the game simultaneously The game is also known for its emphasis on dialog withnon-player characters and enormous maps The developers (Philip M and Anthony

Taglione) went on to create a follow-up called Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard, which was

Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic in the Golden Age

Naturally, Sir-Tech and Origin were not content to let the premier CRPG series fall by the

wayside From 1985-1994, Origin published five new Ultima titles, and Sir-Tech gave us four additions to the Wizardry canon Meanwhile, a new developer of CRPGs, New World Computing, introduced its well-known Might and Magic series in 1986, which had expanded to five games by the end of 1993 Let's start with Ultima and see how the

series evolved during the Golden Age

Golden Age Ultima: The Great Enlightenment

Ultima IV (DOS): But, you mean my

personality isn't just a series of dice rolls?

Although some Ultima fans consider Ultima III to be the best game in the series, Ultima

IV: Quest of the Avatar, released in 1985, is probably better known and admired today.

Indeed, as late as 1996, Computer Gaming World was naming it the #2 Best Game of All Time for PC, and Richard Garriott (creator of Ultima) cites it as one of his top two favorites

games of the series It certainly marked a turning point in the series, and was recognized

as such it was the first game set in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy From here on out,

Ultima would be best known for its strong emphasis on morality and important cultural

and social issues What does it mean to lead a good life? If you don't see how thatquestion could pertain to a CRPG, you have some homework to do!

Perhaps the key aspect that makes Quest of the Avatar unique is the unusual goal it sets

for the player Almost every CRPG we care to list is ultimately concerned with building upenough strength, experience, and resources to overcome some uber-powerful foe

"Character development," if we can call it that, amounts to gaining levels and tweaking

stats Quest of the Avatar departs radically from this convention, instead having the

player focus on the character's morality, boiled down to eight essential virtues: Honesty,Compassion, Valor, Spirituality, Humility, Sacrifice, Justice, and Honor The game actually

"punished" players who acted in typical "hack'n slash" fashion, mindlessly looting andkilling On the other hand, all CRPGs can be seen as "quests for self-improvement," and

Quest of the Avatar merely demonstrates a new method of achieving the ultimate such

improvement enlightenment The character's quest is to become a "shining example" to

Just how different Quest of the Avatar is from other CRPGs is evident as soon as the

player tries to create a character Instead of "rolling die" and generating stats, playersanswer a series of questions about moral dilemmas Answering the questions one wayresults in the character's becoming a bard, druid, shepherd, and so on Although it'sperhaps dangerous to speculate about how much Richard Garriott thought his gamemight have a real-life impact on players, the afterword he penned for the manual seemsclear: "The Quest for the Avatar is the search for a new standard, a new vision of life forwhich our people may strive We seek the person who can becoming a shining examplefor our nation and guide us from the Age of Darkness into the Age of Light." Some criticsclaim that Garriott was reacting against the stereotypes that RPGs were necessarilysatanic or immoral, and my guess is that they're at least partially correct Much wasmade of the new moral and philosophical element of the game, and contemporary

reviewers praised Origin for bringing new vitality to the genre Another interestinginnovation is the magic system, which requires that mages find reagents (ingredients likeginseng and garlic) to cast spells This reagent business is an integral part of many

tabletop AD&D campaigns, but is omitted from most CRPGs, including SSI's "Gold Box"

games

"To me, Ultima has become more than just a collection of puzzles to solve, but an environment, an entire world if you will, a gateway to a life among the peoples and cultures of a different time and place." –Richard Garriott in an interview published in Computer Gaming World, July 1988.

Quest of the Avatar also depends heavily on conversations with non-player characters,

some of whom can even join the Avatar on his quest (up to eight, or one of eachcharacter class) In some ways, it started the (infamous) tradition of CRPGs that literallyrequired players to try talking to everyone Accordingly, players must take copious notes

if they hope to progress very far in the game and it's a huge game, at that, estimated atsome 150 to 200 hours to finish Thankfully, players have many ways to get about in theworld horses, ships, and "moon gates" just to name a few I should also add that gameincluded a cloth map and a small metal ankh in addition to two manuals By the way, the

manuals for each of the Enlightenment games are quite lengthy and loaded with

information that is either directly useful or helpful in establishing context for the games

For instance, besides lengthy discussions of virtues, ethics, combat, and magic, Ultima

V's manual includes lyrics to a song called "Stones," penned by Gwenllian Gwalch'gaeaf,

wife of the famous folk musician Iolo Fitzowen In short, if you don't have the printedmaterials that were included with these games, you're missing out on a large chunk of

the Ultima experience On a positive note, though, this is the only game of the series

that's legally available for free download on the net, and several teams have createdversions that are much easier to run on modern operating systems If you're interested,

be sure to check out the remake xu4, where you can also download the original

The next entry in the series, Warriors of Destiny (1988) is even more deeply steeped in

morality play than its prequel This time, the theme is fundamentalism An evil tyrantnamed Blackthorn has taken over the land of Britannia, and is terrorizing the people byenforcing too strict of a moral code (i.e., "Thou shalt donate half of they income tocharity, or thou shalt have no income.") Although most of the core elements are identical

to the earlier game, the writing here is more polished and professional, and interactionwith non-player characters is more meaningful Players will need to be very careful towrite down any potential "keywords" that might trigger a crucial response from a non-player character Making matters even more difficult is a running clock that determineswhether it's night or day on Brittannia Many events can only take place if the Avatar is inthe right place at the right time; a fact that makes a hint book nearly indispensable.There are some other important differences between the two games The number ofclasses has been cut from 8 to 3 (fighter, bard, and mage) This limitation is particularlyfelt when important characters from the previous game; the specialized classes can theirmagical abilities The magic system has also been revamped a bit; now reagents can bepurchased in stores, and the spell system is now structured around eight "circles" and

strings of syllables Like Dungeon Master, players can now fine-tune their spells by

combining different sequences of magical incantations The combat system is also morerealistic and complex, and characters can even accidentally strike their comrades!

Warriors of Destiny also marks a few important turning points it's the last of the series to

originate on the Apple II and the last time Garriott took a hand in coding

Ultima VI: The False Prophet, was released in 1990 for MS-DOS, and marked the end of

the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy begun with Quest of the Avatar By 1990, the Apple II

was really showing its age, and Origin was convinced that Apple's IIgs just didn't have a

large enough user-base to warrant their attention The False Prophet took advantage of

the PC's new VGA cards, which Origin correctly determined would mark the beginning ofthe end for competing platforms However, though the game features enhanced graphics

compared to its predecessors, in some ways it's actually more limited the dungeons, forinstance, are rendered entirely in 2D, in some ways a step back from the 2D/3D switchingthat occurs in earlier games The interface was also cleaned up, and the old alphabeticallist of commands was replaced by a new streamlined menu Contemporary players wereimpressed with the immense size of the world, which was always displayed on screenalong with the characters (i.e., there's no "world map" mode) Interaction is enhancedwith small portraits of the interlocutors, and keywords are marked in red for easyrecognition An abundance of "cinematics" also adds to the ambiance The towns andvillages are also better populated and seem more realistic in addition to the usualassortment of taverns and blacksmiths, there are also weavers and bakers plying theirtrades Likewise, objects like chairs can be moved around, and walls and doors have "hitpoints" and can be destroyed A player so inclined can even grind fwheat into flour andbake bread! Finally, "random monsters" are now extinct, and there are sensible limitsconcerning when and where the party can be attacked.

Ultima 6 (DOS) Gargoyles just killed a bunch of people WWJD?

The moral imperative this time is based on racism and xenophobia the player must learnabout an alien culture and explore issues that of cultural relativism However, someplayers felt the story was unfocused, and criticized the gameplay for being too heavilyinvested in menial side-quests Though combat is not especially difficult, players caneasily find themselves wandering aimlessly, without a clear sense of purpose or direction

Still, the game was a hit and still cherished by many fans, although the next Ultima

game the first in the "Age of Armageddon" games, featured a graphical overhaul and

controls and tends to make the accomplishments of The False Prophet pale in comparison I'll discuss the Armageddon games in our next installment, so stay tuned! Now, let's turn our attention to the Wizardry series.

Golden Age Wizardry: The Dark Savant

If Origin's Ultima series was becoming increasingly moralistic and even dogmatic, Tech's Wizardry was about to take the opposite approach Four years had passed since

Sir-Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983), and when Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987) finally

arrived, it no doubt took most fans of the series by surprise this time, you get to be the

evil wizard hellbent on getting his revenge The plot is perhaps the only of its type in the