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Evolution of the Video Game RPG

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From Text to 3D: The Most Influential RPGs of their Era

I love video games, but the genre that really captured my imagination and turned me into a lifelong gamer is the RPG (Role Playing Game). For those of you who may not be familiar with video games in general or RPGs in particular, the video game RPG is a specific genre of video games that focuses on a kind of interactive story style of play. While almost all video games have an element of role playing, the major component of the RPG is guiding a character (or characters) on some type of quest, where you are generally playing a central role in an epic story of some sort. While some video game RPGs are based on tabletop RPG themes and rule sets, they are really a completely different animal from the traditional table top RPG. In table top rpgs, the story is generally created or at least guided by the "dungeon master" or similar role and it's really more about using your imagination to create an adventure than playing a game. In video game rpgs, while there are varying degrees of flexibility in how you can play your character in the story, you are taking on a defined role in a predetermined story....think more along the lines of an actor playing a role. Video Game RPGs are about taking part in the story, but they are also about level building, collecting treasure, solving puzzles, fighting monsters/bad guys etc. In some ways, the video game RPG is a lot like a very complex choose your own adventure book.

In this lens, I will be spotlighting the most groundbreaking and influential RPGs of the various eras of the video game RPG. Starting with text only RPGs and continuing on through the current generation, each month I will highlight a different generation of role playing games.

Contents at a Glance

What's New?
Primitive Graphical RPGS
Influential RPGs of the Pre-Graphical Er...

Text Based RPGS
Influential RPGs of the Text Only Era
Your Favorite Era of the RPG

What's New?

Latest Update:
Primitive Graphical RPGs feature added
New RPG Merchandise Added

Next Month:
The first true Graphical RPGs

Primitive Graphical RPGS

Last month we covered text only RPGs. This month I will be covering a genre of RPGs that featured a primitive sort of graphical interface. This era of the RPG includes two main types of games. The first is essentially text based RPGs which employ pictures much in the same way as an illustrated children's book. The pictures were generally static, though some had some very basic animation. Interaction with the game still took place in a text based parser. The second major category was the ASCII graphic games, commonly known as "rogue-likes." These games employed a graphical technique which used normal ASCII characters to represent the characters, objects and environments in the game world. Rogue utilized various keyboard commands to manipulate the environment and typically featured randomized gameplay, permanent death and turn based movement. Rather than truly preceding graphical rpgs these games came up around the same time (early to mid 80s) as the first graphical rpgs and kind of developed along different paths, with the graphical RPGs becoming much more popular and commercially successful, while rogue-likes and text based MUDs garnered a dedicated following among enthusiasts but had limited commercial success once graphical games took hold.

Influential RPGs of the Pre-Graphical Era

1One of the most popular examples of the text based adventure with early picture grahics was 1982's "The Hobbit." As you might expect, the game was based on the book of the same name. The game was produced by Beam Software and published by Melbourne house and was compatible with the Commodore 64, Apple II and other popular home computers of that era.

The simple in game graphics were illustrations created by Kent Rees to represent some of the more famous locales from the book. Aside from primitive graphics, The Hobbit featured a number of technical advances that allowed for game play options not seen in previous text based RPGs. The advanced parser, which utilized a subset of English they called "Inglish," allowed for far more complex text commands than previous games. Where you might type something like "attack dragon" in earlier games, in The Hobbit, you might type something like "cautiously attack dragon and then escape through cave entrance." This allowed both combat and puzzle elements of the game to be much more unpredictable and for players to take different approaches to playing the game.

The game also featured a fairly complex physics based world in which objects and characters had size, weight and density. Players could perform actions such as putting one object inside another, tying a rope to something and objects could be damaged or broken. These types of features allowed for more complex and varied types of puzzles than previous games of this type. Also unique to the game was that it included real time game play in which time would actually pass on its own if you left the keyboard for too long or entered the "wait" command. This allowed for puzzles and game play techniques which could be influenced by time of day or in game events.

One of the more exciting, unpredictable and sometimes frustrating aspects of the game was that it included NPCs (non-player characters) that roamed the game world doing their own thing. They had their own loyalties, alliances and objectives and could even be captured or killed. While this greatly increased replay value by making the game world a bit different every time you played, it also could lead to the game being unplayable if a key NPC got themselves killed too early in the game.

Having sold over a million copies by the late 80s, The Hobbit was one of the most commercially successful computer games of this era. The game spawned three sequels "The Lord of the Rings Game One," "Shadows of Mordor: Game Two of Lord of the Rings" and "The Crack of Doom."

The parser and physics system was very influential in the development of more advanced text/early graphical games of the mid to late 80s and even influenced the game play engines used in many modern MUDs.

If you'd like to give this classic a shot, a java based version can be found here: http://www.play-roms-online.net/online-spectrum-games/the-hobbit

Resources:
The Hobbit Wikipedia
http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/hobbit.html
2Given that the genre is collectively known as "Rogue-likes," it seems pretty obvious that the most influential of the Rogue-like games was Rogue itself. Rogue not only launched the Rogue-like genre, but is credited by many as the game that popularized the "dungeon crawl" sub-genre of RPG which would later spawn wildly successful games such as Diablo. Rogue was created around 1980 by Michael Toy and Glen Wichman and first played on college Unix systems.

The gameworld of Rogue was heavily influenced by Dungeons and Dragons and the popular text based RPG Colossal Cave Adventure. Gameplay centered around randomly generated dungeons in which the objective was to get your player character from the uppermost level of the dungeon to the bottom, encountering various monsters and treasures along the way, retrieve the amulet of Yendor and return to the surface. Once you go down a level, you couldn't go back up until you got the amulet and the monsters got more and more difficult as you descended levels.

Everything in the game, including the player character and monsters, was represented by ASCII characters. Monsters were represented by capital letters and there were 26 different kinds. The advantage of this type of display was that these games could be played on non-graphical terminals. In the first version the dungeon levels were all 3 by 3 rooms, but later versions incorporated mazes. Monsters and objects in the dungeons were all randomly generated.

Rogue was so popular that players continued to develop clones and new versions, some of which incorporated graphical interfaces long after the world had moved on to graphics based RPGs.

You can play a java based version of Rogue here.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(computer_game)
3Of all the Rogue clones, NetHack is is possibly one of the most widely played and beloved. An expanded version of "Hack" which took the basic premise of Rogue and added some new elements, Nethack was originally developed by Michel Stephenson and released in 1987. Like Rogue, the object of the game is to fight your way through a dungeon and retrieve the amulet of Yendor.

NetHack adds many features that have become standard in modern RPGs. At the start of NetHack the player can choose their race, gender, role and alignment or allow the computer to randomly select them. This choice affects which deity your character serves and determines how monsters react to your character. NetHack introduces the concept of "sub-quests," or mini-objectives within the main objective (retrieve the amulet and sacrifice it to your deity). The PC (player character) also gets an animal companion to help them on their quest.

NetHack's approximately 50 levels are much more complex than the original Rogue and include randomly incorporated features such as shops, altars, fountains, traps and pools of water. NetHack also includes a few "special" levels that stay the same for every play through.

NetHack includes a number of items such as potions, weapons, armor, amulets and spells that at the start of game have generic descriptions. The player must deduce how to figure out what various items do and once they figure it out, all subsequent items of the same type are labeled as such. However, when you start the game again, the descriptions are reset, so an item that cures you in one game could very well poison you in the next. In addition, all items in the game are either blessed, cursed or uncursed with uncursed items being neutral, blessed being more powerful and cursed generally having a negative effect. Players don't know what the status of their items are until they detect it through some means, unless they are playing the Priest class, which automatically detects the blessed or cursed items.

One of the defining characteristics of NetHack, and many other roguelikes, is "permadeath." Basically, this means that unlike most modern games, you don't get three lives or five lives or even two, you get one and when you're dead, you're dead and there is no coming back. Your only choice when you die in NetHack is to start over, unless you made a backup copy of your save file, but that really isn't in the spirit of the game. An interesting feature of NetHack is that the game sometimes saves levels where a PC died and inserts them into subsequent played games. Players playing on a networked computer could sometimes run across the possessions of dead PCs, though their items were often cursed.

NetHack introduced a sort of increased difficulty through something called "conducts," where players could choose to have their character handicapped in some way by the game. These conducts would be displayed along with the score and other achievements at the end of the game.

Due to the random levels, permadeath, and large number of secrets and "tricks" a player must uncover to successfully complete the game, entire communities are devoted to discussing tips and tricks and it is considered a very high achievement to finish the game without the help of any of them.

NetHack spawned a very dedicated fan base and updated versions are still being released to this day. Some later versions of the game added graphical interfaces. If you'd like to learn more or play the most recent version you can check out http://www.nethack.org/common/info.html

NetHack inspired many variations on the theme, including games that incorporated additional features and more modern graphics as well as more traditional rogue likes that took the NetHack style game play, but created new game worlds, such as Moria and ADOM.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack

Text Based RPGS

Before there were 3D photo realistic graphics, in fact before there were graphics at all, the video game RPG was already alive and kicking on early computer systems around the world. The text based RPG, is pretty much just what it sounds like. It is a RPG much like the RPGs we play today, except instead of representing the world, characters and actions with graphics, it is all text.

Before I get into my list, I'd like to take a moment to advise all you MUD fans out there that this lens will be focusing on primarily single player RPGs, as MUDs and MMORPGs are really a whole other ballgame. There are some excellent text based MUDs out there, but for this lens the text games I will be focusing on are the more "traditional" single player RPGs.

Influential RPGs of the Text Only Era

My first spotlighted era of the video game RPG will be the "text only" era. Next month I will spotlight the first generation of graphical RPGs.

1Colossal Cave Adventure (aka ADVENT or Adventure) is considered to be the first "interactive fiction game." Famous for a maze section with the room description "You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike..." Colossal Cave was actually modeled on a real cave in the Kentucky Mammoth Cave system.

Gameplay in Colossal Cave involves reading text descriptions of your current location in the game and typing in commands to attempt to solve puzzles, collect treasure, defeat enemies and advance your character through the game. (i.e. go west, enter cave, attack troll, get sword etc.)

Will Crowther developed Colossal Cave Adventure for his daughters in the mid-70s and designed it as a combination of two of his favorite hobbies, cave exploration and fantasy role playing. The game went viral before viral was cool and was passed from person to person, computer to computer and network to network. Eventually, Stanford University computer engineer Don Wood would discover a copy of the game left on a University computer and contact Crowther to obtain permission to expand on Crowther's original idea. Wood not only greatly increased the scope of the game, but being a huge Tolkien fan, added additional fantasy elements to the Cave exploration game, as well as a scoring system. Later Jim Gillogly would port the game from its original Fortran into C for Unix and in this form the game rapidly spread across a burgeoning Internet, inspiring a dedicated and sometimes obsessive following amongst college students and computer nerds alike. Dave Platt further expanded the game, increasing the maximum score from 350 to 500 and infusing the game with some humorous elements, like random witty responses to a player attempting to exit in a direction with no exit, "cameo" events and puns (i.e. if you attack the Bear with no weapon the game responds " With what? Your bare hands? Against *his* bear hands??"

Colossal Cave is credited with laying the framework for adventure games to come in the 80s, in which the game would typically begin with an introduction or prologue above ground, proceed into the meat of the game, which takes place underground and then emerge into the endgame back above ground. Colossal Cave inspired countless variations, some of which added pictures and primitive graphics as well as many text and graphical games inspired by or closely based on the Colossal Caves theme. In addition, adventure games modeled on the Colossal Cave formula became some of the best selling and most influential computer games of the 80s.

Sources:
Adventure: A History
Wikipedia
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
2"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

This above phrase is one of the iconic phrases from the game that was my introduction to the text based RPG. I discovered Zork on an ancient Apple II computer that my parents bought at a garage sale in the late 80s and I was instantly hooked.

Zork was first written in the late seventies by by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and is one of the most popular of the games inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure. The name Zork comes from MIT hacker slang, meaning "an unfinished program" and was not originally intended to be the title of the game. However, the designers received a trademark violation notice from the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons when they tried to publish the game under the name "Dungeon" and decided to instead publish under the name "Zork." Three of those original Zork designers went on to found Infocom and Zork was soon developed into a trilogy that would become the flagship product of Infocom in the 80s era.

Zork distinguished itself from other early text RPGs by including a very rich and detailed story and more advanced gameplay options than earlier text RPGs. The text parser could handle more complex commands such as instead of just typing "hit orc" you could issue commands like "hit orc with my club."

Zork is set in a sprawling underground kingdom, in which you, as the intrepid adventurer are tasked with exploring for treasure, fighting grues and emerging from the Underground Empire with your hide intact, in order to earn the coveted "dungeon master" title. The bulk of the gameplay in Zork revolves around collecting the "twenty treasures of Zork" and installing them in the Trophy Case. In order to do this you have to solve a number of puzzles and navigate a couple of tricky mazes, all the while facing off against grues, trolls and other obstacles.

Aside from a much more detailed and involved story than its predecessors, what really set Zork apart was that it was packed with interesting locations, creatures and a unique brand of humor that is purely Zork. The original Zork trilogy spawned numerous sequels of varying degrees of quality as well as copycat and fan made games and enjoys a loyal following even today. You can download the original trilogy free from this site, however if you're using a 64 bit machine you'll have to do some googling for instructions on how to make it work.
3
Buy This Allposters.com

The final game I will spotlight in this feature is another Infocom release that is infamous for its cryptic and sometimes fiendishly difficult puzzles, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy.

While the game maintains a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as earlier adventures such as Zork and Adventure, it departs from the sword and sorcery theme that dominates most of the early RPG landscape. The Hitchhiker game was released in 1984 and is loosely based on the novel by the same name. The player is thrust into the role of various characters from the Hitchhiker galaxy, but primarily plays as main protagonist Arthur Dent. The story begins in Arthur's house, which is on the brink of being bulldozed and takes the player through a variety of space bound locations, in search of the mysterious lost planet of Magrathea.

While the game was popular amongst Hitchhiker and RPG fans alike, becoming a top five bestseller for Infocom, for a lot of RPG fans Hitchhiker is a game you loved to hate. The player was generally given very little direction as to what to do next; the puzzles often involved using obscure objects in a particular order in a particular place and at a particular time and some of the puzzles, like the infamous "Babel Fish" puzzle if not solved correctly rendered the game unwinnable. In addition to the fiendish puzzles, the game contained many "inside" references that made the game a tough one to solve for players without a strong knowledge of the source material.

Not having been a fan of HHGTTG, I never really got into this game the way I did Zork, however it deserves mention here as one of the first truly successful RPGs to both be based on a licensed universe and to stray from the Tolkienesque roots of its predecessors. Love it or hate it, HHGTG helped pave the road for the non-traditional RPG.

Your Favorite Era of the RPG

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You are in a maze of twisty little comments, all alike

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JoshK47 Apr 20, 2012 @ 8:42 am | delete

Very well presented - good read, indeed!

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LabKitty Sep 12, 2011 @ 11:29 am | delete

Apple II? We remember playing Adventure on a PDP-11. Yikes!

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joystickenvy Sep 14, 2011 @ 1:05 pm | delete

hah computer nostalgia eh?

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cartoonacid Sep 12, 2011 @ 11:00 am | delete

Love this lens, great job!

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joystickenvy Sep 14, 2011 @ 1:05 pm | delete

thanks :)
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