IT FEELS like RPG elements are everywhere nowadays, whereas they used to be confined to the staple fantasy and sci-fi storylines that often spawned them, now you can find RPG elements in first person shooters, puzzle games and even workout titles. After all, nothing helps you get your sweat on like earning some experience points and levelling up. It’s become almost the norm to see little bits of RPG style system in almost every modern title, which seems a far cry from the often niche products that some of us grew up with.
So how did we get here? How did RPGs go from being a horde of instruction manuals, dice and pen and paper scribblings, to a staple component of a plethora of genres and hit titles?
One of the biggest influences on console-based RPG history wasn’t a computer game at all. In 1974 the very first edition of Dungeons and Dragons was published, the tabletop game that saw you craft your own heroes and pit your wits against another player, the Dungeon Master, in an ongoing quest for loot, glory and sweet, sweet stat increases. The stories could be anything you could conceive and the players reactions likewise. It’s an RPG staple that spawned a host of imitators, and official and unofficial games alike.
The first such example was Dungeon, in 1975, which cribbed directly from D&D and presented adventures in a text-based format – though having to input every command made it a sluggish affair. Shortly after that came a game which is still fairly well remembered even to this day, Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply Adventure if you’d rather have less of a mouthful), was released in 1976 and turned its creators love or local cave exploration into a quest for treasure and escape to the surface. It also introduced a rather sarcastic and jokey narrator, which has become something of a staple down the years.
Of course, most text-based games of the time pay homage to one of the all time classics: Zork. Turning up in 1977, so a year or so later than its lesser known precursors, it managed to stand out from the crowd thanks to much deeper storytelling and its improved ability to interact with commands from the player. Gone were standard rote responses, for something a bit more nuanced and interesting, resulting in a slew of spin offs. Text based adventures could still only go so far but Zork still stands as an example of what the medium could accomplish – and is still referenced today, as an Easter Egg in Call of Duty: Black Ops and a major plot point in book/film sensation Ready Player One.
AS COMPUTERS became more complex the RPG could really begin to move in interesting directions, though text adventures still remained popular throughout the 1980’s it was down to more involved games to really push the genre forward. In the early 80’s Ultima took the world by storm, offering a simple character creator and a whole world to explore, via a mix of a 3rd person overworld and then 1st person dungeons. It introduced different races and classes, all of which had an effect on your skills. While the story and dungeons always played out in a linear fashion, you could go out of your way to explore hidden ruins and the like for bonus loot. As a template for what we expect from RPGs today it isn’t far wrong.