R ole-playing games, or RPGs for short, are a staple of gaming, and are arguably the largest genre by far. Your favourite game has a high likelihood of being an RPG in some form or at least owing huge debts to the genre. Find a Multimedia Version Here! Japan is the metropolis for RPGs. Little did the developers know that they had created a beast. It accrued over three million players by , with its influence bleeding into all areas of gaming. Warhammer was conceived in the s: it also has a video game series.
Marketability and survivability became paramount as no one seemed safe, leading to the creation of arcing plotlines, highly detailed settings, and multiple game instalments — parallels that can be noticed in video game RPGs, with long series being a mainstay.
Many aspects became central features: like hit points, experience points, character building, character sheets, numerical attributes like strength or dexterity, and so on. He emphasised storytelling and emotional investment with a simplified interface to bring WRPGs to a Japanese console market.
For those outside universities, the genre really began around It would be a few more years before it and its clones would be available on home computers—the PC version landed in —but the basics were here. Nethack takes the basic dungeon crawling concept and adds several decades worth of development. All are free, as a condition of the distribution licence. Wizardry, for instance, launched in , and the series ran until It used simple graphics and played out mostly using menus, in a way that most Western RPGs would soon try to move away from.
However, its popularity in Japan led to it largely defining what that market thought an RPG was. Later games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest still follow its lead today, albeit with those systems endlessly refined and prettified.
Fantasy worlds were easy to both produce and to understand—the difference between a shortsword and a broadsword being easy to parse. It was that doing so was difficult.
The more floppy disks a game needed, the more expensive it was to produce. One was planned, but it would have required an extra disk. The publisher said no. Some games found ways around this problem. Wasteland, for instance, released in , came with a printed book that resembled a Choose Your Own Adventure.
The idea was that when you reached a critical part, the game told you which paragraph to read. This saved space on the disks for more maps, graphics and other good stuff that RPGs really needed. Most games got around it by shrugging and not worrying about it at all. Dungeon crawling was what people expected from these games, and dungeon crawling is what they got. Stafford took a similar route to Gygax in that after encountering rejections of this concept by publishers he founded his own company, Chaosium.
Chaosium is alive and well today, a frequent winner of EN Awards. However, the first game set in Glorantha was the board wargame White Bear and Red Moon, which was published in Author Ken St. Thank you to Geek Native's Patreon supporters who made this article possible. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
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