The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade


Role-playing games

Rogue (1980)

Rogue was created by a couple of university students

Hardware: University mainframes with ANSI character terminals; later, 4.77MHz IBM PC running MS-DOS in text mode.

Rogue was created by a group of students who had been enjoying the text game Adventure (also known as Colossal Caves) and wanted to write something in a similar vein that would utilize the new cursor movement and character graphics libraries on the terminals they were using. When the IBM PC was released in 1981, a port of this game to that platform soon followed. It would later appear on many other personal computers.

Rogue was a simple, yet addictive game of exploration and character advancement. You controlled the player (who looked like a happy face in the PC version) with the cursor keys, uncovering new rooms in the randomly-generated dungeons, and you could attack monsters (who appeared as uppercase letters) by simply running straight into them. Single key commands enabled the player to drink potions, look at his inventory, equip better weapons and armor, and cast spells—essentially all the basics that Dungeons & Dragons pen and paper players took for granted.

Despite the randomness of the dungeons, there was an ending to the game, a final ultimate evil to defeat, although getting there was difficult as dying meant the game was over. The game wound up being distributed with the source code to BSD UNIX, which meant it almost instantly became one of the most popular games on college campuses.

Ultima III (1983)

Ultima III was originally released on the Apple ][,
then ported to other systems

Hardware: Apple ][

Richard Garriott began the Ultima series with a game called Akalabeth, released for the Apple ][ in 1981. Akalabeth set the basic frameworks for each Ultima game to come: a tile-based overland world in which the player tromped across large swaths of geography in order to visit cities and dungeons, the latter being rendered in primitive 3D wire frame graphics.

Ultima III was the first to really set down many of the conventions that would last for the remainder of the series: a continent named Sosaria (later renamed Britannia), a capital city named Britain and a king named Lord British (based on Richard's summer camp nickname) In addition, for the first time you could have other nonplaying characters join you in a party of up to four adventurers. At any time on the overland or in a dungeon your party could wander into a monster, at which point the screen would shift to a close-up view of the encounter, often with multiple monsters of the same type. Players took turns issuing commands to attack or cast spells, and the monsters then returned the favor. Badly injured monsters would attempt to flee from the scene of battle.

Players interacted with nonplayer characters by typing single words like "NAME" and "JOB" to them, which would trigger replies that contained further key words. Many NPCs had important information that was vital to completing the game.

The game had an ultimate goal (defeat Exodus, the unearthly half-machine son of the evil sorcerers Mondain and Minax) but it wasn't until Ultima IV that the goal changed from "defeat the ultimate bad guy at the end" into something a little more complex.

Ultima VI (1990)

Ultima 6 was the first version to come out for the PC initially

Hardware: IBM PC (8088 @ 8 MHZ)

Ultima VI was the first to support the new 256 color VGA graphics modes available on IBM PCs and clones, and it was the first to support a mouse (although the mouse was definitely optional). The world looked a lot more vibrant at this color depth, and unlike Ultima V, all objects in-game were oriented at the same 45 degree angle, to achieve a kind of pseudo-3D effect known as an oblique display.

The well-tested formula of gathering a party together to help out Lord British and save Britannia was back once again, but the plot had all sorts of subtleties that made it stand out from typical RPGs. The introduction was a chilling and memorable encounter with demonic-looking gargoyles, who strapped you to a sacrificial table and nearly killed you before you were saved by your trusty friends Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre. However, as you played through the game you learned a shocking secret: your actions in the world of Britannia through the last five games had been destroying the world of the Gargoyles, who lived on the flip side of the planet. To them, you were the ultimate evil, foretold by religious prophecy, and only through killing you could their world be saved. It became up to you to convince the Gargoyles that you weren't evil after all, and work together with them to save both civilizations.

Action was still turn-based, but the use of the mouse to move and attack objects anywhere on the screen foretold the move to a real-time combat and movement engine in the next game. You could also click on key words in conversations instead of having to type them in, although that was still an available option.

Darklands (1992)

Darklands was a popular and open-ended adventure

Hardware: IBM PC (80286 @ 16 MHz)

Darklands was an intriguing and unique RPG, in that it was based in a real historical setting (15th century medieval Germany) with fantasy and magic elements added on top. The fantasy elements were based on many medieval beliefs of the time. A party of up to four characters explored the large world map and braved difficult dungeons, all rendered in an oblique display. When the player was in one of the over 90 cities, the interface changed to a menu-based list of options, overlaid on top of artistic scanned drawings of important game events happening in that city. The choices you made in the cities determined where you would go next and would also subtly alter the plot.

Magic was performed by mixing up to 15 types of potions and four bases in flasks, which were then quaffed or hurled at the enemy. Armor and weapons had authentic weights and damage levels. Combat was in real-time, but there was also an "auto combat" option to handle all encounters automatically.

The goal of the game was unusual among RPGs: rather than defeat an ultimate evil, the quest was simply to become famous, and so the game had no ending in the traditional sense. There was a single, most difficult quest, to defeat the Templar Knights and their demon lord, Baphomet, but after finishing him off you got a single victory screen and the option to continue playing and racking up fame points. There were dozens of optional side-quests that could be pursued at the player's leisure.

Baldur's Gate (1998)

Baldur's Gate provided hours of licensed D&D adventure

Hardware: IBM PC (Pentium @ 166MHz)

Baldur's Gate was one of many computer role-playing games that were based directly on the granddaddy of paper and pen RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. Because it was fully licensed, it used that game's world, places, characters, and monster types. The player could control a party of up to six characters, and multiple players could connect to the same game through an Internet connection. All the elements of paper-based D&D (such as saving throws and multiple dice rolls for almost every action) were carried out behind the scenes, but the user could view these results if they so pleased.

Combat was handled in real-time, using the mouse to click on opponents and cast spells. However, to make things a little less frantic in a busy melee, the user could hit the space bar and pause the game to make changes and issue commands. The world was made up of very large objects that had been pre-rendered in 3D programs, unlike older RPGs where lower amounts of memory made it a requirement to build the world up out of repeated small graphic "tiles." So instead of a house being rendered as four different sections of perfectly symmetrical wall tiles, it could look like anything the game designers imagined. The landscape also contained information about the relative height of each section, so the player appeared to climb over hills, ascend ladders, and fall into pits.

The storyline started with an unusual iron shortage and progressed into the discovery of an ultimate evil who was behind the whole thing, and of course had to be eliminated. However, there was much subtlety along the way, and the choices you made in interacting with other NPCs would directly affect both their relationship with you and the plot as a whole.

Multiplayer was a relatively new addition to these types of RPGs, which had spent years as single-player quests. However, multiplayer was essentially the same as the single player game, but with other players helping you out in addition to the computer-controlled NPCs.

Neverwinter Nights (2002)

Neverwinter Nights spawned hundreds of user-created modules

Hardware: IBM PC (Pentium II @ 450 MHz)

Neverwinter Nights was also a fully licensed Dungeons and Dragons computer product, but advances in hardware technology made it look and feel very different from Baldur's Gate. The world and all characters in it were now rendered in full 3D, with hardware-assisted texturing and lighting. The camera would automatically follow behind the centered player character, but the user could move it around 360 degrees with the sweep of the mouse.

Combat was handled in real-time, although behind the scenes the game engine was still rolling the dice and calculating the result for each turn based on the D&D rules. While the world was rendered in full 3D, each area was self-contained, and entering a door or traveling to an adjacent area would result in a loading screen. Curiously, although the world appeared to be rendered out of discrete objects, the landscape (terrain and buildings) was built using large 3D tiles, a step backwards from Baldur's Gate. The player would never notice this unless he realized that many sections of dungeons and towns looked strikingly similar. The reason for this approach was again one of limited memory, this time memory for textures on 3D graphics cards.

The game plot involved a deadly plague that had stricken the city of Neverwinter, and the player attempted to discover the real source behind this calamity, which ended up being very surprising, and not at all expected. To finish the quest, the player could employ an NPC "henchman" to fight alongside with. While the plot was not terribly deep, the game was engrossing and the ending certainly memorable.

Neverwinter Nights' greatest strength, however, was not its story, but its infinite capacity for extension. The game shipped with a very serviceable game and script editor, which allowed nonprogrammers to create new modules, new stories and even new graphics for the game. Hundreds of such modules became available, and some are still being written today. Even new multiplayer modules were created, including game engines that could be run as an always-available server and mimic many of the features of massively multiplayer online games, only without the monthly fees. The ease of expansion also allowed Bioware, the company that produced Neverwinter Nights, to come up with two retail expansion packs (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) as well as a number of shorter modules that can be purchased online, some with very different looks and themes, such as Pirates of the Sword Coast.

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