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Oldest Computer Role Playing Games

M

mbarton

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Aug 4, 2004
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Tampa, FL
Hi, folks. I was wondering if anyone would be willing to share some knowledge about the earliest computer role playing games. We're drafting an article discussing the origin and evolution of the genre, and it'd be great to hear from some folks well-schooled in vintage computing. Of course we're aware of games like ROGUE and ADVENTURE, but I'm drawing a blank where those first "true computer role playing games" emerged in computer history.

Please help! :D
 
I'm pretty sure the FIRST must have been on a mainframe; ADVENTURE springs to mind, but that's not technically an RPG. A lot of people cite Ultima as the first CRPG, but I'm not convinced. There must have been something even before that!

Terry--you mention "D&D." Are you referring to a computer game? I know there's an Atari 2600 game by that title.
 
mbarton said:
I'm pretty sure the FIRST must have been on a mainframe; ADVENTURE springs to mind, but that's not technically an RPG. A lot of people cite Ultima as the first CRPG, but I'm not convinced. There must have been something even before that!

Terry--you mention "D&D." Are you referring to a computer game? I know there's an Atari 2600 game by that title.
Click to expand...

I think he's referring to Dungeons and Dragons. It was the original Fantasy Roleplaying Game and was played in person with paper and dice. It was actually based on an earlier FRPG called Chainmail. The author of both of these games was Gary Gygax. The company that published them was TSR, which is currently owned by Wizards of the Coast.

Avalon Hill had board games earlier, such as military games that had all of the elements of FRPG's, without the fantasy element.

I'm sure you could find someone, somewhere who played a game and called their characters Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, etc. and used a 1960's AH Panzer game as the background.

On computers, Adventure is usually acnowledged to be the earliest game that was published. It was written originally in Fortran, then later into every language you can think of; including Klingon. Adventure predated Chainmail by several years, I believe. Early '70 vs. mid 70's for the 'published' dates.

It was a public domain game, but implementations were marketed by several companies, including Microsoft. CompuServe made a lot of money by providing online versions of adventure. I don't remember any multiplayer versions, but you could post your scores against other players.

Zork was the next game that I know of. It was originally written on a PDP computer. It was broken into three parts to fit on microcomputers of it's day and sold by Infocom.

Other notable games were Scott Adams series, including Adventureland; and graphic games including other Infocom titles as well as some early LucasArts games like The Secret of Monkey Island.

Eventually, FRPG's have become todays blockbusters like EverQuest, Final Fantasy, Ultima Online, etc.

I play EverQuest and I consider it the standard by which other MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games) are judged.

I hope this helps a bit.

Tom
 
"Terry Yager" wrote:

> IIRC, the 1st RPGs were modeled after RL RPGs, so D&D
> comes to mind first. It was certainly one of the earliest.

Does "Spacewar!" Count? Beat the guts out of your oppenent.

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
tachyon said:
I play EverQuest and I consider it the standard by which other MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games) are judged.
Click to expand...

I used to play EQ myself but I had to quit when my son was born almost 3 years ago.

I know the Colossal Cave adventure (XYZZY, Plover, get cage) was a 1960s creation. Does that count?

Erik
 
Erik said:
I know the Colossal Cave adventure (XYZZY, Plover, get cage) was a 1960s creation. Does that count?
Click to expand...

The Colossal Cave adventure is the same thing we call Original Adventure. It was written in 1972 by Will Crowther and expanded in 1976 by Don Woods.

For more information on this "Original Adventure", you can go to http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html for a bit of a history lesson. :)

tachyon
 
Which was the first MUD, and how old is it? I remember it was a big thing as early as 1984, but maybe there was something much before that. The question is how much interactivity and unexpected events has to happen to make an adventure become a role-playing game. If you expect to play against other humans, I wonder if there is something before late 70'ties, since computing power for long was single-user, expensive and networking took a little while to develop.

Maybe some play-by-email RPG? That could work. In the early 1990's, we had a play-by-textfile on college, where every participant would write down their actions into the same text file, and once a while the GM would step in and continue the story.
 
I used to enjoy starting "adventure threads" on some of the bullitin boards I'd frequent around that time. Sounds like the same thing, where everybody would add thier bit to the story.

--T
 
I suppose play-by-mail (non-electronic) RPG may have been around since late 1970's, so I definitely would look in that direction rather than searching for extremely old online software.
 
Earliest RPG's

Earliest RPG's

Hasen't anyone read "Hackers"? The first hackers, at MIT, wrote "Space Ears" on the first DEC PDP-1 delivered to MIT n 1959 or "60.
Ray
 
Re: re my previous post.

Re: re my previous post.

"olddataman" wrote:

> Yes, I can read, but I can't type. I meant Space Wars,
> not Space Ears?

You mean "Spacewar!" & yes I did mention it & it was thrown out! ;-)

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
Is Spacewar more strategy or more role playing? I would say that you need to identify yourself with the character or entity you play as and be able to make decisions related to the character to be called role playing.

Well, of course you can make your own background story and pretend that the moves you make are those of your character. I know from myself to live in the role of a football manager in a fantasy game, not only playing the game like an outside observer moving puppies. However, I don't think the other participants take that view and thus see the game more as resource management or strategy than role playing.

It is likely that one type of games evolved from another; i.e. if some of the MIT personnel got "psychologically involved" with the race or fleet in the space war game, it may lead to new games more focusing on those aspects.

BTW, about for how long has various real life for-fun role playing activites been held and what are their origin? While it may be a little out of scope for the mentioned article, it probably would be useful to know to trace down where in the timeline and location you would expect to find a computer game of that genre.
 
I don't think my bragging is too off-topic for this thread...
I just picked up The Lost Treasures of Infocom for four buck$ at the Sally. It's a 20-game re-release, one of at least two diffrent ones from Infocom. I used to have this set before, but gave it away a few years ago, to a then-teenager who was heavy into adventure gaming. Now I have some interesting stuff to mount on some of my vintage systems.
/brag

--T
 
Yep, Suspended is in there, as well as my favorite, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I have several of the games that I d/l-ed from the internet, but these come with all the maps and accessories, and there's even a hintbook.

--T
 
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