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The History of RPGs - monthly series at USgamer

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Codex 2014
Part one of USGamer's new monthly series The History of RPGs, "How the Ultima Trilogy Took a Genre from Tabletop to Hi-Tech": https://www.usgamer.net/articles/how-the-ultima-trilogy-took-a-genre-from-tabletop-to-hi-tech

(Part one?)

How the Ultima Trilogy Took a Genre from Tabletop to Hi-Tech
HISTORY OF RPGS | In Part One of our new monthly series, Lord British shares his perspectives on the process of bringing pen-and-paper RPGs into the digital realm.

This is the first entry in an ongoing series in which Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish hopes to explore the evolution of the role-playing genre, often with insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

What is a role-playing game? Perhaps no other question in video gaming has launched quite so many forum debates over semantics. Fans of Final Fantasy sneer at the notion that the Zelda games should be classified as RPGs, while in turn hardcore PC gaming grognards shake their head in disgust at the superficiality of Final Fantasy’s approach to RPG concepts. Is Dark Souls an RPG? Is Castlevania? Call of Duty multiplayer has experience levels and character classes—is that an RPG? Can any computer-based experience actually be an RPG, when you get down to it?

We can at least refer to an objective standard for defining the RPG: Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop gaming phenomenon that debuted in 1974 and served as the inflection point for the genre as a whole. D&D adapted tabletop war gaming into a modular format focused around small teams of adventurers. It introduced the standards that continue to define RPGs more than four decades later: hit points, character classes, the chimerical combination of rules and luck that drive combat, and finally the need for some sort of narrative framework to motivate players. Computer and console RPGs attempt to distill these elements into combinations that work within the constraints of digital media, remaking the act of role-playing in a format where the human-driven element—the game master guiding the players’ quest—is replaced by a CPU as a matter of necessity.

Every RPG designer has a different idea of what it means to transform the tabletop experience into something that fits within the boundaries of a computer. So, too, do players… which is where those semantic debates come in.

Over the coming months, this series will explore the history and evolution of computer and console RPGs by documenting the milestones of the genre. The goal: To understand what it means to be an “RPG,” precisely, and how different designers have reinterpreted the concepts that D&D laid down. When possible, we’ve spoken to the people behind these landmark games to better appreciate the reasons they made the choices they did, and to better understand their relationship with the genre. In that light, it makes sense to kick things off with the first commercial video game release to capture the essence of D&D: Ultima, the brainchild of designer Richard Garriott.

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Pioneering Play
"There are only a few people that go back in the [games] industry further than I do," muses Portalarium creative director Richard Garriott. "I go back to before personal computers. I wrote my first games on a teletype, with strips of paper tape as the memory and an electromechanical typewriter as the input device."

Garriott doesn't necessarily look like someone who helped revolutionize video games back in the medium's earliest days. Compared to most computer game pioneers of the ’70s, he appears far too young to have launched one of the most formative and influential computer games ever made. Yet he designed his first game in 1977. His breakout hit, Ultima, launched a few years later, right as America was collectively calling in sick to work due to Pac-Man Fever. There's no denying the influence of Garriott's work over the past four decades.

Of course, there's a reason for Garriott's relatively youthful appearance: He was still a teenager when he made his RPG debut. His prodigious aptitude for multiple disciplines—design, programming, and storytelling—blossomed against a backdrop of the fantasy genre's explosive popularity in the U.S. during the 1970s. All these factors came together to inspire Ultima.

As the creative visionary behind Ultima, Garriott can arguably claim responsibility for more medium-defining works than any other game designer outside of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. Along with Sir-Tech's Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and Atari's Adventure, Ultima laid the groundwork for how role-playing games should work on personal computers—and, eventually, on consoles. The influence of the Ultima games, and 1983's Ultima 3: Exodus in particular, reached far beyond the U.S. market. They guided a generation of Japanese and European designers as they ventured into the role-playing genre with works of their own.

The Ultima concept didn't spring from Garriott's forehead fully formed, of course. Nor did he single-handedly invent the computer RPG. After all, the sort of person who was likely to get heavily into computer programming in the 1970s was also likely to be in love with the formative fantasy genre works that inspired Garriott. He spent several years learning the art of computer game design, building on the earliest examples of the genre. He worked within the limits of the era's impossibly limited technical constraints—sometimes even hashing out his work on systems that lacked a screen, as with the aforementioned teletype device.

"I wrote a series of games while I was in high school [on] that teletype," he says, "and at the same time, I was introduced to two other very formative events. One was reading Lord of the Rings, and the other one was the publication of the game Dungeons & Dragons. Those three things in my sophomore year mixed together and I wrote a series of… well, they weren't exactly text games like Zork or Adventure. They were 'graphical' in the sense of having asterisks for walls, spaces for corridors, dollar signs for treasure, and this would print out every time you made a move. So if you moved north, you'd actually have to wait for the machine to print a 10x10 grid of text to see what the scene around you looked like from sort of a top-down perspective."

Even working on these primitive proto-RPGs, Garriott proved to be on the right path. The ASCII-based approach he used to present his dungeon layout printouts would become a permanent fixture of gaming a few years later. Rogue, that famous breakthrough in procedurally generated content, used a similar text-based mechanism to create its dense, ever-changing worlds. Rogue was designed to be played on shared mainframes via text-only shared terminals, which themselves were only one step removed from Garriott's teletype.
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Garriott's Akalabeth: World of Doom predated the Ultima series.

The Virtual GM
Garriott certainly didn't aspire to create anything as infinitely replayable or deep as Rogue with his teletype-based high school practice projects. Instead, he treated them as if he were a tabletop game master and each teletype project was a self-contained campaign. Even though he admits his early creations were only ever seen by "people who were literally with me at the time," he still approached them with a GM's mindset. Those tentative early works, he says, were inspired not simply by his experiences playing tabletop RPGs, but specifically by his own preferred approach to pen-and-paper games.

"I definitely gravitated toward the game master [role]," Garriott says. "We'd have four or five games going simultaneously. When you went to any one of those tables, you would see some really amazing storytellers, and what all of us felt was that the rules were irrelevant. No one really paid any attention to the die rolls.

"One of the things I realized when I went off to college and came back, the majority of [other players] were worried about die rolls. They'd sit around arguing about, 'I'm up behind you and I'm up on a rock and I have an initiative,' and they'd do complex calculations for a few minutes, roll a die, and… miss. Then, 'Let's start arguing about the calculations again.' I'm going, 'That is not roleplaying.'

"So from the earliest times, I was trying to make a game that was not just about the number-crunching but was asking, 'Can we tell an interactive narrative together?'"

Of course, telling dynamic stories may have been an unreasonable expectation for a teenager creating computer games stored in a few kilobytes of RAM and played on a scroll of printer paper. Yet it's not hard to envision Garriott creating his dungeon maps and simple computer-powered combat as a visible manifestation of the adventures he imagined in his head. His teletype efforts allowed him to create a foundation for the works that would come later, becoming the technical and mechanical underpinnings for games that would revolutionize the concept of video game narratives.

"If you think about the Ultima series," he says, "one of the innovations in most of the Ultimas was the scrolling tile graphic map. Well, if you look at what I was just describing of asterisks for walls and spaces for, spaces for corridors, that was a scrolling tile graphic map. Literally! Physically, on an actual scroll."

While these pre-Ultima projects have long since vanished into the digital ether—Garriott even ran a contest a few years back in which fans were asked to explore their vision of what those teletype adventures played like—they served as a bridge between Garriott's pen-and-paper sessions and the sprawling computer worlds he would build throughout the 1980s. Starting out, Garriott didn't feel the need to obfuscate his influences, since his teletype projects were largely made for his own satisfaction. It was only when he shifted to working on personal computers rather than teletype systems that Garriott decided to be slightly less obvious in his love for Dungeons & Dragons.

"I called those [teletype] games D&D 1, D&D 2, D&D 3, and so on," he says. Garriott ultimately wrote 28 of these adventures, and the final entry in this teletype series served as the basis for his move into home computer programming: “When the Apple II came out, I converted the last one I had made—D&D 28—to [Apple]." That reworked project would go on to become Ultima’s prequel, Akalabeth. "In fact, the remark statement at the beginning of the code says 'D&D 28 B'!" he says.

Digital Dungeon
While the idea of creating dozens of tiny games for an almost non-existent audience may strike some as a futile or empty effort, Garriott values the critical discipline he learned during his D&D days. "I was teaching myself to program at the same time [as designing games]," he says. "One of the reasons, I think, for the early success of Ultima was the way I'd rewrite it over and over again to really maximize how much more I could do with each one."

While the Apple II computer proved to be a vastly more capable machine than the teletype that served as D&D's incubator, it was a far cry from modern computers and suffered from many limitations right out of the box. With primitive graphical features, a small amount of RAM, and data storage cramped by the minuscule capacity of 5.25" diskettes, Apple's popular home system demanded clever workarounds for games as ambitious as the ones Garriott had in mind.

Akalabeth: World of Doom, Garriott's graphical remake of D&D 28, arrived in 1979 and entered wider circulation through a larger publisher the following year. That makes it a contemporary of several other pivotal takes on the RPG genre, such as Rogue, Atari's Adventure for 2600, and the official commercial release of Zork. Of all these efforts, Akalabeth was arguably the most ambitious. Fans often refer to Akalabeth as "Ultima Zero," and for good reason. Despite its small scale compared to the actual Ultima games, Akalabeth featured many elements that would appear in the series to come.

Perhaps most remarkably, it depicted its world through two different points of view. Players explored the world through a top-down perspective, a direct extension of Garriott's teletype efforts. But once they entered a dungeon, players were treated to a crude first-person viewpoint via wire frame graphics. While this concept would be expanded on more impressively a year or two later by Sir-Tech when Wizardry arrived, it was quite remarkable at the time. And unlike Wizardry, the first-person perspective amounted to merely one window on the game's world.

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The Saga Begins
In a spiritual sense, Akalabeth had more in common with the D&D series than with Ultima. Like those early programming exercises, it was more about getting a sense of things on a technical basis and feeling out the realities of game design in a new medium. It was only after kicking the Apple II's proverbial tires with Akalabeth that Garriott would finally go on to create his first truly notable game, the original Ultima. A much larger adventure than Akalabeth, Ultima required Garriott to make use of all the game making tricks he had learned to that point.

"There was only 64K of RAM in the computer which, when I wrote Akalabeth, I used up," he remembers. "For Ultima, I really wanted more, but the machine didn't have it. How I got around that is… Akalabeth and Ultima 1 were written in BASIC. So I cheated BASIC by saving the same program out multiple times. I changed the end of the program to have call information for new monsters, and I would do a binary load of the back end of a file on top of the running program in memory. I'd have to move the end-of-file markers and do all kinds of unsanctioned modifications of the operating system in order to pull this off! We did that all the time. We were having to hack the system deeply, just to do really basic stuff."

Ultima may have been hacked together behind the scenes, but it truly did capture the feel of a tabletop session like no other computer game before it. In a way, it feels more like a freewheeling, improvisational table top session than its own sequels. Ultima 1 has a real kitchen sink feel to it, mixing pop fantasy with science fiction. It's a game where you can play as a Hobbit (or rather, "Bobbit") who then jumps into a spaceship to battle through shoot 'em up sequences.

The original Ultima contained quite a few sci-fi elements, something that would be winnowed out of the series in short order. By the time Ultima 3: Exodus rolled around in 1983, the Ultima universe had settled into a fairly traditional view of magical medieval fantasy. Exodus' only real nod to sci-fi came in the form of the final boss: Exodus itself was the computer-like offspring of the first two games' villains, and its futuristic nature helped sell its status as an uncanny entity existing at odds with the surrounding world.

The shooter sequences and time travel elements of Ultima 1 and 2 were, in a sense, the last instances of Garriott figuring out what exactly he wanted to do with his work—or as he calls it, the first phase of his career. "The first phase was 'Richard Garriott learns to program and throws everything he can and everything he can do into one game,'" he admits. "So, the first Ultima not only included medieval fantasy and these 2D tile graphic outdoors with 3D dungeons, it also included space flight and literal T.I.E. Fighters. Sorry, George Lucas! And there were land speeders, lightsabers, and blasters. By the time we got to Ultima 2, we included time bandits, cloth maps, and you know, time travel and Jurassic Park dinosaur eras. Basically, everything I could think of, just thrown into one game. If I could make it work, and it was cool in a movie I saw or a book I read, there it was in the game.

"Pretty quickly, though, I got to the point where a few things happened concurrently. One was [realizing] it's really hard to make a game that is both 2D and a 3D. Not only are you coding two engines, but… what do [spells] even mean?” Garriott offers the example of a force field spell. In the 3D, first-person viewpoint of Akalabeth’s dungeons, Garriott says, a force field spell would block the entire corridor. In a top-down 2D viewpoint, though, that same spell would only fill a few blocks of the map, and enemies could walk around it. The fundamental difference between the two perspectives became increasingly difficult to reconcile as Ultima’s mechanics grew in complexity.

"I began to think, 'Okay, I have to decide. I can't do 3D and 2D and outer space. You know, I need to settle in on what I'm doing, physically.' It turns out that tile graphics were my particular area of innovation and specialty, so I stuck with that, because it's the one where I knew I could continue having this kind of leading role. Then I said, okay, that's generally fantasy. If making 3D polygonal stuff had been better, then you know, maybe I'd have made a space game. So I knew it'd be on the ground, and so that put me mostly in a medieval [setting]."

The Third(-ish) Time's the Charm

By the time Exodus debuted in 1983, Garriott had whittled away all the creative dead ends and other cruft of his earliest games. The end result was, after more than half a decade of iteration and experimentation, a brilliant role-playing game that genuinely captured the sensation of playing a massive tabletop campaign. The land of Sosaria, where Exodus transpired, consisted of a vast continent surrounded by huge islands and dotted with both cities and dungeons. Players could effectively travel anywhere they liked from the outset, though deadly monsters proved to be almost as much of an impediment to free-roaming as the cryptic relics and installations that dotted the landscape.

By this point, Garriott had abandoned the first-person dungeon viewpoints in favor of maintaining a consistent top-down look. Even battles played out from above, viewed through a zoomed-in perspective that prefigured the likes of Pools of Radiance and Shining Force. The aerial combat perspective helped set Exodus apart from contemporaries like Wizardry and The Bard's Tale, and not just in a visual sense. Exodus had expanded the player's combat roster from Akalabeth's lone protagonist to a party of four, and the ability to shuffle those heroes around the battlefield helped drive home the fact that you were playing with a virtual group of friends.

Location and positioning became critical factors in combat, too, demanding players and enemies alike move within range of one another in order to perform their actions. Range had existed as an abstraction in Wizardry, where the player's party of six formed up in forward and rear ranks with the back line relying on spells and projectiles in order to attack foes. Here, though, players had full control over their team's arrangement at all times. You could maintain the concept of rear ranks and keep more vulnerable combatants safe from direct attacks, but you could also scatter or reassemble your formation as the situation warranted.

Despite this tremendous improvement to the workings of combat, Exodus was a less conflict-oriented game than its predecessors. The first two Ultimas, and Garriott's preceding projects, emphasized skirmishes with monsters almost as a matter of necessity. "My very first games were just 'go fight stuff,'" says Garriott. "But that was really just a side effect of my learning how to program. Almost immediately, Ultima became filled with characters that immediately had conversations."

While duking it out with the bad guys factored heavily into Exodus, Garriott invested far more time into developing the realm of Sosaria than he had the previous games' worlds. There were more opportunities to interact with non-player characters, and the enigmatic structure of the world demanded players explore, observe, and interact. Mysterious devices called Moon Gates appeared throughout the land. By experimenting with the gates, players would eventually learn that they served as teleporters, with the current phase of Sosaria's twin moons determining the activation of each of gate. Likewise, the battle with final boss Exodus required more than mere dungeon-diving and damage output; success in Exodus requires a fair amount of clue-hunting and puzzle-solving.

While this still didn't bring the game to the point where it perfectly resembled the tabletop social experience simulation Garriott aspired to create, it represented a huge step forward. Exodus' design would serve as the foundation for many of the biggest role-playing franchises to emerge throughout the 1980s and 1990s, especially on the Japanese side of the industry. Eventually, console RPGs would drift far from the principles of design present in Exodus, but even that speaks to the game's influence. Such was its impact that developers stopped taking their cues from Ultima and instead looked to games that had been inspired by Ultima. Ultima-descended RPGs demonstrate a sort of telephone game phenomenon, with latter-day creators building on its principles and strike out in unrelated directions without necessarily having played the original games themselves.

The Ultima series would continue to evolve beyond Exodus, but those refinements would come largely in the area of narrative and world-building. Garriott and his teammates at Origin Systems more or less had the workings of the genre figured out in Exodus. And while its sequels would be every bit as impactful as Exodus, Garriott looks back at the series' formative years and takes pride in the things he got right early on.

"There are still some things I look back at that we did in those earliest ones that I'm not sure we've really done better since. Even little things like the conversations with my early characters. You could talk to them, and every character knew the answer when you asked them their name, their job, how they're doing. But they all had two more hidden keywords, and those two hidden keywords might be referenced out of what they just said. Like, if [you] ask him his job and he says, 'I'm Joe the fisherman,' fish might be something they might know about. Or it could be that you have no reason to know what the other one might be. It might be 'magic sword'. But unless somebody else in the world, in another area, tells you to go ask Joe the fisherman about the magic sword, there's no way you would know to ask that question of that fisherman.

"It turns out that simple five-state answering of simple questions offered an amazing array of power for me to be able to put very sophisticated stories into the game, as long as I broke it up into tiny little pieces and scattered it into the world. I developed techniques like I would both write out my stories linearly and I would say, you know, you're going to start the game and you're going to go talk to Joe the fisherman, but you don't know about the sword yet. So you have to get further in the game, and you're going to meet this other person who tells you to go back and talk to Joe the fisherman about the magic sword. Now, if I go back, I can find the answer, because I already know where Joe is.

"Then I would take that exact same document, and instead of writing it out linearly, I'd write it out by geography. I'd say, here is town A, town B, town C, town D. What I'd find is a lot of the data of the story, a lot of the advancement of the story, was in [a few specific] towns and virtually nothing was happening in these other towns. So I'd say, 'OK, how can I modify that? Let's move Joe over to this other town. Let's add an intermediate clue that you have to find in some other place.' By analyzing story craft bi-directionally, both how the story flows and how your geographic exploration flows, it allowed me to create quite sophisticated stories, I feel, with quite limited technology. That's a technique that I use to this day."

As it happens, Garriott is quite literal when he talks about carrying his design philosophy forward to the present day. His most recent project, a free-to-start online RPG called Shroud of the Avatar, launched in March 2018 and has already seen several meaningful content updates. Shroud continues the legacy of Garriott's work, specifically channeling Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar and the influential massively multiplayer RPG Ultima Online. Garriott's vision of the RPG also manifests in the countless modern entries in the genre whose design roots can be traced back in part to the Ultima series. Garriott may not have created the first computer role-playing game, but he arguably created the first to truly matter. Computer RPGs began here.
 
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https://www.usgamer.net/articles/hi...y-cast-story-aside-in-favor-of-casting-spells

How Wizardry Cast Story Aside in Favor of Casting Spells
HISTORY OF RPGS | In Part Two of our monthly series, Robert Woodhead enlightens us about Wizardry's pursuit of systems over story.

This is the second entry in an ongoing series in which Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish hopes to explore the evolution of the role-playing genre, often with insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

Why do role-playing video games work the way they do? The answer to that question often boils down to, "Because Wizardry did it." But why did Wizardry do those things in the first place? To hear Wizardry programmer Robert Woodhead tell it, that answer amounts to, "Because of PLATO." Richard Garriott's Ultima had shipped a few months earlier with its grab-bag approach to the genre. Ultima combined first-person dungeon exploration with outdoor travel from town to town presented with a god’s-eye viewpoint. Ultima also included all kinds of odd anachronisms, including time travel and an outer space shooting sequence brazenly lifted from the finale of Star Wars, but its biggest influence was undoubtedly Garriott’s time spent shaking dice in Dungeons & Dragons.

Wizardry took a different approach. Designed and programmed by Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg, it consisted of nothing but dungeon-diving. The game was viewed entirely through the first-person wireframes seen in Ultima’s dungeons (and Akalabeth before that). It had no overworld. A town at the mouth of the dungeon—navigated entirely through menus—allowed players to shop for gear, rest at inns, and save their progress. There was no wandering around to gather clues from random townsfolk. There definitely was no space combat. There was only the dungeon, consisting of 10 floors of monsters, tricks, and traps, each level spread across a labyrinthine 20x20-space grid.

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PLATO's Allegory of the Dungeon
What Wizardry most notably offered over the original Ultima was the ability for the player to assemble a large team of heroes—a six-member party—to tackle the dungeon's depths. Players could define their team makeup by designating the race, alignment, and class of each combatant. This concept, a fundamental element of the genre today, could well be Wizardry's most important contribution to gaming. And according to Woodhead, it all came about as a hack to compensate for the Apple II's shortcomings versus the platform where he had cut his teeth: PLATO, which in many ways proved to be an even greater influence on Wizardry than D&D.

According to Woodhead, PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) "is one of the great sort of unsung heroes of computing and gaming. PLATO was basically where everything you love about the internet was invented between 1970 and 1975," he says. The PLATO system supported hundreds of connected terminals across the country, each boasting impressive 512x512 graphical displays—plasma screens equipped with touch panels, wild stuff for the early ’70s.

It was an incredibly advanced piece of tech for the era, but perhaps its most important feature was its network connectivity. "Because all these terminals were networked together and had very low latency, they generated a social community," says Woodhead. "And that expressed itself not only in things like message boards and chat, but also in games. Games on PLATO were multiplayer games that you could play with people all over the country."

Those games included a few inspired by the hot new trend sweeping America's college campuses: Dungeons & Dragons. Woodhead himself wasn't immune to that pandemic's charms. "At the end of the first semester of my senior year, Cornell asked if I might want to take a little time off because of low grades," he admits. "Actually, they were pretty firm about it! One of the things that had caused me to get thrown out of Cornell was playing too much Dungeons & Dragons. And there obviously had been dungeon games on PLATO. So I started thinking about how you would do this on the limited resources you had available on the Apple II. How would you deal with a single-player aspect?"

Woodhead had been deeply affected by his experiences with PLATO's networked systems, but the home computing space wouldn't catch up to that technology en masse for more than a decade. Outside of college, Woodhead's programming efforts were limited to the tiny boundaries of his Tandy TRS-80, a vastly more limited platform than PLATO. Still, Woodhead found himself intrigued by the challenge inherent in recreating the essence of PLATO games for Tandy's minuscule microcomputer.

"I started thinking, how could I do some of the PLATO games on this dinky little computer?" he says. "How would that style of game work on a TRS-80?" His first attempts didn't set the world on fire, but they nevertheless registered as a modest success: "The first professional product I released was a little tape that had 15 [...] TRS-80 implementations of all the classics, like Mugwump [and] Reversi. Stuff like that. I thought maybe I'd sell two or three of them. I think I sold a couple hundred."

Before too long, Woodhead upgraded to an Apple II, a somewhat less cramped computing format, when his mother volunteered him to use the computer to build a database to manage their family pewter-casting business' inventory. "We got Pascal for [the Apple II], because I was familiar with Pascal from Cornell. And so I set to work doing this inventory system, and in my spare time [...] the first thing I did was play around with data structures to learn a little bit more about Apple's Pascal implementation. I ended up producing this kind of tree structure database program, which we called Infotree. [Company president] Fred Sirotech had two sons, Rob and Norm, and somehow, they found out I was doing this and somebody had the idea: 'Why don't we try to sell this?' It actually sold, again, several hundred copies.

"Then somebody had the idea of doing a game. I don't for the life of me remember whose idea it was. So I started thinking about it and I thought, 'You know, what game do I want to write?' One of my favorite games on PLATO was a game called Empire. It's a tremendous tactical strategic space war game—multiplayer. I thought to myself, 'How could you ever do this on this little dinky Apple II?' I realized I couldn't do a multiplayer game, so I needed to do a single-player game. So I said to myself, 'Well, if this was a single-player game, you know, how would you do it?'" This became Woodhead's first game release, Galactic Attack.

Galactic Attack was an early pioneer of computer strategy games, but it wasn't an RPG—that would come next. Again, though, Woodhead recognized that much of the core appeal of both tabletop gaming and PLATO RPGs would be lost in a solitary computing environment. "The thing that was great about the PLATO games was you could join with a bunch of your friends and go down and beat on the monsters," he says. "How could you do that on a little Apple II? So I started writing a game, fleshing out some ideas. My working title for it was Paladin."

Woodhead's computer RPG would simulate the multiplayer experience by allowing the player to control an entire party of heroes all at once. While this obviously would sacrifice the social element that made those earlier RPG experiences so engrossing, the presence of a team of warriors opened up the door for more complex combat strategies than had been available in previous computer RPGs, including Ultima. Still, even if playing the game would lack a social aspect, its creation was very much about collaboration.

"I heard that somebody I knew from Cornell, Andy Greenberg—also a PLATO person—was also working on doing a kind of D&D type game on the Apple II," Woodhead says. "We got in contact with each other and started talking about it, and it turned out he was further along in the project than I was. He had actually written a game in Applesoft BASIC that had a lot of the core design features that Wizardry later used. And he had one thing that turned out to be probably the most important thing: He had the name Wizardry.

"He also had a very interesting resource. He had a bunch of friends who were avid gamers who would play the game and tell him everything that sucked about it."

And so, Woodhead and Greenberg led a party of WARGs (the Wizardry Advanced Research Group, or what we in modern parlance refer to as "beta testers") on a quest to create one of the most influential RPGs of all time.
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Wizards and Warriors
To hear someone describe Wizardry, you wouldn't think it would be a game that can take hundreds of hours to complete. A single town and a dungeon consisting of 10 floors, each on a 20x20 grid—how long could that possibly take to complete?

As it turns out, quite a while. For one thing, the game itself moved at a decidedly leisurely pace; because Woodhead and Greenberg had programmed the game in BASIC, it didn't run as quickly as it might have had it been coded closer to the metal. But even so, the volume of material present in Wizardry—the player's skills, the dungeon layout, the monster logic—ran up against the boundaries of the platform and the floppy diskettes from which the game data ran.

"We were really pushing the limits of what an Apple II could do," Woodhead says. "I mean, we were swapping things into and off of the disk like crazy. You actually had to flip the diskette when you played it so we could put the database for the game in the same place as the operating system on the other side of the disk. All sorts of really bizarre little tricks like that."

These tricks proved more enduring than Sir-Tech could ever have guessed. Many games have patterned themselves closely after Wizardry, perhaps most notably Etrian Odyssey and the early Shin Megami Tensei games by Atlus. Many of the details these and other derivative dungeon-crawlers (including much of developer 5pb's catalog) have internalized and perpetuated came about not as brilliant inspirations of game design but rather as reluctant workarounds for the restrictions of the Apple II platform.

Consider, for example, how many of these games give players a starting point of single town with a menu-based town interface. It's a genre standard that came into being entirely because the original Wizardry didn't have storage space to include anything else. "The reason you had to go back to the town to save was that we couldn't layer in a save code to the other areas of the game," Woodhead admits. "We would've run out of space.

"When you went into the dungeon, the town stuff just got discarded and it loaded the core dungeon code. When you got into combat, it would then throw that away, bring in the combat code. Then, when you were actually fighting, it would actually load in sub levels. That's why there was a lot of disk activity when you were fighting. We used every single [diskette] sector in the final Wizardry game—there was absolutely nothing left over. Adding a line of code that caused one part of the program to become one block bigger would break the entire game. We didn't have the space for it.

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"It was a continual battle. Adding a level would have added two blocks. [The disk] was about 1Kb. Why was the dungeon 10 levels? Because that's how many levels we thought we could get away with."

Wizardry also introduced the concept of a standard syntax for spell names—again, as a matter of necessity. By working with a series of consistent phonemes for spell names, Wizardry was able to cram more playable features into less data space. This, too, has become a convention that spans even beyond the dungeon-crawler format. Consider Final Fantasy's spell conventions (e.g., Blizzard/Blizzara/Blizzaga for ice magic), or MegaTen's even more systemic naming convention, which denotes a spell's element, its area of effect, and its power level through a consistent structure. What began as a technical workaround for a 1981 video game has become an industry standard.

"It's a resource problem," Woodhead says. "Given the constraints you're working under, you know, what game systems are the most important? What things do you kind of have to fake? Because you have to kind of cheat a little bit to get done."

Of course, cheating in Wizardry only happened on the development side (well, aside from one small experience glitch some fans exploited). The game expected players to give the game a full, earnest investment of time and energy in order to conquer the depths of the Mad Overlord's dungeon.

Much of the commitment that players had to make for conquering Wizardry resulted from the utterly ruthless design of the dungeon. Because the entire adventure played out through a first-person perspective, players had to keep track of their progress by hand. The concept of an auto-map didn't exist in 1981, and even if it had, Woodhead and Greenberg wouldn't have had any room left on the disk to include it. Every step of the dungeon needed to be tracked manually, with graph paper and pencil, lest the heroes become hopelessly lost and die in combat while bumbling their way back to town to rest and save. This tradition still lives on with the Etrian Odyssey games, which include their "graph paper" as an in-game element on the lower DS/3DS touch screen.

Yet even this process was more easily said than done. Unlike players, the game didn't have to play fair. A few levels into the dungeon, nasty tricks began to appear. Teleporters would drop players to another location within the maze. Cruel spinner tiles would change the player's orientation. These traps were not always obvious, forcing players to pay meticulous attention to their location and surroundings—more easily said than done in a world consisting entirely of white outlines on stark black. A specific magic spell could help with the orienteering, and later updates of the game blunted the ferocity of the traps to a degree, but Wizardry made its intentions clear: It was not your friend, it wasn't your mom, and it didn't feel the need to coddle you.

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Indeed, Woodhead would have made the game even more punishing if he could have. "When people talk to me about how much they enjoyed playing the game was, they almost invariably have a story about how they were having this great expedition and they got all this great loot and they're running back," he muses. "Then, like, three steps away from town, they hit an encounter and it's like, 'No!' If I had known that, we would have probably twisted up so that you had a slightly higher chance of an encounter when you head back towards town, because that turned out to be such an emotional experience for people."

Still, despite the way it frayed their nerves, fans wanted to complete Wizardry. For one thing, you needed to carry over your endgame party in order to be able to play the sequels. But more to the point, Wizardry was a huge, inventive, and unquestionably challenging game without precedent on the market. And despite its near-total lack of story (the plot began and ended with the Mad Overlord, Trebor, sending players into the maze to retrieve an amulet from the evil wizard Werdna), it was easily the most massive and intricate interpretation of the RPG to have appeared on computers at the time. It played like a D&D treasure-hunting module being run by a particularly cruel game master: Perhaps not to everyone's tastes, but then, there weren't a lot of other virtual campaigns on the market at that point.

Wizardry pioneered the mechanics-focused school of RPG design, centered entirely around combat and exploration. Ironically, many modern RPG fans wouldn't consider Wizardry a proper role-playing game given the lack of narrative content or character development. The player's party of six exists entirely to contribute to battle scenes; they are their spells and weapons. Again, this amounted to a compromise borne of necessity—and not necessarily one the developers were happy about.

"We always wanted more and more story," Woodhead says. "I worked on the first four Wizardry games, and each game tried to do something a little bit new, adding little story elements and trying to make that aspect of it richer within the context of the game engine. Which is why, for example, in Wizardry IV, the entire premise of the game was flipped. Now you're the bad guy and it's really a puzzle game. And so that was our attempt to play with that aspect of the experience.

"At its core, I think [an RPG] has to provide really significant emotional experiences, and it has to allow you to project yourself into the characters in the game. I think you see this in the really best games. You know, you're carried along in the story with this character which you can empathize with them. You get a chance to make decisions, like how you would be if you were in that situation. It's a projective thing.

"I think that that the really great games are the ones that find maybe some new or better or interesting twist on how to do that, [as in] Fallout 4 and especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. When it comes to role-playing games, the ones that have captured my attention are the ones that provide that kind of emotional journey experience where you can play through Fallout as a complete and utter bastard or you can play through Fallout as trying to be as empathic as you can."

Wizardry demonstrated that an RPG can offer the projective element Woodhead values based on the play experience alone. The lack of in-game character writing certainly didn't keep players from growing attached to their parties. Eventually, Sir-Tech acknowledged their most loyal fans' affection for the teams they had carried across three dungeons by adding different player teams as random encounters for Wizardry IV's protagonist—the evil Werdna—to struggle against as he attempted to escape his underground prison. (Fittingly, these enshrined heroes would prove to be, by far, the most difficult part of a legendarily brutal game.)

The Founder Effect
Despite the impact of Wizardry on the role-playing genre, Woodhead seems resolutely humble about his work. He credits the game's success in large part to lucky choices that turned out well in hindsight.

"Most people don't want to admit it," he says, "but a lot of that sort of stuff really comes down to, 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

"We're all informed by our experiences. I'd seen all these great games both on the computer and with paper and pencil. So had Andy. So we were like, 'OK, now we've got this new medium, [home] computers. How can we do cool stuff in this environment, given these constraints?' As the constraints changed, other people looked at it and said, 'Well, they did this. Now we have this. What can we do with this set of resources?'

"So in that respect, anything anybody does is basically just a link in a chain. It's this long chain, and it goes back way before D&D. It goes back to tabletop board gaming. Before that, it was military wargaming and Tolkien and Prince Caspian."

Wizardry definitely draws on game concepts that had come before it—not just D&D, but also the wargames that helped inspire it. "Stuff like the way three people in the front row are in physical contact, while the people in the back are a bit protected but can't attack physically? That's pretty standard in war gaming," Woodhead says, comparing the front- and back-row party arrangement to military strategy games. But for the most part, he admits, they were simply winging it.

"We just had no idea what we were doing. There wasn't this body of experience. What we were doing in Wizardry, what Richard was doing in Akalabeth and Ultima—we're all just kind of blindly stumbling around, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. There were a lot of people trying to do these kind of games, and I think we basically got lucky. Not to wax too philosophical, but I kind of feel that whenever you talk about successes in your life, you have to do it with a certain amount of humility."

Wizardry and Ultima have one other thing in common: Both series came to an end about 20 years ago. In Ultima's case, Electronic Arts' poor handling of the franchise caused it to fizzle out after 1999's Ultima IX. Meanwhile, Sir-Tech dissolved around the same time, and Sir-Tech Canada managed to ship 2001's highly regarded Wizardry 8 before shuttering its own doors. The rights to the series appear to have been shuffled around between several Japanese publisher—who, technically, have keep the series alive since 2001. But the dozens of games they've released under the name Wizardry have consistently failed to move the needle or introduce any new or interesting ideas worth of the series' legacy.

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That Wizardry should end up in Japan is probably no coincidence. Japanese RPG fans have done a much better job of keeping the torch lit for the first-person dungeon crawler, whereas Americans seem to have moved along to the logical next step in the format's evolution—free-roaming first-person games like The Elder Scrolls and the recent Fallouts.

Much of Japan's affection for the Wizardry style can likely be traced to the game's influence on the biggest RPG hits in that territory during the early- to mid-’80s. The first proper RPG designed specifically for the Japanese market, The Black Onyx, was specifically a Wizardry clone. Meanwhile, the creators of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Mystery Dungeon were all profoundly influenced by import copies of Wizardry. The series is part of the Japanese RPG's genetic makeup, in a sense.

Meanwhile, Woodhead himself has developed many ties to Japan over the years as well; currently, he runs AnimEigo, one of the first companies to have made a proper business out of licensing and localizing anime for the U.S. Yet he admits he's at a loss to explain why his work has remained so enduring overseas.

"There could be an argument made that's just a founder effect in that Wizardry and Ultima just happened to be the games that were able to literally jump across the ocean," he says. "A lot of the stuff that was going on in D&D and tabletop gaming... because of all of their text, they were [harder to localize], so they were delayed. Meanwhile, Japan didn't have access to PLATO. They didn't have access to a lot of what was going on in the sort of homebrew computer industry." So by default, he says, Wizardry helped introduce RPGs to the Japanese market.

"It's sort of a chicken and egg thing. Is it because Wizardry really appealed to them or was it because Wizardry was just the first one there and so everyone decided, well, that's how it should be done? I have no idea. You know, it, it's one of these situations where there is no real answer to those questions. It probably was just, like, one guy in Japan who noticed Wizardry and imported it and told his friends. I have no idea who that is. I'd like to thank him.

"I will say that, in terms of Wizardry's success in Japan, a huge amount of credit has to go to the people who worked at a company called Fortune that did the original localization of Wizardry. In fact, that's one of the reasons I started going to Japan, was to help them with that localization."

Fittingly, Woodhead acknowledges that the best rendition of the original Wizardry also hails from Japan. "Personally, I think the best version of the original Wizardry ever done was the Nintendo version," he says. "They managed to cram the entire game into a cartridge, and second of all, they leveraged the special graphics capabilities they had to make a really nice presentation. All the people in Japan did just tremendous work—I was really, really impressed."

It's hard to imagine the Wizardry series ever amounting to anything more than a succession of obscure low-budget games stranded in Japan again. Maybe that's fine. The game's unrelenting interpretation of tabletop gaming quietly continues to make its impact on the medium felt every time someone draws another line segment in the latest Etrian Odyssey; every time they battle a grinning blue Slime; every time they cast Curaga on a wounded halfling ninja.
 
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what a fucking retard

prolly one of those people who thinks grid-movement is "outdated"
 

octavius

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According to the above article, regarding Japan's custody of the Wizardry series:

But the dozens of games they've released under the name Wizardry have consistently failed to move the needle or introduce any new or interesting ideas worth of the series' legacy.

Well, they introduced anime, which at least was new, if not very interesting to normal people.
 

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The Bard's Tale: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-bards-tale-launched-the-second-wave-of-rpgs

The Bard's Tale Launched the Second Wave of RPGs
The History of RPGs | Welcome to Skara Brae, and to the future.

This is the third entry in an ongoing series by Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish exploring the evolution of the role-playing genre, often with insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

When Wizardry landed on Apple II at the end of 1981, it hit with megaton force. Along with Ultima, it defined what computer role-playing games could-and should-be. You'd be hard-pressed to find an early RPG fan or creator who didn't find themselves entranced at some point by Sir-Tech's dungeon-crawler; its meaty mechanics and unforgiving design drew players in, then provided them with enough substance to justify the struggle.

These two role-playing goliaths didn't simply rack up record sales for the era, though. They also helped spark a wave of computer RPGs that drew inspiration from them (or, in many cases, outright imitated them). Along with other foundational efforts like Atari's Adventure, Automated Simulations' Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, and Infocom's Zork, Ultima and Wizardry provided designers with all the fundamentals they needed for transforming their own RPG ambitions into digital form.

Past and Future
"Playing Wizardry was so profound," says RPG designer Michael Cranford. "It was like drawing a bunch of connection points for me between gaming in the past and what a computer-moderated experience could be."

Cranford, whose career has included stints as a writer, programmer, and college professor, would make his own impact on the role-playing genre in 1985. As the lead designer and programmer on the most notable of the second-wave American RPGs, The Bard's Tale, Cranford sought to take computer role-playing to the next level by building on what had come before.

"I was definitely standing on the shoulders of Robert Woodhead there," he admits. "[Wizardry] was a brilliant implementation of a Dungeons & Dragons experience.

"It was so limited in so many ways, but it had a huge impact on me. I loved the game and as I was playing,. I was constantly thinking of ideas. 'I wish I could do this. I wish I could do that.' I was generating a list, because I thought, 'I think I can do this. I think I can actually write something that's like, beyond this.' Then I started wondering if people would want to play this? Would they be intrigued if this had three times the depth of Wizardry? And better graphics?"

At first glance, The Bard's Tale does indeed owe a tremendous debt to Wizardry. The bulk of the game involves traveling through simple first-person dungeons, battling hordes of random monsters with a six-member party of warriors. Even the screen format looks much the same, with party information appearing as a permanent fixture below a windowed dungeon view and text display.

At the same time, Cranford created a game experience that went far beyond the strict dungeon-crawling of Wizardry. While it lacked Ultima's emphasis on exploring a world and interrogating non-player characters with keywords, it nevertheless presented a virtual space that consisted of more than just a dungeon and a menu for dealing with essential tasks in town. The Bard's Tale broke its dungeon into multiple pieces, all scattered across a town called Skara Brae.

Skara Brae itself proved to be a setting every bit as rich as the dungeon's depths-even more so, in some respects. Players navigated the city as they would a dungeon. It sprawled across a 30x30 grid that demanded to be mapped by hand, just the same as the mazes below the surface. Adventurers didn't need to contend with random monster mobs in the city streets, of course, as Skara Brae existed as a sort of safe version of the labyrinthine depths. Yet it nevertheless played a significant part in the quest: The fragmented dungeon could only be accessed from different points within the city, and each entrance was hidden behind a series of cryptic riddles and oblique tasks. In other words, The Bard's Tale managed to take the Wizardry format and integrate a degree of Ultima-esque world-building and narrative that Sir-Tech's impressive RPG had lacked.

Cranford (along with his collaborators on The Bard's Tale, which included such future video game luminaries as Brian Fargo and Lawrence Holland) put together a game that looked a lot prettier than Wizardry, as well. The wire frame dungeons and crude monster illustrations of earlier dungeon crawlers here solidified into more concrete imagery. Labyrinths now consisted of colored walls with unique "event" spaces rendered in even greater detail. Above ground, Skara Brae's brick walls gave way to meticulously illustrated shop and pub interiors. Even the randomly encountered monsters didn't simply look nicer than in previous RPGs, they actually displayed simple animations.

The Bard's Tale became an instant hit, and its graphical finesse accounted for much of its popular acclaim. That aspect of the game had come naturally to Cranford, a capable illustrator. TIndeed, the elaborate visuals and intricate puzzles of Skara Brae were-typically for RPG developers in this era-elements Cranford had carried over intuitively from the tabletop gaming sessions he had run with his friends and collaborators.

Visions
"I wasn't told how to do all of this," he says. "To me, it was like, I'm going to make this a story. It's going to be an adventure. It's going to be like a great novel. It's going to have a visual component to it. I was an artist, so I used really elaborate drawings. I fit things into them, so it wasn't just window dressing. They were critical [to the quest], and I'd have guys like Brian Fargo studying the drawing. They're like, 'What's that right there? What's that thing we're seeing peeking out behind that rock right there?' Some of that stuff was relevant, and with some of it I was just kind of messing with them, because I knew they would scrutinize everything. They loved that stuff. It became a lot of fun developing these complex visual puzzle-solving adventures.

"Combat was just sort of the flavoring that tied everything together, rather than a lot of these canned campaigns which were all just fight after fight after fight after fight. Mine were all more about a story. There were a lot of NPCs in my adventures that would come to life and help you and provide special clues or keys to getting past certain things."

In a sense, The Bard's Tale straddled the line between RPG and the burgeoning graphical adventure genre, which had begun to explode in popularity thanks to the likes of Sierra On-Line hit King's Quest. The graphical adventure wasn't too far removed from RPGs, especially in those early days. After all, that genre had emerged as an offshoot of the text adventure, which experienced its defining work in Infocom's Zork. In many respects, Zork amounted to an alternate interpretation of tabletop RPGs, one that emphasized the narrative and puzzle dungeons over combat and hunting for experience points. That The Bard's Tale should echo graphical adventures seemed only natural-another indication of the thin and often arbitrary lines that define genres.

Cranford unsurprisingly acknowledges Zork's influence on his own work. "I played Zork, and that was the kind of gaming I liked to do, no question," he says. "There was combat in there, but it was definitely intentional and not just, 'I'm putting three orcs here and five goblins here.'"

Besides his love of gaming and his passion for drawing, the third pillar of Cranford's contributions to The Bard's Tale turned out to be his knack for programming. While Wizardry had been a landmark work, it (and its first three sequels) ultimately ended up being hampered by their use of high-level programming languages. Wizardry relied on Pascal and BASIC, which made them highly portable across multiple platforms, but it also worked to their detriment by crimping their size and reducing their speed. On systems as limited as the Apple II or Commodore 64, the resources required to run these advanced programming languages in the background cut into system memory and disk storage space that could have been used for additional dungeon levels, extra monsters, or prettier graphics.

"I knew that because [Woodhead] had written Wizardry in Pascal, he had this big runtime engine," recalls Cranford. "I was thinking all the overhead from that is what made it so slow and so limited. I'm a 6502 assembly language developer, and [that meant I would have] five times the space he had, plus the efficiency of machine code. I knew my game was going to be a lot faster, and I had more system resources that I could put in there."

Compare Wizardry and The Bard's Tale running side by side on the same machine, and the difference becomes obvious. Cranford's use of low-level machine code made for a faster, more attractive, more complex adventure. (Though he, too, ran up against the hard limits of those early computers: "I'd get down to where I'd be 15 bytes from the end and I'd have to change monster names to make them shorter so that I could fit in another monster and still have it all there," he says.)

Despite these inevitable logistical struggles, The Bard's Tale stands apart from its predecessors in that Cranford openly embraced the limitations of the available technology. Where the first generation of computers RPGs embodied a struggle by designers to capture as much of the tabletop experience as possible via primitive microcomputers, Cranford leaned into the rudimentary nature of 8-bit computing. To him, PCs offered consistency. Where other designers saw restrictions, Cranford saw the potential for quality control by taking away the fickle human element that made pen-and-paper campaigns such a crapshoot.

Past
"My frustration [with tabletop gaming] was that it was so unstructured," he says. "It wasn't clear what the limits were as to how much you let people get away with. There were so many areas to fudge the play, and that was frustrating. When I finally came to understand that a computer could be involved in this, then the rules are set and the system works the way it works. If you live or you die, that's just the way it is. There was something about it that I felt brought structure into the the thing. It was a perfect synergy between the kinds of gaming I wanted."

Unlike many of his predecessors in the RPG space, such as Richard Garriott and Robert Woodhead, Cranford's experience with computer RPGs came entirely from commercial releases. Being younger than the creators of Ultima, Wizardry, and Zork, he had missed out on the shared computing experiences of the '70s that served as the creative incubators for those games. In a very literal sense, The Bard's Tale belonged to a new generation of games: Ones created by designers shaped by radically different experiences than the ones that had informed the people behind the initial wave of computer RPGs.

Cranford acknowledges the impact this had on his approach to game design. "I hadn't been involved with MUDs," he said. "That probably would have changed my approach. My approach was more like the solo adventure idea: Me playing Dungeons & Dragons and not needing anybody else because the system would be the dungeon master. Of individuals being able to game on their own rather than having to find a group of people and sit down at a tabletop. If I'd had more of that communal experience, maybe I would have thought differently and had some ideas about multiplayer gaming. But none of that occurred to me.

"There were limitations with the computer, but I knew we could ultimately exceed all those things and build enough intelligence into this that it feels just as natural as tabletop gaming, but structured where [another player] can't do something he's not supposed to. If you have a really good dungeon master, there is something there that it's difficult to capture in any kind of software. But, that's not what I found out there most of the time."

Many of Cranford's ambitions for The Bard's Tale didn't-couldn't-come to fruition with the original game due to the limitations of 8-bit computing. Even so, the city of Skara Brae was something new for the computer role-playing space: A self-contained world that felt almost like a real space. While other computer realms, like Ultima III's Sosaria, enticed players to explore them, they never felt as realized as the hub city at the heart of The Bard's Tale. Players came to know the city and its denizens as they delved into the different underground spaces and returned to gather new information or spend their earnings. It was a reasonable facsimile of the running changes a live dungeon master could impose on a tabletop campaign, if admittedly imperfect.

"It's a trade-off," he acknowledges. "I recognize that you're giving something up here. There is a dynamic quality [to tabletop gaming], but I didn't feel like a lot of the people that I were playing with were great storytellers anyway, so I didn't feel like I was losing a whole lot.

"I could do what I was doing because I felt like my dungeons were really complex and had a lot of cool story elements that would have been almost impossible to fit into an application. But I had hope that it would ultimately get there in time. With the technology we have now, I think you could really almost do everything."

Still, Cranford feels that The Bard's Tale was heavily defined by the restrictions imposed by early 19'80s technology, and that those boundaries worked to the game's advantage. "I think anytime you have a limited palette to draw on... when you reach the limits of one thing, you can put your back in that corner and focus on other things," he says. "By having very limited graphic and processing capability, you can spend all your time and energy thinking about content, thinking about gameplay, and things like that. If everything's unlimited in the sense of the complexity of the interactivity, processing power, memory, and disk space, it's difficult to know where to invest your time. Next thing you know, you've split your resources in a way which are maybe not going to end up with the best product in the end. You might be a lot better off stopping, saying, 'This is good enough.' I think that the limitations there made it easier to spend time and energy thinking about what was going to make this thing fun.

"When I eventually created Centauri Alliance, I did put more in story elements. But it actually became rather complicated, which is what bogged that project down-the amount of animation and things like that. The Bard's Tale started off really simple, with automated combat and things like that. So it made it easy to get the game done in the first place.

Future
Like many of the RPGs of the '80s, The Bard's Tale hasn't endured to the same degree as simpler properties like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. An attempt to reboot the series about a decade ago as a comedy RPG went over well with critics, but it failed to resonate with fans who wanted something closer in spirit to the Apple II classics they had grown up with.

Nevertheless, the series has made at least one permanent mark on role-playing thanks to its eponymous warrior-minstrel. The bard in The Bard's Tale wasn't a character but rather a player class that specializesd in spells capable of enhancing other party members in combat. Support class characters were a new concept in computer RPGs at the time, and buff-slinging bards have since become a genre mainstay in everything from the similarly Wizardry-inspired Etrian Odyssey games to the decidedly different Final Fantasy franchise.

Fittingly, the bard class embodied Cranford's creative philosophy toward his game. To his mind, it speaks to the way people tick. "They want to exceed limitations," he says. "They want to be more than they are. They want to be everything that they feel they should be. And technology is our attempt to realize that and we use devices to try to overcome limitations. In a game context, I think why science fiction and fantasy blend together so well is because those things are utilized for the same purpose, to give us the same experience. In my games, I wanted magic to be the center point of the game and I wanted people to have that sense of becoming everything they want to be.

"As I'm developing a game, I'm always thinking, how do I deliver that experience to people? Where they feel like I've just lifted myself to this higher level? So it's kind of a positive realization of an experience of fulfillment and destiny. That's the experience I always wanted to leave people with, because that's the thing I got and I got that from Wizardry, and I wanted to deliver that in my game. You know, helping people to have an experience of being the best they can be, even better than they would have imagined, through their character and their immersion in the game."

Also podcast thing with the author of this monthly series: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/blood-god-rpg-podcast-diablo-2



Kat is once again joined by Retronauts host Jeremy Parish to explore the history of RPGs. This time they dive into PLATO, Wizardry, and Bard's Tale as they explore about the rise of the "second wave" of RPGs in the 1980s. Then David Craddock returns to talk about #18 on our Top 25 RPG Countdown: Diablo 2! .
 

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Arcane
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Codex 2014
September piece goes back to the origin of JRPG as a genre, Dragon Quest: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/dr...-liberated-rpgs-from-costly-computers-feature

Yuji Horii Remembers the Difficult Road to Liberating RPGs from Costly Computers With Dragon Quest
HISTORY OF RPGS | The great migration away from just PCs started with Dragon Quest in 1986.

This is the fourth entry in an ongoing series by Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish exploring the evolution of the role-playing genre, often with insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

The View From the East
The role-playing game initially emerged from the primordial soup of America's early academic computing systems. But the U.S. didn't have a monopoly on computers. By the time the ’80s arrived, every prosperous nation had not only its own high-end shared computing system for government and academic use, but its own local brands of humble, consumer-centric systems as well. Certain computing standards—processor families like the 8086 and 6502, or operating systems like DOS and ProDOS—tended to be universal, but the particulars of international computers were custom tailored to the needs of their respective markets.

This proved especially true in Japan. There, the written language consists of a heavily modified and profoundly idiomatic variant on Chinese ideograms. QWERTY keyboard and single-character text entry systems developed for English-speaking regions didn't meet the needs of Japanese consumers and businesses. Electronic companies like NEC and Sharp were quick to fill this vacuum with a slate of PCs designed especially for Japan. Typically, these computers offered multi-character key-entry systems and enhanced screen resolution that allowed them to more easily handle intricate kanji text, and these tweaks made those systems quite distinct from western computers.

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Perhaps this technological divide helps account for the appeal of imported role-playing games among Japan's tech literati in the early ’80s. In an era where simply owning a computer was something of a status symbol, RPGs must have seemed especially tantalizing. RPGs were stuffed with English text—something that had become synonymous with cool in ’80s pop culture in Japan—and the big international hits only ran on pricey imported computers. American PCs weren't entirely unheard of in Japan, of course; Satoru Iwata fell into Nintendo's orbit specifically because his experience with coding for Commodore's VIC-20 translated neatly to the NES, which ran on a similar processor. But those foreign computers and their games were rare, expensive, and inaccessible. For enthusiastic young computer nerds prowling the alleyway shops of Akihabara, that made for a heady combination.

Naturally, Japan's pioneering game designers were eager to try their hand at creating their own takes on the RPG. Many of these early works have been lost to time due to their meager distribution on computing platforms that never made their way to other countries, but clearly the interest was there. Still, the import giants reigned supreme. Japan's first true locally made RPG hit, The Black Onyx, was designed by Dutch emigré Henk Rogers (of Tetris licensing fame) in the style of Wizardry. Developer Nihon Falcom was so inspired by Ultima that it may have gotten in the way of a possible import licensing relationship with Origin Systems; legend has it that Richard Garriott was less than thrilled to find its hit Xanadu contained in-game art lifted directly from Ultima 3's manual.

It wouldn't be until 1986 that a truly unique and substantial take on the RPG emerged from Japan. Ironically, it wouldn't be a game designed for PCs at all but rather for consoles. But then, that's what made Dragon Quest so significant.


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Lone Crusader
The original Dragon Quest seems, in hindsight, a rather paltry take on the RPG. Even a novice player can complete the entire adventure in less than 20 hours. The quest contains a whole two story objectives—rescue the princess and defeat the Dragon Lord—and technically you don't even need to bother with the rescue if you know the trick to reaching Charlock Castle, where the villain resides. Dragon Quest almost completely abandons the RPG party mechanics innovated by Wizardry and Ultima 3, putting players in control of a single character with a fixed skill progression path and a linear selection of gear upgrades to purchase. You have menu-driven, turn-based combat revolving around spells and swords, but even so, Dragon Quest is about as bare-bones as an RPG can be.

And yet, Dragon Quest existed. That alone made it remarkable: here was a pretty reasonable interpretation of the RPG, and somehow, it ran on Nintendo's NES console.

"We only had 64 KB of memory," says Dragon Quest director Yuji Horii. "We had to implement the system, the monster, data, graphics, story, and music—all of it into that cartridge. We were quite impressed that we were able to achieve that."

By comparison, most PCs in 1986 used 5.25" diskettes that offered 340 KB of storage, with a few early adopters already enjoying Sony's luxurious new 3.5" disk format with its stunning 720 KB of space. And unlike cartridge-based console games, computer software could span multiple diskettes or even install compressed data onto capacious hard drives. On top of that, the NES used a two-button controller, whereas PC RPG fans had already grown accustomed to making use of an entire keyboard to quickly input commands. An RPG should never have been possible under those conditions.

In sheer technical terms, Dragon Quest couldn't begin to compare in scope or complexity to a contemporary PC RPG like 1986's The Bard's Tale 2 or 1987's Wasteland. Somehow, though, Horii (along with programmer Koichi Nakamura, now president of Spike Chunsoft) managed to create a recognizable imitation of the RPG experiences that could be had on more powerful platforms. Even more impressively, Dragon Quest held up as a complete and satisfying (albeit compact) work in its own right, and in doing so it paved the way for an entire genre of games.

"With Dragon Quest, we were developing for the NES at the time—the Famicom in Japan—and I really wanted to bring the RPG genre to that platform," Horii says. "But we all know that the machine and the hardware itself was quite simplistic. It didn't provide a lot of space to do much, in that sense.

"Oftentimes people had mentioned that it would be impossible to bring RPGs to the system, but by creating and focusing on one character rather than a party, and then kind of simplifying various mechanics but still ensuring that people would still get the sense of fun and interesting aspects of an RPG game, we were able to successfully achieve it."

Dragon Quest reproduced the broad strokes of the role-playing genre. As with the formative works designed in the U.S., it took place in a generic medieval European fantasy land prowled by monsters and ruled by an evil wizard. The hero took up his quest from the king, slept at inns to heal, and battled foes with melee strikes and magical skills. Defeated monsters yielded gold and experience, and townspeople offered crucial clues for advancement.

Where The Black Onyx had directly lifted its mechanics and aesthetics from Wizardry, Dragon Quest attempted to do something a little different. Combat here played out through a Wizardry-style first-person perspective, but the hero explored the kingdom of Alefgard—both its expansive overworld and its murky dungeons—by way of a top-down viewpoint reminiscent of Ultima. What really set it apart from its peers, however, was its visual style. Dragon Quest pitted players against ravening fantasy monsters and spell-slinging undead, but it avoided anything resembling realism. Instead, the game embraced both its young audience and the colorful graphical capabilities of the NES hardware by rendering bad guys as whimsical cartoon characters illustrated by a rising star of comic art by the name of Akira Toriyama.


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Dragon Quest reproduced the broad strokes of the role-playing genre. As with the formative works designed in the U.S., it took place in a generic medieval European fantasy land prowled by monsters and ruled by an evil wizard. The hero took up his quest from the king, slept at inns to heal, and battled foes with melee strikes and magical skills. Defeated monsters yielded gold and experience, and townspeople offered crucial clues for advancement.

Where The Black Onyx had directly lifted its mechanics and aesthetics from Wizardry, Dragon Quest attempted to do something a little different. Combat here played out through a Wizardry-style first-person perspective, but the hero explored the kingdom of Alefgard—both its expansive overworld and its murky dungeons—by way of a top-down viewpoint reminiscent of Ultima. What really set it apart from its peers, however, was its visual style. Dragon Quest pitted players against ravening fantasy monsters and spell-slinging undead, but it avoided anything resembling realism. Instead, the game embraced both its young audience and the colorful graphical capabilities of the NES hardware by rendering bad guys as whimsical cartoon characters illustrated by a rising star of comic art by the name of Akira Toriyama.

At the time, Toriyama was a year or two into his decade-long run on Dragon Ball, the follow-up to the extraordinarily popular comedy manga Dr. Slump. His involvement with the game became a huge selling feature, though Horii admits it came about through sheer circumstance... and perhaps just a bit of chicanery.

"Given the fact that it was on the NES, we wouldn't really be able to achieve a truly realistic imagery or graphic style. At the time, I was a writer for [manga magazine] Shonen Jump, and my editor was actually the same editor for Toriyama-san. The editor had mentioned something to the effect of Toriyama-san really wanting to work on a game, and that's how we got into it and brought Toriyama-san on board to create the designs.

"In retrospect, it turned out that Toriyama-san never really had an interest [in games] or anything. It seems like the editor was just trying to incentivize him!"

Dragon Quest may not have been Toriyama's dream project after all, but he nevertheless brought his A-game to the project. His interpretations of standard RPG monsters looked like nothing in any other video game before it, projecting whimsy and menace in perfect balance. Practically every foe you encountered in Dragon Quest faced off against players with a smile plastered on its face, but Toriyama's masterful pen covered a spectrum of expressions. Silly grins for low-tier monsters became wicked smirks as you reached the upper echelons of the monstrous ranks. It also helped that Toriyama knew when to switch things up for effect; several foes that appeared as de facto bosses—the guardian Golem and deadly Axe Knight—loomed over the player with blank expressions that seemed all the more menacing for the goofiness surrounding them.

Of course, you'll find the pinnacle of the Dragon Quest/Toriyama connection in the game's lowest-level enemies, the humble Slime. An RPG standard, other games had rendered Slimes as formless puddles of ooze or else as gelatinous cubes containing the acid-eaten remains of hapless adventurers suspended within. Toriyama's Slimes, on the other hand, were colorful onion-shaped blobs peering up at players with wide eyes and gormless grins. They came off as a combination of the gels from Namco's Tower of Druaga (a Pac-Man-inspired action RPG that had been a massive hit on Nintendo's Famicom the year before Dragon Quest's debut) and Toriyama's own popular, multi-colored Poop Boy sight-gag characters from Dr. Slump. The Dragon Quest Slime became an instant icon and has been reworked into literally dozens of alternate forms, ranging from timid Marine Slimes hiding in their spiky conch shells to the elusive, deadly Metal King Slime (worth a fortune in experience... if you can defeat it).

Toriyama, whose comics tend to have a playfully naughty undertone, probably has something to do with Dragon Quest's bawdy humor, too. Girls in bunny costumes populate the series' casinos, and you can pay women to perform the mysterious act known as "puff puff" in many of the games. Even the original Dragon Quest, limited as it was, managed to squeeze in a little playful ribaldry. If you stopped to rest and heal up while leading the rescued Princess Gwaelin back home, the innkeeper would make a sly comment the following morning. Truly, Dragon Quest fell far from the staid adventures that inspired it.


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Corporate Crusader
One other critical factor set Dragon Quest apart from the formative RPGs of the prior decade: it had corporate backing. Where Ultima, Wizardry, and even The Bard's Tale represented the work of determined amateurs who were making things up on both the design and business level as they went along, Dragon Quest's creators had plenty of experience under their belts by 1986. They also had the support of an established publisher.

Japanese publisher Enix had entered the computing biz at the dawn of the ’80s and quickly turned its focus to gaming. Enix itself didn't create many games, however. Instead, it worked more as a pure publisher, shepherding promising projects to market. Both Horii and Nakamura got their breaks thanks to Enix's talent search contests, which picked up contest entries by both men (sports sim Love Match Tennis and puzzle-platformer Door Door, respectively) and brought them to retail in Japan. Both designers remained in Enix's orbit, with Nakamura's own company Chunsoft working as a go-to contractor to help facilitate Enix's projects.

Working under Enix's umbrella, Horii and Nakamura benefited from opportunities that would otherwise have been impossible. For example, the Enix connection is responsible for Dragon Quest's iconic musical themes. Composer Koichi Sugiyama "responded to a survey," says Horii. "Our producer read that survey, and that's how Sugiyama came on board in the production process as well." Although Sugiyama has become a decidedly controversial figure in recent years, there's no denying that his soaring compositions have become an inextricable component of Dragon Quest.

Enix also opened the door to the NES. The company had been one of Nintendo's earliest third-party supporters, and they shared a close relationship with the notoriously thorny console giant. Although Dragon Quest could have been a far grander game as a PC release, Horii wanted to reach the console's much larger market. To that end, the team even settled for a bare-bones cartridge release rather than aiming for the system's new Disk System expansion, which offered far more memory than a standard cart. "I felt like having to buy an additional system was a high barrier to a certain degree," say Horii. "So we wanted to ensure that everyone could play on the Famicom alone and enjoy the game on [the standard hardware]." While this made for a comparatively tiny game that lacked save support (players had to record their progress by jotting down lengthy passwords on paper), their gamble paid off when Dragon Quest ended up selling 1.5 million copies—a massive figure by the era's standards.


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The Portopia Serial Murder Case was Horii's first big hit. [Screen from alvanista.com and vgmuseum.com]


Enix's publishing and marketing support played a huge role in Dragon Quest's success, but ultimately the game worked because of its singular focus on bringing role-playing to a console. Horii and Nakamura were both fans of those elusive western RPGs that were all the rage in the early ’80s. ("Wizardry was quite popular back then, so I purchased that, and it was my first experience," recalls Horii.) But Dragon Quest's mechanical and interface design owed a great deal to Horii's first big hit, a graphical adventure whose title translates to The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

The graphical adventure genre as a whole could be seen as a close cousin to the RPG. They owe their existence to Infocom's Zork, itself an adaptation of tabletop role-playing experiences. Zork focused on the narrative exploration of pen-and-paper campaigns instead of the combat elements that fueled Wizardry, and formative games like King's Quest drew the genre further and further from those roots. Still, the similarities between the mystery-driven Portopia and the more adventuresome Dragon Quest make the two genres' relationship explicit.

"Originally, I wanted to actually become a manga artist," says Horii. "I really liked developing and creating stories. With computer games, I found this whole new level where you have interactivity and interaction and could progress your stories in that fashion. I developed an adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and after that I discovered the RPG.

"It was quite niche back then, and oftentimes, people didn't quite know what to do in the games. We wanted to create a kind of linear rail that people can go on to experience the genre. Furthermore, in Portopia, I had implemented a command system where you were able to select your moves and whatnot, and that had naturally carried over to the Dragon Quest games as well."

Portopia had debuted as a computer title, but it was soon reworked for Famicom. As detailed in Nathan Altice's I Am Error, the move to a platform reliant on tile-based graphics and controller-based inputs forced Horii to rethink the mechanics of his adventure game from the ground up. The simple window-based menu command system he developed for Portopia's Famicom release became a foundational component of Dragon Quest.


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A New Hope
Ultimately, Dragon Quest saw the role-playing genre entering a new, mature phase. Despite its bright, cartoonish art and simplified design, Dragon Quest was a sophisticated work. It brought together elements of multiple genres, an interest in storytelling, and the need to work within the harsh constraints of a limited platform. The end result had broad appeal, reaching a mass audience of young and casual players who previously had been locked out of RPGs due to their complexity and the costly platforms that powered them. And this, Horii says, was entirely by design.

"You know, oftentimes video games and computers in general, they can feel quite cold, right?" muses Horii. "With Dragon Quest, we're always aiming to create a very kind of warm environment, a warm world, within the game. That's carried over throughout all of the different genre games within the Dragon Quest series, as well as bringing the unexpected and keeping the excitement alive."

Dragon Quest's success ensured the quick arrival of both sequels and imitators. Single-player RPGs designed conspicuously in Dragon Quest's shape glutted the Famicom and other consoles throughout the late ’80s and into the ’90s. These varied wildly in quality, but the best of the bandwagon-riders resulted in long-running franchises including Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, and Phantasy Star. Meanwhile, Dragon Quest's own sequels built progressively on the last, growing in substance and quality at such a pace that the original game soon felt more like a primitive rough draft than a proper standalone release.

"With Dragon Quest II and III, you know, the memory space limitations had doubled or tripled," says Horii. "So of course what we could do within the game also expanded and in line with that, and so we were able to kind of further build on that."

Dragon Quest II added additional party members to the mix, making for a quest that felt more like a proper role-playing adventure than its lonely predecessor. Two years later Dragon Quest III arrived; with its massive world and highly involved class-change system, it became, in effect, the de facto template for the console RPG. The goal for sequels, according to Horii, has always been to take the series one step further than the last.

"With Dragon Quest III, for example, we had a party with companions," he says. "But then I realized that each of these companions also have a life of their own. That's why with IV, I wanted to create a story that also told the lives of the companions and made an experience that revolved around kind of bringing each of those party members together. With V, we wanted to depict the life of a single character, from his childhood to adulthood, and then you see his son becoming a hero himself."

More than any other RPG series, Dragon Quest has managed to stay true to its roots. You can play Dragon Quest XI and see the clear through-line to the original NES game: its audio elements, monster designs, spells and weapons, and even the intangible feel of the adventure itself hearken back to the 8-bit days. Horii and his co-creators seem never to have lost sight of the fundamentals of Dragon Quest. And why should they want to? The original game perfectly reinvented a genre for a format and audience that RPGs had never catered to before. That's rare alchemy.

Special thanks to Matt Kim for his contributions to this feature.
 
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aweigh

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I fucking hate this guy. He's writing all of these shitty articles from the perspective that old = bad and anything new = good. Absolutely worthless articles.
 

TemplarGR

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I fucking hate this guy. He's writing all of these shitty articles from the perspective that old = bad and anything new = good. Absolutely worthless articles.

I agree with this. Being old does not mean automatically bad, and new is not always good. Indeed.

Oftentimes this goes the other way around, for example here on codex old=automatically good and new=automatically bad, unless it is indie, then it is a masterpiece. Explains all the retards who criticize Witcher 3 :P
 

FeelTheRads

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It's way more often the former than the latter, though.

Furthermore, most new things are indeed shit so you won't be terribly off in just lumping everything together.
 

newtmonkey

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Jeremy Parish is completely obsessed with Japanese video games and basically knows nothing whatsoever about computer games, so it's no surprise he only gets excited about RPGs when talking about something so absolutely childish and simple as Dragon Quest 1.

History of RPGs according to Japanese console obsessives like this guy:
- According to Wikipedia, such classic RPGs as the "Ultimate" series from the King of England, the "Wizardry" games (lol what are these ATARI GRAPHICS XDXD), and "Brad's Tale" were released, but the graphics are horrible and you need to memorize like 20 commands just to do anything, so no one played them (except for the NES ports, which are a million times better)
- OMFG JAPAN DID IT AGAIN!!!! XDXDXD THOSE GENIUSES SAVED THE RPG INDUSTRY JUST LIKE THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY WITH MY PRECIOUS NINTENDO
- Westerners made a valiant attempt to compete with nerd classics like Bladders Gate, Fallout 3, and Planetscape Tournament, but all was for naught
- After revolutionizing RPGs, Japanese megageniuses continued to release Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Pokemon games every year for a million years
 

Twizman

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I was openly swearing on the podcast episode where they were continually denigrating Dragon Quest II. I get it though for most people it's not their cup of tea. Personally I loved the challenge and party based combat playing through it recently. The main difficulty was the obscurity of the orbs you need to collect, a non-issue with an emulator/guide.

I heard the analogy of growing pains and evolution for the series. Personally I played through the evolution and my favourite part happens to be near the very start. I like the particular Wizardry link in the chain of rpgs, which happened to be pretty much the first chain in the history of the genre lol.

Enjoying the podcast though. Parish asked Kodama-san about the contribution of Phantasy Star to the genre, and she didn't have much of an answer. I always thought the macro system in IV was really fun and intuitive, and I don't recall seeing it in other titles. Though maybe it existed in a different form.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/history-of-rpgs-part-6-ultima-4-wasteland-mature-rpgs

How Ultima 4 and Wasteland Ushered in a New Era of Maturity for RPGs
HISTORY OF RPGS | Inside Ultima 4 and Wasteland, two critical attempts to bring meaning to the genre of RPGs.

This is the sixth entry in an ongoing series by Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish exploring the evolution of the role-playing genre, featuring insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

A decade after the earliest computer role-playing games made their debut on PLATO terminals at American universities, Japanese designers defined their own distinct approach to the genre by paring it down to its essence. Dragon Quest and the hundreds of games it inspired gave players a very small amount of freedom within narrow parameters. This marked a significant change from open-ended American RPGs, but it proved to be a perfect fit for the tastes of Japan's gamers.

Back in the U.S., however, computer RPG designers chafed at the limitations that defined their digital adventures. Most of these creators had cut their respective role-playing teeth on tabletop games, where play mechanics existed primarily as rules of order for stories that were bound in scope and direction only by the game master's imagination... or their willingness to entertain players’ unpredictable whims, anyway. Computers, especially the primitive home computers of the early ’80s, could only hint at the expansive chaos of a great tabletop session. With the likes of Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Ultima having laid down the preliminary outlines of PC role-playing, developers now set about the task of pushing the boundaries beyond those cramped basics.

Fittingly, the first meaningful attempt to bring greater depth to PC RPGs came from Ultima’s creator, Richard Garriott, by way of 1985's Ultima 4. Throughout the initial Ultima trilogy, Garriott experimented with a variety of narrative and mechanical concepts before settling down into a comfortable groove with Ultima 3: Exodus. Not only did Exodus lay down the foundation for the workings of future Ultima games, it also brought the series' story cycle to a self-contained stopping point. With his game design formula locked down, and freed of the need to continue some overarching narrative, Garriott took the opportunity to reconsider the very concept of the Ultima franchise. What could the series become? Was there room for more than combat and looting?

"My earliest games really were just about fighting monsters and collecting treasure," says Garriott. "There was a story, but it was pretty much go 'save the princess' or 'kill the big, evil wizard.' Ultima 3 was the first game I published myself through my own company, Origin, so it was the first time I started to get letters from people who had played the game. For the first time, I actually could see what was happening in the heads of people playing my games. I was shocked to see what those letters contained."

Garriott learned his fans hadn't found the meager amount of text contained in the early chapters of Ultima to be a disappointment. Instead, like an impressionist painting, the games’ terse dialogue boxes provided just enough information to help fire their imaginations. Fans happily filled in the details themselves, becoming their own de facto game masters. "I began to see people reading story meaning, even though there was no real story in those games," he says. "People began to read between the lines and think I was trying to tell them something meaningful, when I wasn't."

Equally enlightening were the anecdotes players shared about their behavior. "Some people liked to replay the game to be quite sinister," he recalls. "They'd go kill off all the villagers. They'd steal from every shop. They liked to kill my character, Lord British. I realized these people were playing to min-max their way to the top, not to play any story they perceived." To Garriott, these patterns of behaviors spoke to failings not of Ultima fans but rather shortcomings in his own game design and the conventions of the genre at large—flaws, he realized, that were incumbent upon him to correct.

"The bad guy was just sort of waiting there for them, not doing anything bad to be worthy of your wrath. You were the plague of locusts killing and sweeping up everything in order to become powerful and rich. I thought, 'There's something wrong with that.' I was expecting people to be heroic. But I'm the one who put in the feature that you could steal from the shops, right? They couldn't have killed the NPCs if I didn't allow it.

"So, I said, 'OK. I'm going to switch it up.' I started writing Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar. I deliberately said, 'I'm going to let people play the way they've been playing, but if you go through the town and kill everybody or you steal from that shop, that person's not going to want to help you in the future.' If you need [a key item] but you've been stealing from that shop, they'll go, 'I'd love to help the hero, but you are the most dishonest thieving scumbag I've ever met, so I'm not going to help you.'"

This represented a bold and unconventional change in the underlying fabric of role-playing games, and Garriott's friends and business partners worried that upending the genre would lead to Ultima's ruin. "Everyone told me, 'People aren't going to like it,'" he recalls. "And I said, 'You know, I still think it's the right thing to do. I think it'll actually make a better game.'

"I wasn't trying to take a moral stance—I literally thought it would make a better story experience if I did it this way. So despite the objections, we produced this game about ethical parables, and it was the first number-one best-selling game I released."

Shipping in September of 1985, Ultima 4 arrived at a critical point in time. The American video game market had begun to rebound from Atari's collapse several years prior; Nintendo would launch its wildly successful NES home console in the U.S. the following month, the vanguard of a revitalized industry. At the same time, however, parent groups around the U.S. had begun to fret about satanic imagery and themes in children's entertainment ranging from music to tabletop games. That trend didn't go unnoticed by Garriott, and Ultima 4 turned out to be effective counter-programming to the moral panic of the era: A computer role-playing game whose entire theme emphasized positive ethical choices.
"No question, that was an influence," Garriott agrees. "A lot of the people leveling that criticism were these often TV evangelists who were pillaging money from their followers while committing adultery. I would actually often pull those people, if not literally by name but by reputation, in as characters and vignettes within the scenarios that I'd build out. I said, 'OK, now let me show you how a lot of people who claim to be good really aren't, and a lot of people who appear to be rogue-ish are just surviving. Once you get them out of their need to survive, they're actually far more honorable than these peddlers of hypothetical sanctity.'"

Ultima 4 took a different approach to role-playing than anything that had come before it. While the game retained the look and mechanics of its predecessors and even scaled up its world to a size that eclipsed all three earlier Ultimas combined, killing wasn't the point. Players didn't set out to slaughter monsters or defeat some nebulous villain in a palace at the edge of the world. Rather, they sought to become the Avatar, the human embodiment of virtue. To achieve this, the hero's party doesn't set out to defeat bosses or loot treasure. Instead, they seek out tokens of enlightenment while upholding the tenets of the world’s Eight Virtues: Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Humility.

The abstract nature of this quest forced Garriott to rethink the player's relationship to the world. "We were very tightly focused on ethical behavior," he says. "I tried to fill the games with as many ethical parable tests as I could. When you do that, and especially when you don't tell somebody immediately whether they've passed or failed the test, it means they don't really know. If something looks like a test and it might be a test, they still act like it's a test."

Trials in video RPGs had typically amounted to major battles against hideous monsters and powerful warriors. The tests in Ultima 4, on the other hand, came down to the player's moment-to-moment choices throughout the quest. Did they give money to beggars, or did they steal from shopkeepers? Even the hero's behavior in mundane combat encounters factored into their pursuit of the Virtues.

"We'd do things like saying creatures like wolves and bears are not evil," say Garriott. "Now, hunting them for food, in a medieval setting, is acceptable. But killing them wantonly is wasteful, at the very least. So, if a wolf was attacking and you ran away from it or injured it to where it ran away from you, you got a little virtue point. On the other hand, if there was something that was evil, you'd get a bonus for defeating them. Conversely, if you ran away from something evil when that creature was weak but you were powerful, meaning you could have vanquished it but you fled in fear and didn't save whoever else might be targeted by that creature in the future, then you would take a hit."

Though Ultima 4 still didn't come close to offering the narrative flexibility of a tabletop role-playing session, it represented a critical step within video games to push the genre back toward its origins. Garriott's gamble paid off not only in terms of sales, but also in critical acclaim. More than three decades later, Ultima 4 continues to be regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative RPGs of all time, paving the way for works as varied as Mass Effect and Undertale.

It also helped prompt the creations of an equally significant take on the RPG from Interplay, the studio that had made its mark on the genre with The Bard's Tale. The Bard's Tale won over PC gaming fans upon its initial debut and continued to impress through two sequels. But at the same time, Brian Fargo (a longtime friend of The Bard's Tale designer Michael Cranford, whose role in the trilogy expanded over time to that of producer for the third chapter) found himself frustrated by the same narrative disconnect between tabletop and video RPGs that had nagged at Garriott. Fargo began planning his own take on the RPG, one rooted firmly in the open-ended storytelling traditions of pen-and-paper role-playing: Wasteland.

"With The Bard's Tale, we tried to make it such that the freeform game really came in terms of the party make-up," says Fargo. "We gave players different ways of surviving through the dungeons. We would find that your party, for example, looked wholly different than mine, or you were able to find an exploit because of your cleverness. You had that sense of playing the game your way."

"It wasn't until later on, in the case of Wasteland, where we started trying to open it up from a story perspective and letting people play it in different ways."

Again, both Garriott and Wizardry co-creator Robert Woodhead had found that players were happy to fill in the empty spaces of computer RPG stories on their own. The RPG, after all, was fundamentally a format powered by imagination. With tabletop role-playing sessions, players envisioned monsters and dungeons based on the raw story provided by game masters; computer RPGs simply flipped that relationship. They offered vivid visuals but required players to come up with their own stories and personalities for teams of characters who, functionally speaking, amounted to little more than their combat capabilities.

With Wasteland, Fargo aspired to ease that burden for players. This new RPG would feature an unprecedented amount of in-game text, enough to give players considerable freedom of choice. Wasteland's story would adapt to reflect the actions of players, reflecting the decisions they made throughout their journey.

"I'm sure somebody could name another," says Fargo, "but I feel like [Wasteland was] one of the first RPGs to have an open-world mood to it. You could go anywhere you wanted. You could try to take on areas that were not fit for your level yet, and if you got killed, that's OK. The ability to play a story your way, to me, was a radical shift."

Like his fellow computer RPG pioneers, Fargo cut his teeth on Dungeons & Dragons. His love for the genre, he says, "goes all the way back to my high school days—definitely First Edition. I still have my original monster manual and the dungeon master shield." Fargo credits the screen behind which game masters conducted their sessions as a valuable psychological tool that helped inspire his approach to game design. "You could roll the dice and not let them see what you were doing, or sometimes you'd roll the dice but nothing was happening, just to mess with their head. The thing that drew me to it was the social aspect. We tended to play more of a freeform game."

However, unlike Bard's Tale creator Michael Cranford, Fargo appreciated the precision of RPG rule books, seeing them as an essential part of the tabletop experience. "There were rules, which I loved—you were almost part-lawyer. It was like, 'I have my cone of silence.' 'Well, no. You're outside the 30-foot range.' We had all these sort of technicalities with the rules, trying to trip each other up, which was always kind of fun.

"But then there was the freeform side of it where the dungeon master would take latitude in telling the story or improvise, based upon us coming up with clever solutions. I really liked the storytelling aspect of it. You have your character, and you're living in that world, and there was a great risk factor to all the hours you put into the character."

More than any computer RPG before it, Wasteland embraced both the rules of the genre while trying to extrapolate them into interesting, dynamic story events. Fargo had plenty of experience designing and programming games by that point, but he realized early on that his vision for Wasteland was far too ambitious for a single person to handle.

"That first game took us four years to make," he says. "Wasteland took a long time, and the way it was done was very technically challenging. Each square you stepped on basically would execute a small program. Did they use the rope here? Did they talk there? Have they been here before with this thing? Going square-by-square and looking at it and what kind of dice roll would be put up against it was extremely time-consuming. But it was the cascade of effects of things that you did that made it so interesting."

In Fargo's estimation, Wasteland's complexity marked a turning point. "We were moving away from one-person [projects]. The Bard's Tale was more or less one person, as was Dr. J Vs. Larry Bird, and Archon, and M.U.L.E. We were starting to move away from that, and Wasteland was, for me, the complete pivot of bringing in an entire team of people and attacking this in a different way."

This was, in effect, a natural extension of the approach that had emerged over the course of The Bard's Tale trilogy. "The Bard's Tale III had been a bigger effort in terms of number of people that were required already," Fargo says. "My role started shifting. I became a producer." As such, he says, one of his key tasks was to ask, "'What are the sensibilities we want to hit?' I would bring in like, Michael Stackpole, to talk about the touch points that we want to hit. We brought in a lot of different writers [for Wasteland], so you had Mike, Liz [Danforth], and the others, each bringing a very unique style to their areas. You got a different diversity than you would have with a single writer.

"I don't know anybody else that was doing that in the same scope that we were. I wouldn't pretend to know everything behind the scenes of what was going on, but I brought in a bunch of professional writers. It tended to be in those early days that we [programmers] would just write our own stuff. If there was dialogue, we would just do our best. But it turns out writers are best when they're writing, and musicians are best doing music. So different voices and real writers were able to help punch it up. Back then, everything was text, so what you read had to be interesting, and they really excelled at that."

Ultimately, Interplay's ambitions for Wasteland proved to be somewhat more than the tech of the era could support. The entire game had to fit onto diskettes, which for most users in 1987 meant single-sided disks with a capacity of 360KB. Wasteland's extensive branching text trees alone could easily have filled that space without even accounting for engine code and graphics. So, Interplay cheated by shipping the game with a massive companion book that contained extensive information on the world along with story vignettes—making it a sort of auxiliary text storage device that also handily worked to discourage piracy. Wizardry's windowed combat, but neither the locales nor their inhabitants resembled anything from those other RPGs. Players could sneak into military compounds, roll the dice in what remained of Las Vegas, or fight punks over the rights to make jukebox selections in a dive bar.

In some senses, Wasteland feels like a reaction to Ultima 4. Rather than coax players onto a predetermined ethical pathway, Interplay's writers left the numerous possible outcomes of its scenarios open to interpretation. "We don't like to put morality on it," Fargo says. "We prefer to have a cause and effect that makes sense. We don't want want you to play the game and say, 'OK, I've killed all those people, so now I can't win the game. [We prefer to] make you live with the effects, but we don't want to make the game unwinnable because of what you chose to do."

As with Ultima 4, the decision to field questions of ethics and morality made Wasteland a richer, more satisfying game experience. However, the two games differed wildly in both tone and style, which spoke to the burgeoning maturation of the genre. Both raised questions about the nature of right and wrong, but only Garriott's story provided definitions. Wasteland left things more ambiguous, forcing players to once again use their imaginations to fill in the details.

"Sometimes when people talk about morality, it tends to be more black or white," says Fargo. "You’re either the good guy or the bad guy. But we tried to put you in situations where there was no clear decision about whether you were a good or bad guy, or else we created unintended consequences.

"We also tried to create content that you wouldn't see if you chose a certain path. It was a combination of a lot of little things that gave it a different vibe. If something felt immature, or sophomoric, or stupid, I avoided that, but I always encouraged the writers to put players into situations where they'd really be torn. That's the beauty of RPGs—you can actually feel bad about what you're doing. We show you this great reward you could get at, this fantastic weapon that's going to make your life so much easier. But you have to do something really shitty to get it.

"Watching people agonize over that decision is beautiful, and that's what makes a role-playing game great. 'I really want it, but I don't want to have to kill these innocent people.' Well, they're not real people. But in your mind, they are at that time. If we've done a good job, you're always worried about the repercussions of what you've done."

Although Wasteland amounted to a modest commercial success compared to mega-hits like The Bard's Tale and Ultima 4, it's nevertheless proven highly influential. A decade later, Interplay would produce Fallout—essentially Wasteland 2 in all but name (said name was bogged down in rights issues). Fargo, who now runs recent Microsoft acquisition InXile Entertainment, successfully crowdfunded a proper Wasteland sequel several years ago and currently is well into development on a third entry in the series. Beyond Fargo's own work, Wasteland's trademark branching, moral-based story design has been echoed in series like Baldur's Gate, Shin Megami Tensei, Tactics Ogre, and more.

It's entirely possible the narrative design Wasteland pioneered three decades ago will never truly be superseded, at least not in single-player RPGs. Where dungeon and inventory content can be automatically generated easily enough, effective storytelling requires a human touch. (One need look no further than the lackluster and repetitive nature of the procedural quests in Bethesda's Skyrim to see this fact in action.) As in tabletop gaming, the dynamics of social interaction in computer RPGs are most effectively provided by other people. Still, Wasteland and Ultima 4 both demonstrated that RPGs could be about something more than laying waste to ogres and goblins—or that, at the very least, they could bring some actual meaning to those acts of violence.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014
Jeremy Parish is completely obsessed with Japanese video games and basically knows nothing whatsoever about computer games, so it's no surprise he only gets excited about RPGs when talking about something so absolutely childish and simple as Dragon Quest 1.

History of RPGs according to Japanese console obsessives like this guy:
- According to Wikipedia, such classic RPGs as the "Ultimate" series from the King of England, the "Wizardry" games (lol what are these ATARI GRAPHICS XDXD), and "Brad's Tale" were released, but the graphics are horrible and you need to memorize like 20 commands just to do anything, so no one played them (except for the NES ports, which are a million times better)
- OMFG JAPAN DID IT AGAIN!!!! XDXDXD THOSE GENIUSES SAVED THE RPG INDUSTRY JUST LIKE THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY WITH MY PRECIOUS NINTENDO
- Westerners made a valiant attempt to compete with nerd classics like Bladders Gate, Fallout 3, and Planetscape Tournament, but all was for naught
- After revolutionizing RPGs, Japanese megageniuses continued to release Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Pokemon games every year for a million years

This narrative comes more and more apparent. Yes, an entry about roguelikes in a series about the history of RPGs should be centered around Mystery Dungeon series, Japan's mainstream version of it: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/making-dragon-quest-of-roguelikes-how-niche-pc-rpg-genre-mainstream
 

Swigen

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History of RPGs?

In the beginning there was Final Fantasy 7, and it was good.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/making-dragon-quest-of-roguelikes-how-niche-pc-rpg-genre-mainstream

Roguelikes: How a Niche PC RPG Genre Went Mainstream
HISTORY OF RPGS | Mystery Dungeon tackled the daunting task of making roguelikes friendly.

This is the seventh entry in an ongoing series by Retronauts co-host and Greenlit Content senior creative director Jeremy Parish exploring the evolution of the role-playing genre, featuring insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.

Designing computer and console role-playing games has always been an imperfect art: The translation of a fundamentally social, human experience into one driven by computers. Tabletop RPGs use systems-based rules to dictate many aspects of a play session, so naturally the orderly nature of computers has railroaded the general definition of computer RPGs in a very specific direction. According to the collective consensus, computer and console RPGs should be story-driven adventures built around numeric, experience-based character growth. The freewheeling, improvisational nature of a memorable Dungeons & Dragons campaign led by a game master with a flair for narrative has been replaced in video games by predetermined storylines with fixed outcomes and, at best, a few branching decision trees that give the player a small amount of agency within those rigid boundaries.

This is unlikely to change significantly until some faraway day when machine learning reaches a point that allows computers to spin a convincing yarn all on their own. But there is one video RPG subgenre that does manage to capture the anything-goes, high-stakes unpredictability of a lively tabletop session: roguelikes. While light on actual narrative, these games are designed with the understanding that dynamic interactions and complex design alone can result in their own share of memorable stories.

The Beginning of Roguelikes
Roguelikes rely on a combination of random procedural generation and complex interlocking systems to provide players with an unpredictable take on the RPG. Roguelikes typically incorporate only a cursory storyline, emphasizing exploration and combat survival to a degree that eclipses even the classic first-person dungeon crawler. They operate according to strict rules, but the sheer breadth of items, weapons, and enemies that can appear during combat always keep players on their toes. Nearly every element the player encounters possesses the potential to interact with the world and everything else it contains—and while the resulting effects obey logical rules, the sheer number of possible interactions available within these rules can make it difficult for all but the most seasoned players to predict the full range of outcomes their actions might have. The fact that the dungeon and everything in it is generated afresh for each new session means no two adventures can ever play out the same way.


The genre name "roguelikes" comes from a little known game called Rogue. | MobyGames

The roguelike got its proper beginning in the early ’80s thanks to two UC Santa Cruz students named Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy who created a deceptively simple-looking game called Rogue. The genre's roots actually stretch back even further, though; like Wizardry, Rogue had a fair few antecedents on the PLATO platform, the first of these appearing as early as 1975. However, unlike the ur-roguelikes of the PLATO ecosystem, Rogue wasn't limited to a closed, academic network. On the contrary, it saw a number of commercial releases throughout the ’80s. These versions failed to make an impression on the market, though, ultimately earning only a small number of devoted fans who would go on to create their own interpretations of Rogue's principles—hence "roguelikes"—but otherwise disappearing quietly from the mainstream gaming world as little more than a half-remembered blip in history.

No, the roguelike didn't enjoy anything approaching mainstream success until the creators of Dragon Quest at Chunsoft decided to do for that genre what they had already done for the traditional computer RPG: turn it into an approachable, console-friendly format that any gamer could enjoy. Both Rogue and its descendants—games like NetHack, Moira, Angband, and their own offshoots—typically took the form of abstract, frequently bewildering games. They used simple ASCII text for "graphics," with alphanumeric symbols representing in-game objects and characters. Despite being built around combat that amounted to bumping into a foe until it died, they also included so many commands and options that players needed to make use of an entire computer keyboard for shortcuts. Roguelikes were as unforgiving as they were difficult, with sessions spanning months potentially ending in a single turn due to bad luck... at which point all the player's progress was erased and they had to start back at the beginning of the game with an all-new character lacking even a sword to their name.

In fact, Rogue was so oblique that Chunsoft (now Spike Chunsoft) president and former Dragon Quest programmer Koichi Nakamura initially questioned the wisdom of trying to adapt it to consoles.

"We had just made [Super NES visual novel] Otogirisou, and a couple members of the team were really into the original Rogue. I hadn't played at the time, but those team members were like, 'Nakamura, we need to make Rogue—our own version of Rogue.' So I said, 'OK, let me see what this game's all about.'

"When you first start playing, it's utter nonsense,” he says. “You're an @ symbol moving around, fighting As and Bs and the like, the items are all question marks, and the levels are made up of hashtags and things like that. You're just wandering around like, 'What's going on? I don't get this. I don't know what's fun.'"

The title screen for the original Rogue. | MobyGames

Eventually, though, Nakamura says he warmed to the game despite its opaque design, and he began to envision how this potential "Dragon Quest of roguelikes" could take shape. "I spent an entire 10-day Golden Week holiday playing Rogue, trying to figure out what is interesting about this game system, and it started to click over time. I realized if, let's say, I have two orange unidentified items and I use one and it's a potion of healing. Then I know the other orange item is the same thing. It becomes a matter of learning what the different items do, how those relate to the environment, and what the enemies are doing.

"For example, there's an item that halves the enemy's speed so I can attack twice for every time the enemy attacks once. I thought, 'I guess this is useful, but so what?' Then I realized I can hit, then move away, and then the enemy moves towards me... I'm invincible, right? If you have extra actions, it means you can dodge the enemy's attacks and hit them without them hitting you back. At that point, everything fell into place and I realized why the system was so intriguing. So we started thinking about: ‘How can we do this in our own way?’"

Making the "Dragon Quest of Roguelikes"
Chunsoft wasn't the first developer to have come up with the notion of a console adaptation of Rogue. Sega had made its own attempt to bring the roguelike to its Genesis (also known as Mega Drive) console in 1990 with a game called Fatal Labyrinth. A simplistic take on the genre, Fatal Labyrinth's format appears to have been a pragmatic choice by Sega to produce a role-playing title for their Japanese Meganet distribution service. As a downloadable game distributed in the days before broadband and expansive rewritable memory options, Fatal Labyrinth's procedural design and lack of any real built-in narrative allowed the game to offer expansive play value despite being contained in a tiny amount of memory space; this in turn reflects Rogue’s own design, which lacked graphics simply because it was created for play on shared text-only terminals. However, both Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal (its 8-bit downconversion for Master System and Game Gear) lacked the depth of a proper computer roguelike and failed to make much of an impression on gamers.

Nakamura, on the other hand, wanted to capture the substance of true roguelikes for consoles in a way Fatal Labyrinth had failed to achieve. He and his team decided to take a literal approach to “doing for roguelikes what Dragon Quest had done for RPGs” by making his roguelike an actual spinoff of the Dragon Quest series. Although Chunsoft was wrapping work on the fifth Dragon Quest chapter around this time, series lead Yuji Horii recommended they look back to the series' final 8-bit entry for inspiration: Dragon Quest 4.

The end result was a game whose protagonist was as unlikely as the prospect of transforming a genre geared toward hardcore PC gaming fanatics into something true to the genre while simultaneously being accessible to a young, casual console audience. Called Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon (Torneko's Big Adventure: The Dungeon of Mystery), Chunsoft's interpretation of the roguelike retained key genre elements like item identification, procedural dungeon generation and item placement, and permanent character "death." But it starred one of Dragon Quest 4's most charismatic side characters, a portly middle-aged merchant whose efforts to support his family by running a humble weapons shop caused him to become swept up into a grand quest to save humanity.

"I figured that if we were to bring a roguelike to a console, we'd kind have to take a similar method to [our approach with Dragon Quest] by lowering the barriers of entry to get people interested in the game." says Nakamura. "There's a lot to take in at first, and if people get overwhelmed, they're not going to want to continue. I wanted to give the players a familiar setting, and the Dragon Quest setting was great for that because people were already familiar with the monsters and the items. So even if they didn't know how the game system works, they could kind of guess, you know? This monster will probably move this way. This item will probably have that kind of effect. So it's easier for them to get in and learn the nuts and bolts of the system from there.


Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon stars a portly middle-aged merchant, rather than a dashing hero. | MobyGames

"I was able to talk to Horii and ask him, 'Hey, I want to make a roguelike. Can I use Dragon Quest as the framing device?' He said, 'Oh, yeah—roguelikes seem pretty interesting. Go ahead with it.' However, his advice was that we shouldn't go with a hero-like character. Heroes have this, so to say, sense of adventure. They have this grand mission they're supposed to be carrying out. If you're a guy slogging through a dungeon, that doesn't really fit into your typical hero archetype. But on the other hand, Torneko—he's a merchant, so it would make sense for him to go through these dungeons to gather up items and weapons and things like that for use later on."

By luck, Torneko's entire storyline dovetailed neatly with the concept of a roguelike. His chapter in Dragon Quest 4 (a game divided into multiple standalone scenarios highlighting its various party members) had seen him delving into dungeons as he sought out rare weapons to stock at his shop. His solo roguelike outing simply expanded on this, pitting him against familiar monsters and gathering what resources he could as he descended through challenging, procedurally generated caverns toward his objective.

Of course, being a Dragon Quest spinoff, the concept of permadeath had to be altered somewhat; one of that series' core innovations from the very beginning had been not to punish failure with a decisive game over screen. So Torneko doesn't die when he succumbs to enemies in the Dungeon of Mystery, but losing to the increasingly powerful creatures within does cause him to revert to level one as the dungeon generates an all-new layout for the player’s next run. Also, unlike a "true" PC roguelike, Torneko no Daibouken also introduced some more permanent elements—another suggestion by Horii to help ease casual players into a famously punishing genre.

"Permadeath is a big thing in roguelikes," says Nakamura. "The idea of adding shops to Torneko to give the player a sense of progression was actually proposed by Horii. In Dragon Quest, when you die, you don't lose your equipment and experience. You just lose half your gold. So he figured that, you know, if people are coming over to Mystery Dungeon from Dragon Quest, they're not going to stick around if they lose everything when they die. So we added a way to help a player out. Give the player some sort of a tangible reward for the amount of time they put into it—that was our way of thinking."

The Sensation of Mystery Dungeon
While Torneko no Daibouken didn't sell the millions of units typical to a core Dragon Quest title, it established Fushigi no Dungeon (eventually standardized as "Mystery Dungeon" in the U.S.) as a vital and vibrant franchise in its own right. Torneko has appeared in several sequels, as has Dragon Quest 8's rowdy thief Yangus. Chunsoft has also licensed out the Mystery Dungeon brand to create tie-ins with a number of other RPG franchises ranging from Pokemon to Final Fantasy; the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games easily stand as the best-selling roguelikes of all time, with sales for each release reaching into the millions.

Ultimately, though, Chunsoft reserves its best Mystery Dungeon ideas for games starring the character they created for the second Mystery Dungeon title: Shiren the Wanderer, a ronin who travels through medieval Japan with his companion, a ferret named Koppa. "Torneko opened the doors to roguelikes for a whole new audience," says Nakamura. "It let people get acclimated to what a roguelike game system was. Because we had the familiar Dragon Quest setting, they could just focus on the game mechanics.

"The issue is that there are certain limitations built into the Dragon Quest world. In NetHack, you can go around and be a thief and steal things from people, but you wouldn't really want one of your Dragon Quest heroes to act like such a scoundrel. There are also some systems that we wanted to include that we couldn't do with the Dragon Quest setting. For example, Shiren has a 'meat' system where if you defeat an enemy, you can eat its meat and learn new skills. You can set your own traps, and things like that. Those were things that we thought would be cool but didn't fit into the Dragon Quest framework. Shiren was our way to kind of move away from that and do our own thing."

Chunsoft has only created about half a dozen unique Shiren titles and spinoffs through the years, but the depth and creativity of those games gives them remarkable longevity. Being a wholly original character, Shiren affords Chunsoft's designers a degree of freedom they can't explore with licensed properties. As a result, the Shiren games are probably the least-known entries in the Mystery Dungeon line, but they're unquestionably the richest and most creative.

Die-hard roguelike enthusiasts admittedly tend to regard the Mystery Dungeon games as lesser variants of the genre. The franchise fails to meet many of the elements defined in the Berlin Interpretation, the most widely accepted definition of the genre. Even Shiren doesn't meet all the high-value criteria, thanks to its lack of permadeath: Yes, Shiren has to start over from the beginning when you collapse in a dungeon, but the games offer ways to circumvent the loss of all his gear. You can hide equipment in special protective pots or store it in warehouses that retain persistence across journeys. It's even possible to upgrade weapons across multiple sessions so that Shiren can start a new run wielding stupendously powerful gear.

For his part, Nakamura doesn't seem especially concerned about meeting some sort of external genre criteria with Mystery Dungeon. The most important thing, he says, is that the games uphold the spirit of the roguelike format while remaining true to the team's vision. "I don't know if we've really sat down and said, 'What absolutely constitutes a roguelike?'" he admits, adding, "I do have my own theories about things that I think a roguelike should be. Notably, it should be something that you can play multiple times, and it should play differently each time. You don't know what will happen until you start the run.

"It's important to have consistent rules, and the items and equipment you have should follow these rules. There should be unexpected things you can do with items, within the rule system, but items should never break the system. Even if they do unexpected things, they should obey some kind of consistent logic. The way that humans react to [probability percentage and damage indicator] numbers they see on-screen versus the results they actually get is quite interesting, and it's one of the things that we're always working on underneath the hood. There's a lot of psychology behind the numbers.

The dynamism of Mystery Dungeon can surprise even its creators, Nakamura admits. He recalls a early playthrough in which he unwittingly discarded a container of valuable goods by attempting to break it against a wall while wearing a bracelet that caused projectiles to pierce obstacles. While these bracelets can come in handy during combat, allowing a thrown weapon to strike multiple foes in a line, they also cause items to pass through other barriers. Nakamura watched in horror as his precious loot sailed through the wall and off the edge of the screen.


Mystery Dungeon as a series has grown far beyond just Shiren. | MobyGames

"You know,” he says, “I created the game, and I knew this was supposed to happen... but the first time it happened to me, I was like, 'What the hell? The game bugged out on me!' So I talked to the programmer, and he said, 'No, no, no. That's actually the way it's supposed to work because, you know, the ring makes things go through objects.' Those are the kinds of surprises that I like to see in roguelikes."

Perhaps the greatest testament to Shiren's quality is how influential it's been on other developers, or at least how many other developers have settled upon similar mechanics and concepts to those found in Mystery Dungeon. Roguelike elements began to work their way into other mainstream games most visibly with Blizzard's Diablo in 1997, and when Derek Yu's Spelunky arrived more than a decade later it caused people to reconsider what "roguelike" actually means. The likes of Spelunky and Rogue Legacy are barely recognizable as offshoots of Toy and Wichman's venerable dumb-terminal creation, but they nevertheless apply Rogue's philosophy to unrelated genres in fresh and clever ways.

Features like the permanent shortcuts players can unlock as they advance through Spelunky's caverns and the carried-over stats of Rogue Legacy are ideas that have their roots in Mystery Dungeon’s warehouse and long-term weapon-crafting. The classic ASCII-based roguelike format will never become a widespread hit, but its mechanics—filtered through the prism of Chunsoft's pioneering work—have become commonplace, especially in the lively and innovative indie gaming space.

Meanwhile, Chunsoft continues to explore new ground with the Mystery Dungeon titles. The most recent release in the series, Etrian Odyssey crossover Etrian Mystery Dungeon 2, launched in Japan in 2017. While Shiren himself hasn't gone on a new adventure since Shiren the Wanderer 5 in 2010 (2015's Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate was a remake of Shiren 5), Nakamura sees room for further sequels—provided the team can continue thinking up new innovations like Shiren 5's game-changing day and night system.

"Even before we hit Shiren 5, I figured we had reached the ultimate form of the roguelike," says Nakamura. "Talking to the development team, I asked, 'Where can we go from here, guys? We made Shiren 4. I think it's pretty much perfect.' The team was like, 'No, no, no. We can do more.' And the result of that was Shiren 5.

"I think there are still places the roguelike can go, and it all depends on what kind of options new technology brings us. For example, Torneko didn't have any kind of online connectivity, but on the DS Shiren games, there's online connectivity. If you die in a dungeon, you can have a buddy come save you. So it introduced this new element where even though it's a single-player game, you can still interact with other players. If there's some new technological advancement that we can incorporate into the game, that will open up new possibilities for the roguelike. The Shiren team is still very passionate about the series, so if there's ever an opportunity, I'm sure they'll be up to the task."
 

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