THE CRPG Addict Looks At The Earliest CRPGs
The CRPG Addict, taking a break from what is shaping up to be a frustrating slog through Wizardry V, has decided to dabble in a bit of digital archaeology and look at the history of the earliest CRPGs.
He may even have zeroed in on what might be the oldest surviving CRPG:
In Dungeons and Desktops (2008), Matt Barton calls the 1970s the “Dark Age” of CRPGs, but he does his best to sort through some of the gloom. His account generally matches, but in a few notable cases conflicts, with the recollections of Dirk Pellett, an early CRPG contributor who wrote a history of early CRPGs in an introduction to dnd on Cyber1’s PLATO mainframe. Pellett’s history, unfortunately not accessible from the Internet, appeared in 2010.
Both trace the first CRPGs to 1974, almost immediately after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Pellett gives the “first” CRPG as a file called “m119h,” which was deleted soon after its creation by someone on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since the mainframe was intended for “serious academic study and coursework,” administrators were quick to delete game programs, and one suspects that there were any number of CRPGs created and deleted while in various stages of development during this era.
The earliest surviving CRPG seems to be a 1974 or 1975 game called The Dungeon by Reginald “Rusty” Rutherford, who was studying in Urbana. He titled the file “pedit5” (which some sources give as the name of the game) to keep it from being deleted as an obvious game. This didn’t save it, but somehow the source code got preserved, and it’s available on Cyber1 now.
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The game uses an iconographic perspective with surprisingly good icons.
The Addict looks at a few other titles which followed in the wake of dnd and The Dungeon, and includes a few screenshots of some of these. His conclusions are worth highlighting:
My quick review of these games seems to support a couple of conclusions. First of all, the earliest CRPGs were quickly divided into the top-down/iconographic branch and the first-person branch. The former started with The Dungeon and/or dnd and gave rise to the family of difficult dungeon-crawls filled with random encounters that we saw in Telengard, Caverns of Zoarre, CaveQuest, and DND. Roguelikes also seem to have developed from this branch.
The second branch, starting with Oubliette, spawned (through adaptation or plagiarism) Wizardry and, from there, Might & Magic. Richard Garriott, in the meantime, synthesized the two branches in the Ultima series (starting with Akalabeth) by mixing iconographic outdoor exploration with first-person dungeon exploration.
And unless I am grossly mistaken, it was the Ultima series which served as a key inspiration (though not the sole inspiration) for JRPGs in the Final Fantasy mold.
Anyhow, it looks like the Addict took advantage of his access to the Cyber1 archives to actually give The Dungeon a playthrough, so be sure to check out his write-up about it!
Basically yeah. To be more precise, Ultima was one of the main inspiration of Dragon Quest, the first JRPG. Its creator Yuji Hori was a huge fans of these early computer Role Playing Games, and Dragon Quest in a nutshell was basically Ultima III mixed with the first person combat of Wizardry games.
And Final Fantasy was off course a rip-off Dragon Quest so it really does traces back to Ultima.
It’s also funny in a way, because while Western CRPGs have evolved quite a bit from this basic concept, there are still a lot JRPG to this day who still follow this core principles of an Ultima III-ish kind of gameplay with overland map, separate (mostly) turn based combat and one liners NPCs.
…confirming the stereotype of Japanese as highly intelligent yet fundamentally non-innovative. Oh my.
Japanese tends to be very conservative in their gaming habits indeed… (Altough to be fair I’d argue it’s true about a lot fans everywhere) For instance when Dragon Quest IX was annouced, they planned a new form of real time battle system. This lead to such an outcry that Yuji Hori caved and went back to a more traditionnal approach 😛
That being said it’d be unfair to say there are no innovations, a lot of JRPGs follow a similar core concept/gameplay, but still there can be many differences and some very great ideas none the less. In essence I see nothing wrong with the whole overland map, turn based concept – I actually wouldn’t mind to see some western developpers trying a modern take on this approach but well… it seems now it’s either the cinematic RPG approach or the big sandbox approach.
I think it comes down to, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I know I got my fill of random turn based battle a LOOONG time ago. Well, I guess I don’t really -like- any combat. It’s just repetition. You find a strategy that works well on a certain enemy(or most enemies as it usually turns out) and you do it over and over and over.
But anyway, talk about innovation. Cyberdoll, for sega saturn, was a jrpg that had a turn based combat where you could target different areas of the body. This game being released a year before fallout 1.
I’m not sure which rpg was first with area targeting turn based combat. Off the top of my head, fallout 1 was the first.
Also, remember ff6 with the bar that filled up? That’s the earliest rpg off the top of my head to do that.
They also mass produced the first gas/electric car! I’m sure they’ve innovated a few things.
Us Anglo-Saxons are no match for their superior intellect and magic-like martial art abilities.
I think the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it attitude” is common to a lot of people, and especially fans and gamer even in the west. When you have a game or series that try a different direction, it rarely goes well with fans – we have tons of exemple of it. But try different stuff is wat allows innovations to come, Ultima would not have been such a great series if Origin and Garriott didn’t had this kind of “Well it’s not broke but let’s fix it anyway” attitude.
OTOH there were many Ultima fans who would have been happy with just having the same kind of game over and over. This was true about older fans, but even moreso after Ultima VII I think.
I’m pretty sure there were games that allowed to target specific part before Fallout… but perhaps not RPGs, I’m not quite sure.
Yeah that’s that notably one of the worst aspect in JRPGs – all those goddamn random battle you get over and over and over that turns you crazy. There’s usually a point when I can’t stand it anymore and I just finish ’em for the plot. But then I don’t play that many modern RPGs anymore – I generally stick to those which are very cinematic.
That would be Final Fantasy IV actually. The bar that filled up is the ATB (Active Time Battle) system which has been part of most Final Fantasy games since then (indeed even FFXIII uses a variaton of the ATB). The first game that used it was FF4, they’ve refined it over time but almost always kept it except for FFX (which was fully turn based) and FFXII (which was combat sandwish crap). It’s a pretty cool system though, a good way to make a turn based combat a tad more fast paced.
Hah that screenshot of The Dungeon gave me a laugh.. I was born 23 days after the version in that screenshot was released..