The Big Bang for computer roleplaying games occurs in 1974 with the release of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game. Almost immediately, wherever computers exist, coders started writing computer roleplaying games.
The game pictured below is Akalabeth, one of best Apple II games, written at the end of the decade by Richard Garriott. It’s an early dungeon crawler, with simple combat, a world map and a quest inviting the player to hunt down and defeat a series of monsters.
This site has a section listing RPGs released by date over here.
However if you go back to the games earlier in the decade: things get weird.
That any CRPG existed in the 70s comes as a surprise. Computers are rare and access to them is limited.
So what were the first CRPGS? The earliest games all come from Illinois, developed on a platform called PLATO. PLATO was a educational programming platform and proto-internet all in one. Here the first RPGs were created in secret. Initially games were illegal software, secretly uploaded and constantly deleted by system administrators. To survive the programs need to camouflage themselves like Pedit5 or as with later games, gain the protection of a system admin.PLATO was for education not role-playing. Machine memory and time was expensive and allocated to departments for serious business™. That’s why the very first CRPG, in 1975, was called pedit5 because it was hidden in the Population and Energy Group’s computer space (hence the PE prefix).
CRPGs beginning life as parasitic programs is weird but that wasn’t where the weirdness ended for these early RPGs…
Timeline and the World of 70s America
Before we dive into the early games, let’s set the stage. In the early 70s, home computers didn’t exist. Computers were giant machines tucked away in special rooms, accessible to only a few. A small number of programmers used remote terminals to connect to mainframes at universities, research centers, or military bases. Computing wasn’t mainstream, and hardware varied widely. Only by the decade’s end did the first home computers reach a small group of early adopters.
CRPGs were born after the release of Dungeon and Dragons in ‘74 and started to take off in popularity from there.
- 1971 Chainmail wargame published (the precursor to D&D)
- 1972 C invented but not widely used in the games of the era.
- 1972 PLATO IV introduced; a graphical, networked system at the University of Illinois.
- 1974 Dungeons and Dragons tabletop roleplaying game released.
- 1975 Pedit5 the first CRPG is released on the PLATO system.
- 1977 Apple II released.
- 1978 Apple II Reference manual released. Containing Dragon Maze source code
- 1978 Beneath Apple Manor released, the first commercial CRPG*.
- 1979 Akalabeth was released, the most advanced home computer RPG of the decade.
Dragon Maze was a sample program that generated random mazes. This example served as a basis for many CRPGs and became a starting point for more advanced procedural systems.
CRPGs aren’t restricted to fantasy or scifi settings but that’s the context they’re coming from in the 70’s, so those are the works I think are work have a brief look at.
*Beneath Apple Manor is the first compiled commercial RPG, sharing much in common with the later, more famous Rogue.
Scifi and Fantasy Movies of 1970s
Fantasy and sci-fi films in the 70s that captured the public’s imagination included:
- Star Wars (1977)
- Solaris (1972)
- Alien (1979)
- Westworld (1973)
- The Omega Man (1971)
These movies came out against the backdrop of the space race. The first moon landing was in 1969, and Gene Cernan, in 1972, was the last man of the millennium to walk on the moon. Space was in the air. High-fantasy, swords-and-sorcery films didn’t take off until the 1980s.
Scifi and Fantasy Books of the 1970s
Tolkien’s books arrived in America in the 60s and quickly gained a cult following on University campuses in every state and in the 70s they were seeing a resurgence in popularity.
Lord of Rings was popular among many demographics not just the nascent computer-geeks but counter culture hippies as well. There was a taste for both fantasy and sci-fi. Starwars came out towards the end of the decade and Star Trek was a household name since the mid-60s. Popular authors included: Roger Zelazny Princes in Amber Series, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Brooks, Michael Moorcock, Stephen R. Donaldson and so on. There were also magazines like Heavy Metal and Analog that included fantasy and scifi stories and art. This heady mix of fantasy fed into both the CRPGs being written but also into Dungeon and Dragons and it’s expansions. For example some of monsters in Oubliette come from Stephen R. Donaldson’s book including the Uruk-hai.
It’s also worth noting what doesn’t exist:
- Pac-Man doesn’t exist, arcades had pinball machines not videogames,
- There are no home consoles
- No mobile phones
- Most people do not have a home computer
- HTML and the world wide web do not exist
- No graphical user interface systems and so on.
- While the mouse had been invented, home computers didn’t yet use one.
- Color TV was rare.
This list hammers home how insanely ahead of it’s time the PLATO system was with it’s message boards, multiplayer games, highscore boards and online education courses.
Gaming Platforms
CRPGs began on PLATO, a multimedia computing system and early internet system that was ahead of its time, developed at the University of Illinois. With the release of PLATO IV, thousands of terminals supported 512 x 512 pixel displays. However, these displays could show only a single color: orange, due to the gas used in the screen manufacturing process.
PLATO was built as an experiment in computer aided teaching but this also provided a system where programmers could write games. After being initially forbidden games became seen as an excellent way to test the system. A number of games because legitimized and were played extensively after hours by students and staff at the Universities and colleges where PLATO was available.
Due to the nature of the platform, games on PLATO had graphics and multiplayer, far ahead of their time.
As innovative as PLATO was, it was also relatively cloistered, only a few thousand terminals existed and you had to have some affiliation with an institution to get access. The Apple II had a much greater reach; by the end of 1979 nearly 100,000 Apple IIs had been sold and it was Apple II that would carry the torch for RPG development into the 80s.
The graph shows that while PLATO dominated the decade, home computers like Commodore, Apple, and TRS-80 began to gain a toehold toward the end. With the rise of home computers, products originally born only from passion started to become commercialized.
The First CRPG Games
In total, in the 70s, there at least 21 CRPGs released. The early days are not perfectly recorded so there are “lost” games, that people remember but the source code nor any screenshots are available. This was a extremely industrious and innovate time. (Please let me know of any I missed and make me remake all these graphs :D)
All PLATO games used it’s language TUTOR. Towards the end of the decade home computers became available, and hobbyists began creating the first games for them. Home computer games mostly used some dialect of the BASIC programming language. The outlier here is Fortran and this is Daniel Lawrence’s DND for the DEC RSTS/E / PDP-11 mainframe computers.
The first CRPG was The Dungeon by Rusty Rutherford, a single-player game (or “solitaire,” as they called such games then) featuring crude line graphics that implemented a Dungeons and Dragons-style dungeon crawl. This was the game hidden away on PLATO under the name pedit5. Presented from a top-down view, the goal was to escape the dungeon with a certain score. It included all the basics: dungeon exploration, a leveling system, a combat system, a magic system, varied enemies, and permadeath. The levels were pre-authored, meaning there was no random dungeon generation; as you replayed the game, you’d learn the layout. You can see a gameplay screenshot of The Dungeon below:
Later that year DND came out and this was very similar to Pedit5 but added a boss monster to defeat. It was also developed semi-remotely. Dirk Pellet worked with Ray Wood and Gary Whisenhunt without ever meeting them. This was in the 70s, they used the PLATO system to communicate and develop the game. The other thing to note about this games is they were constantly updated with adjustments and new features - which makes dating innovations quite hard!
Daniel Lawrence, in 1976, released a similar game also called DND on the PDP-11 so games were starting to spread out from the PLATO ecosystem a little.
When Things Get Weird Again
Moria came out on PLATO in 1975. This was a graphical multiplayer RPG. Moria was played first person, although the view was around the size of a postage stamp. Players could band together in parties, go on adventures and fight monsters. Here’s a screenshot of combat in the game:
PLATO games were mostly played in university computer labs late at night, allowing players to see their fellow gamers. Additionally, there was often an audience of non-playing onlookers offering advice. Multiplayer RPGs gained significant popularity, with people playing obsessively—sometimes to the point of failing their classes.
Duncombe [one of the author’s of Moria] would eventually flunk out of Iowa state. He was not the first, and was by no means the last, PLATO-addicted college student to do so.
- The Friendly Orange Glow, Brian Dear
This was happening before most people even had a home computer, never mind access to a network or the internet.
The next big hit after Moria was Oubliette which directly inspired the later Wizardry series of games. As more RPGs were released they became more and more sophisticated having many features that would be seen far later with the take-off of MMORPGs.
Other notables RPGs include Beneath Apple Manor for the Apple II which had many features of a roguelike before Rogue was ever written! Including random dungeons. It was also one of first commercial RPGs, retailing for $14.95. Just before the decade closes out Richard Garriott released his first game Akalabeth, that included a world map, first person dungeon diving and went on to found the Ultima Series, often being called Ultima 0.
Game Traits
The games of the era are implementations of the D&D rule system and center around exploring dungeons, fighting monsters and collecting treasure. Some of the later games on PLATO were surprisingly complicated with magical weapons, differentiated monsters, guilds and meaningful character creation stories.
Overall no stories are being told by these games, apart from the stories players are telling themselves. There’s no “world” being simulated, these are video games, they have high scores and little depth.
Few of the games are fun to play today but they introduced mechanics that would spread to most computer games. Today, many games have experience points, hit points and levels. One could say these mechanics are from D&D, and that’s true, but how they those rules were translated from text to code was down to those very early programmers.
Here’s a list of some of the early traits:
American
All the games released this decade that are known about, are American, unless you’re counting Richard Garriott’s birthplace to get one for the UK :). Dungeons and Dragons is an American invention, America had the majority of the world’s first computer systems, taken together it’s not too surprising things start here. In 80s the gamedev scene become significantly more international.
As the map above shows, the largest concentration of CRPG development is at the University of Illinois and its surroundings, due to the number of PLATO machines and terminals available there. The rest are somewhat scattered but generally close to major universities, as programming knowledge and machines were not yet widespread.
D&D Inspiration
All the CRPGs in this decade are directly or indirectly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. The stats, character creation phase, the combat simulation, the monsters, the fantasy setting, how door interactions work; it’s all from D&D.
There are even two different games called “dnd”!
Cargo Culting D&D
Many games of the era, including pedit5 the first CRPG, have content that’s not functional; spells that don’t work, stats the aren’t used and only exist in the game because these early games are copying D&D. To give a specific example from pedit5 Continual Light, among other spells, are unimplemented and taken directly from the Men & Magic booklet from Original Dungeons and Dragons.
RPGs for Free
These games are made for fun not for profit. The idea of selling software at all is a brand new one. Only with the advent of the home computers do we starting seeing CRPGs for sale and beginnings of small software empires.
Dungeons
Most games are about exploring a dungeon for treasure. The deeper the player delves the greater the reward and more difficult the monsters.
The Dungeon as an Enemy
The influence of early Dungeons and Dragons is very strong, the dungeon as an enemy itself that the adventure must carefully navigate, is a theme that runs strongly in these games. There are lots of traps, pits, dead-ends, stuck doors and monsters. This danger and environmental antagonism is something that mostly softens in later years. If you doubled down on this idea you might get to something like Tomb Raider, Spelunky or something entirely new. Games like Beneath Apple Manor give you the option to listen at closed doors for enemies, that kind of careful, slow exploration seems like an interesting path not taken in game design.
Multiplayer
PLATO was a networked system by default, so making multiplayer games was natural. These are the ancestors of massively multiplayer RPGs that become so popular with spread of the consumer internet.
No Narrative
None of these games have much story, there’s a little world building, perhaps a goal like find the magic orb but nothing beyond that. Story is something that is an 80s CRPG innovation.
Combat
D&D comes from wargames. Every single one of these games has some type of combat simulation as a core pillar of the gameplay.
Advancement
Another D&D trope, the player becomes more powerful either by collecting gold, killing monsters or both.
Keyboard Only Input
Mice were not common and few computers of the time had the graphical interface a mouse requires. Game input was solely keyboard based. Few keyboards of the time even had exclusive arrow keys! If no arrows existed there was convention for using letter keys for arrows.
The keyboard above is from one of the PLATO machines and as you can see there are no single purpose arrow keys.
Mapping
Mapping is the activity of drawing a map of the grid-based game world. In many games, this becomes almost a requirement and, to some extent, serves as its own gameplay mechanic. No games of the time had automaps or minimaps (though Orthanc had one added far later).
Some player enjoyed the mapping aspect. There was a satisfying element of learning the environment and perhaps exposing good places to check for secret doors. Mapping only works when the levels are grid based. Any player can map a level based on a grid. When levels become freeform hand-mapping is out of reach for the average player but we’ve got a few years until that begins to happen.
Procedural Generation
The majority of 70s game had hand-authored levels. However it wasn’t long before some games experimented with procedural dungeon generation algorithms, especially as the Apple II Reference Manual included a maze generator called Dragon Maze that was widely available. When you have limited memory, procedural generation makes a lot of sense.
Just in Time Worlds
Related to procedural generation but standing apart I think. “Game world as database” doesn’t really exist, a few PLATO games lean that way but there’s not enough memory to track a persistent game world. Instead events occur probabilistically each time you make a move, a monsters appears from nowhere and if you defeat them they’re gone forever leaving no trace on the world. The same for chests and traps no game designer is placing these objects, they are born as you enter a level, room or tile but then disappear again. Memory is too tight to support much in the way of object permanence. Inventories are much the same way, few games support a true list of what you’re holding but just increase and decrease an attack integer and from which the weapon you’re carrying is inferred. It gives the games a simulation so restricted that the very artificiality is what we associate with video games. It also pushes developers to lean on procedural rather that authored content - though few programmers could come up with level generation algorithms alone and instead relied on hand authored maps.
Permadeath
Games of the era expect most sessions to end with the player’s death and for the player to replay them again and again. The games are hard, the areas unforgivingly dangerous and the play tense. This is another trait of early Dungeons and Dragons. The environment as an enemy. Permadeath partly stems from system limitations; allowing players to continue from an earlier state requires saving that point, which was challenging due to limited memory on early machines.
That said, many PLATO games allowed characters to save and continue, but dying meant permanent loss. In multiplayer PLATO games, characters could be resurrected under certain circumstances, but even then, survival was never guaranteed.
Activity Log
In some Apple II games, such as Beneath Apple Manor and Dungeon Campaign, text is displayed at the bottom of the screen to describe recent events. This feature eventually evolved into a log of actions that survives into much later games such as Baldur’s Gate. There’s a platform-level reason for these logs: the Apple II’s low-res graphics mode provides developers with 40×40 characters at the top of the screen to use as for graphics and four lines of text at the bottom. In this mode, the platform inherently offers an activity log by default.
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Above you can see Dungeon Campaign contrasted with Baldur’s Gate’s activity log, two decades later.
Exiting the Dungeon to Level Up
A large number of the games don’t have the player level up immediately when they get enough experience, instead the player is required to find a dungeon exit and there they can then spend the XP to gain levels. This is a mechanic games like Dark Souls revisit much later where the player must make it to a bonfire with their XP to level up. However it’s so widespread in these early games it’s likely to have come from how the Dungeon and Dragon tabletop games were played at the time; Dungeon Masters would often only let their players level-up in a town where trainers live and this means they don’t gain levels mid-adventure.
Live Games
PLATO games lived on the mainframe and this made it very easy to update them and instantly have all players on the new version. Games were constantly updated, so much so it’s almost impossible to date specific versions or get a good description of what was exactly present in the earliest version of a game. This way of developing is a lot closer to modern “live” games than the big box retail games of the 80s and 90s.
The Legacy of the 1970s
Dungeons and Dragons and the 1970s laid the groundwork for what becomes the computer role-playing genre. All the key elements are set by the end of this decade and future games are mostly refining this formula as computing power increases.
Here are a few things that the 70s don’t have:
- Giving the player choices to make on gaining a level
- Strong narratives, making story choices
- Dialog trees
- Limited interactions outside of combat such a puzzles, lock picking minigames and so on.
- Complex combat simulation
- Action based combat systems
- Bitmap graphics
- True 3D graphics (i.e. actually doing 3d to 2d projection)
- Sound other than the occasional beep
The games of the 1970s reached fewer than one hundred thousand players, but each sparked a connection. In the years that follow, some of these sparks will ignite into burning stars, giving rise to the landmark RPGs go on to reshape the gaming world and amass their creators fortunes.