1991/1992

            

1991 was, on balance, a depressing year. It took me nearly 3 years and 1,201 hours to get through its 37 games, nearly a quarter of that spent on Fate: Gates of Dawn. When it was all over, Ultima V from 1988 still stood at the top of the list and only four games had broken a rating of 50 all year, three of them sequels to games that had higher scores. The average rating was 2 points lower than 1990 and 3 points lower than 1989.

Games in 1991 got longer but not better.

        

Even the highlights had asterisks. There were four Gold Box games this year--Pools of Darkness, Death Knights of Krynn, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, and Neverwinter Nights--but still none of them managed to exceed Pool of Radiance, and for the first time I began to wish SSI had better balanced quality with quantity. Might and Magic III was good but not as good as I remembered. Fate was memorable but lasted more than 200 hours beyond the point I should have stopped playing.
          

This screen was not worth the equivalent of 7 full-time work weeks.

      

I did continue to appreciate the growing geographic diversity of our developers. There were more countries represented this year than in any previous year, including Canada (Ancients 1: Death Watch), Switzerland (Antares), Denmark (Chaos in Andromeda), Germany (Die Drachen von Laas, Fate: Gates of Dawn, The Ormus Saga, Dungeons of Avalon, Spirit of Adventure), Australia (Dungeon of Nadroj), Japan (Knights of Xentar), the UK (Moonstone, Heimdall, HeroQuest, Knightmare), and Italy (Time Horn). What's more, none of these games totally blew it. In fact, they all had moments of innovation and brilliance, even if they didn't always achieve high final scores.

I'm also satisfied with my "won" rate for the year. I only gave up on Antares, The Ormus Saga, Dungeons of Avalon, and the sample game with The Bard's Tale Construction Set, and I took both Ormus and Avalon as far as I could. They both still bother me.

The only major theme I can draw out of the year is the surprising persistence of low-quality Ultima clones. Between Quest for Tanda, The Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron, The Ormus Saga, and Legend of Lothian, I've really had my fill of independent game with iconographic interfaces.

Game of the Year Nominees

Part of me wants to reach down to mid-list for "Game of the Year." Knights of Xentar--at least was different. The limited but satisfying Shadow Keep. Twilight: 2000, because no other RPG has let me drive a tank through Poland. But no, I can't nominate any of them with a straight face. So instead, here's my half-hearted list of nominees for "Game of the Year":

1. Disciples of Steel. The clear victor if I chose based on rating alone. It was the top-rated game of the year and the one I authentically enjoyed the most, despite its many flaws. In a year of blah, this one-hit wonder managed to anticipate dozens of future trends, including multiple interweaving quest threads, multiple modes of gameplay, and lots of player choice. Its character development and tactical combat systems, adapted from Wizard's Crown, are near-unsurpassed, and it gave solid attention to other mechanics of quality RPGs, including a tight economy and a diverse set of equipment. I was sorely tempted to replay it at the end of the year, favoring a completely different approach this time, seizing cities by force and maximizing the use of the optional strategy game hiding beneath the surface. My biggest quibble: it sold about 12 copies and left no mark on the future.
           

Despite hundreds of battles, I never got bored with Disciples of Steel's tactical combat system.

         

2. Pools of Darkness. Technically, as Gold Box sequels went, Death Knights of Krynn ranked higher. But Pools of Darkness took the Gold Box to new levels, maxing out spell capabilities and allowing characters to rise to god-like levels. It told a compelling story, featured one of the most memorable maps of the series (Moander's corpse), and concluded everything with a truly-epic final combat. While not the Omega of the Gold Box games, it's close, and it makes a worthy bookend with Pool of Radiance.
       

The final battle of Pools of Darkness is legendarily difficult.

         

3. Might and Magic III. I don't think it's the best of the Mights and Magics even among the first three, but it demonstrates New World's commitment to pushing the envelope and updating its interface with new technologies. The mechanics often feel unbalanced, and the game world is sometimes a little goofy, but it's still loads of fun. Between its million side quests, the dozen items of equipment that every character can strap on, and its constant sense of character development, no one else was offering anything exactly like it. The Might and Magic series has always, in my opinion, exceeded its sources (principally Wizardry) and competitors (principally The Bard's Tale), but this was the first year that it truly left them in the dust.
         

Combat in Might and Magic III is turn-based, but through sound and graphics manages to evoke a real-time feel.

          

4. Fate: Gates of Dawn. The game that embodies "go big or go home." Out of nowhere, developer Olaf Patzenhauer took an Alternate Reality base and made the largest physical RPG seen so far, with more monsters, more spells, more character classes, more items, more everything than any of his competitors. More isn't always better, of course, and in the end, Fate is ludicrously, unconscionably, almost maliciously long, with only the thinnest plot and an absurd ending, but it's hard to beat the mechanics of the first 50 hours. As whole, Fate re-defines "epic" and paves the way for Germany's ascension in the RPG world in the 1990s.
         

I managed to map most of the 640 x 400 game world.

            

5. Eye of the Beholder. It's easy to forget that up to this point, the Gold Box series has offered the only truly successful adaptation of the most famous tabletop RPG system. Every other attempt at the D&D license has resulted in something forgettable at best and execrable at worst. Eye of the Beholder comes along and, though flawed, shows that there is another way to do it. It kept Dungeon Master-style gameplay alive and managed to produce its own sequel during the same year.

Honorable mentions: Technically, Death Knights of Krynn rated higher than Pools of Darkness, but who gives GOTY to the middle game in a three-part series? Spirit of Adventure was a surprisingly effective improvement on its Bard's Tale template but didn't really leave a legacy. I had a ball with Conan: The Cimmerian despite it lacking in several core RPG areas. MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients was a poor game overall, but it was an important step to truly open worlds and lots of player choice in how to achieve objectives.

1992 Preview

While we let those percolate, let's look ahead to 1992. If 1991 was a disappointing year, 1992 promises to be the absolute opposite. I'm practically giddy at the list before me. Every franchise had a release this year. We get the final D&D Gold Box title (aside from the Unlimited Adventures construction set) with The Dark Queen of Krynn. The Ishar series begins. The Realms of Arkania series begins. We get the second Interplay Lord of the Rings title. We get the third Magic Candle title. We get a Might and Magic, a Wizardry, a Quest for Glory, and two Ultimas! And in between these surefire hits are a ton of titles that I feel like I've heard good things about, among them Amberstar, Black Crypt, Darklands, Four Crystals of Trazere, and Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace. Surely, one of these games is destined to unseat Ultima V at the top of the list.

Here's the bad news: there are 65 games. This is, in fact, the peak year for RPGs.
         

      
The following year, 1993, has one game fewer, and after that the number drops back to the 30s and 40s for most years, averaging 43 between 1994 and 2009. But 1992 is a definite hump, and I can only be glad that so many of the titles look promising. Given the sheer number, you'll need to understand when I'm relentless with my definitions. I'm tempted to start right now by axing B.A.T. II; the first one was hardly an RPG at all.

Despite the sheer number, there's not a lot of new geographic diversity with the 1992 titles. The USA and Germany remain strong. Canada and the U.K. contribute a few. A few more leak to the west from Japan. Hungary contributes its first RPG with Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes, and Finland offers its first RPG since SpurguX (UnReal World). In terms of platforms, I'm going to be able to abandon most of my emulators. There are four Amiga-only games (Antepenult, Black Crypt, Dungeons of Avalon 2, and Warriors of Releyne), two Macintosh-only games (Darkwood and Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete), and a lone C64 game (Telnyr II). The other 58 have a DOS port.

We're going to be entering 1992 slowly, because I've decided to double up on 1988 and 1989 games until I clear the "old" list and can work off of 1992 exclusively. There are 38 games remaining on that "old" list, although I can tell a lot of them are destined to be cut.

Year-End Superlatives

Total games played: 37 (from an original list of 45)

Highest-rated games: Disciples of Steel (57), Death Knights of Krynn (54), Pools of Darkness (52), Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra (52), Gateway to the Savage Frontier (49).

Longest played (hours): Fate: Gates of Dawn, at 272. It's hard to write that without feeling like I need therapy. The average was 31 hours per game and the total was 1,201 hours.

Longest played (start to finish): Martian Dreams, which was on my mind between October 2015 and March 2017 despite only taking 35 hours.

Percentage won: 89%

Hardest game: Knightmare, the only game to which I've given a full 5/5 for difficulty.  I question whether it's possible to win without a hint guide. Even then, it takes more than 400 hits to kill the final enemy, who can kill you instantly if he hits once.

Highest category score: The 8 awarded to Disciples of Steel in "gameplay" for its nonlinear approach and replayability. It was a little too hard at the beginning for a perfect 10.

Best game with a bad category: The damned Gold Box games still can't get the economy right. Death Knights of Krynn and Pools of Darkness came in at 2 and 1, respectively, in that category despite breaking 50 in general.

Worst game with a good category: Playing Neverwinter Nights offline, I could enjoy all of the strengths of the Gold Box engine with none of the content. Knightmare was a beautiful-looking game that was absolutely enraging.

Game of the Year

          

          
In a year where I'm lukewarm about all my choices, I've chosen Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra less for the specific title and more as a representative of the overall series. If I don't give it here, you can imagine what will happen: IV will lose to one of the Ultimas, or Darklands, or one of the other awesome 1992 titles. V will fall to something like Betrayal at Krondor. VI, perhaps my favorite of the series, had the misfortune of being released the same year as Baldur's Gate and Fallout 2; VII came out the same year as Planescape: Torment. No way is VIII or IX getting it.

I liked Terra less than its predecessors, but I still liked it quite a bit. It continues to exemplify an approach that hardly no one else is taking: an open world that may reward or punish you for exploring in a non-obvious order; lots of side-quests (seriously, when do these become standard?); a heavy dose of lore attached to individual maps and areas ("Corak's notes" were particularly brilliant); and copious methods of character development. I love its contrast with development in, say, D&D, where a character's attributes remain (mostly) fixed his entire life and his reward for slaughtering a thousand orcs is four extra hit points and one new spell slot. A Might and Magic III character, in a fifth of the time that it took that D&D character to go from Level 5 to 6, will stumble upon a fountain that raises his strength 5 points, upgrade 6 items of equipment, gain 8 new spells, come across an amulet that doubles his hit points, and turn in a quest item for 3 levels' worth of experience points. I hasten to add that Might and Magic's approach isn't universally the better one--there's something to be said for more spartan character rewards--but it sure feels more rewarding when playing.

You also have to admire the engine, which manages to feel fast and action-oriented despite being turn-based and tactical. It offers a nice halfway point between Dungeon Master and Wizardry.
       

There are problems, of course--see my "Cabbage Theory" in my final entry. The rest of the game has long outgrown 16 x 16 maps. And the creators' inability to craft a plot with any gravitas remains a significant liability. But more than most developers of the era, you sense that New World has the capacity to learn from these mistakes and grow. We will soon see the results. Well, not soon--in like 100 more games. It is highly likely that I'll end 1992 and start 1993 with the IV/V pair. Whether I try them independently or combined remains to be Xeen.


Let's jump right in to 1992. In choosing the play order for the year, I often think of John Cusack's advice on making mix tapes in High Fidelity: "You got to kick it off with a killer, to grab attention," but it can't be the best, because you have to leave room to "kick it up a notch." Thus, I've chosen Ultima Underworld. It's a groundbreaking game that makes us feel that we've stepped into a new era, but parts of it haven't aged well, and I thus doubt it will be the highest-rated game of a very competitive year.

1987/1988

        

1987 was a deceptively big year for computer RPGs. First of all, it was the first year that the number of RPGs really exploded. No earlier year had offered more than 20; 1987 published 35, setting a new average that would hold into the early 1990s. 

Perhaps more important, it was an extremely diverse year. The diversity exists across several variables. First is the platform. None of the earliest platforms had completely died, but some of the newer platforms that would dominate the late 1980s and early 1990s were becoming available. As a consequence, we had games for DOS, the Apple II and the Apple IIGS, the Commodore 64 and the Commodore Amiga, the TI-99, the TRS-80 Color Computer, the Amstrad CPC, the ZX Spectrum, and the Macintosh. 1987 was a true emulator-buster.

       

For better or worse, 1987 gave us the first games in the windowed Mac interface.

        

We see the diversity in countries of origin. We had our first Canadian RPGs with Alien Fires: 2199 AD, Deathlord, and Gates of Delirium. The French golden age continued with L'Anneau de Zengara, Inquisitor: Shade of Swords, Karma, and Le Maitre des Ames. The UK, still in bizarre mode, contributed The Kingdom of Krell. Finland chimed in with the SpurguX roguelike. And for the first time, four games made it from Japan to western PCs: The Ancient Land of Ys, Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War, Sorcerian, and Zeliard. This probably reflected the growing popularity of Japanese console games.

     

French games continued to offer uniquely odd settings and gameplay.

     

But the most important facet of the year's diversity was in the approaches that the games took. Good or bad, we saw a lot of "firsts" in 1987: The weird Alien Fires and its randomly-shaped rooms and digitized dialogue; the text-RPG hybrids that were Beyond Zork and Quarterstaff; the "Boolean interactive fiction" in Braminar; the odd combat system adopted by Cosmic Soldier; Wizardry IV's insane difficulty and anti-hero protagonist; the mythology and symbolism of The Seven Spirits of Ra; the RPG-side scrolling action hybrid presented in Sorcerian; the platformer-RPG hybrid in Zeliard; and the philosophical underpinnings that enlivened The Tower of Myraglen. I can't even quickly sum the eccentricity of the European titles. We will have better years, but we may have no more interesting years.

        

Console-like action combat in Zeliard. I never understood why my character looks like a human in the cut scenes and a furry little animal during the actual game.

      

Unfortunately, as we often see, originality does not always translate into fun gameplay. The average GIMLET did not improve upon 1986 (both were at 28). The top-rated game of the year, Pirates! (48), isn't even really an RPG, and almost everything in the "recommended" zone is a sequel, including Beyond Zork (46), Alternate Reality: The Dungeon (45), The Eternal Dagger (41), Phantasie III (39), Legacy of the Ancients (37), and NetHack (36).

The major exception is, of course, Dungeon Master (47), which I will probably replay sometime in the coming years. When I first played it in 2010, I was very new to RPG history and didn't fully understand its impact on the rest of the genre. I also had never experienced its type of gameplay and viscerally didn't take to it. Now that I've had more experience with its successors . . . well, I still don't prefer the approach, but I think I like it better than I did 8 years ago, and I'm in a better position to analyze its contributions.

            

Dungeon Master invented the style of gameplay that we're now enjoying in Eye of the Beholder II.

          

I originally gave Game of the Year for 1987 to NetHack, but with several years of hindsight, there's no question that I have to switch it to Dungeon Master, both for the quality of the game and for its influence on the genre. NetHack deserves to be recognized, but it's always tough to nail roguelikes, which undergo continuous development, to a specific year. Even if we can, my own rating says I didn't enjoy it as much as Dungeon Master, and I can't honestly claim it was more influential.

If not for Dungeon Master, Alternate Reality: The Dungeon would have a shot. I loved that game, not just because it was good, but because it was so much better than I expected after Alternate Reality: The City. Its unsung developers made good on the empty promises of the originator of the "series," crafting a better game with an actual ending. As for other titles, Deathlord was impressive but not really influential; Beyond Zork was mostly enjoyable for its text adventure half; Pirates! isn't defensible as an RPG at all; and everything else is a sequel that didn't improve significantly on its predecessor.

         

Alternate Reality: The Dungeon was a rare sequel that vastly improved on its predecessor.

         

Other notes on the year:

• Two games that put the A.D. on the wrong side of the year: 2400 A.D. and Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. The former remains one of the least-satisfying Origin games.

• Four Ultima-derived titles: Deathlord, Skariten, Gates of Delirium, Hera. 

• My "won?" rate is pretty low for the year, at about 66%. 

• There will be games in the year that I try again. Wizardry IV needs to be beaten. I'd like to look at The Seven Spirits of Ra again now that I've played the first game from the developers. Faery Tale Adventure will always be a sore spot.

      

It wasn't even hard. It was just huge, empty, and boring.

        

We have only two more years before I'm caught up on the "backtracking" list and can just work off a single list (although even then, there will be some backtracking to pick up games that I missed even on the second pass). 1988 has 20 games that I didn't catch the first time, none of which I know anything about except The Legend of Blacksilver. I'm eager to play that because it's the last Charles Dougherty (Questron) title. Beyond that, I can't say that I'm looking forward to any of them, but that's mostly because I've never heard of them. I suspect a handful will fall to the definition razor, particularly the two contributed by GameFAQs (Gold of the Realm and Slaygon), which is almost always wrong when it conflicts with MobyGames.

There's less diversity in 1988 than 1987, but we still have a few foreign games, including Last Armageddon and The Scheme from Japan, Turlogh de Rodeur from France, and Nippon from Germany. 

I've already done a "1988/1989" transition posting--it was the first one I did--so when I get to the end of these new 20, it will just be a brief addendum to that. Don't hold your breath on any of these 20 games nudging Pool of Radiance out of the "Game of the Year" spot.

1990/1991

As a whole, 1990 really started to challenge my CRPG addiction. I took several long breaks while getting through it. I told you that it was because of work and my house, and while both those things were true, my usual M.O. is to find time for games regardless of how busy I am otherwise. A lot of times this year, I just didn't want to play.

CRPGs were new in the 1980s, and hardware and software were primitive. This meant that even a mediocre game has the virtues of brevity and simplicity. You know what the game wants from you, how it's going to play, and how to win. I don't particularly want to play something like Shard of Spring or Questron II again, but if I had to, I know I wouldn't have a lot of trouble with it. I think what we see in 1990 is an increase in complexity without an accompanying increase in quality. When I think back on 1990, my mind is filled with games like DarkSpyre, MegaTraveller, Tunnels & Trolls, and Dragonflight--games that have...I was going to say a "sharp learning curve" but that isn't quite right. More of a sharp interest curve. I just couldn't bring myself to get excited about them.

But perhaps there's a simpler explanation than improved technologies that developers didn't quite know how to use. I suspect that by 1990, it became clear that RPGs could make some serious money. A lot more people wanted in on the action, leaving a lot more mediocrity to slog through. "Cashing in" would be a good theme of the year. How else to explain such a sudden increase in:

1. Adaptations of tabletop RPGs. Where before we'd seen only Dungeons & Dragons licensed for the computer, in 1990 we suddenly got MegaTraveller, Space: 1889, Tunnels & Trolls, and Buck Rogers--none of which were very good.

2. Licensed properties. In addition to licensing of tabletop RPGs, we have games based on Elvira and Lord of the Rings.

3. Spin-offs and re-use of engines. These included Escape from Hell, Fountain of Dreams, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, and three Gold Box titles: Champions of Krynn, Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, and Secret of the Silver Blades.

Not all of these pursuits resulted in bad games, of course. The Gold Box titles still hold up remarkably well, and Lord of the Rings, Tunnels & Trolls, Escape from Hell, Elvira, and The Savage Empire all had good points. But in general, the 1990 emphasis seems to have been quantity over quality, and it was tough to find a game that got out of the 30s on my GIMLET scale.

What a gloomy way to start the year-end review! Let's segue to some good things:

Game of the Year Nominees

As I'm always explaining, "Game of the Year" isn't just the highest-rated game. In the choice, I look for something that exemplified the themes of the year, that showed originality and courage, and that had a lasting influence. Just like last year, therefore, I have to eliminate several of the titles near the top of the "highest rated" list--Champions of Krynn, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Quest for Glory II--because they didn't offer enough that was different from a predecessor that already won "Game of the Year." Still, several worthy titles remain in 1990.

1. Escape from Hell. Though flawed, deeply in places, this might be the most starkly original game of the year, with a solid recreation of the Wasteland engine and a clever plot lifted from Dante and other classical sources. We'll have plenty of orcs and trolls in future games, but I guarantee we aren't going to have another RPG in which we can team up with Stalin and Hitler to overthrow Satan.

2. Ultima VI: The False Prophet. Whether as good as V or not, there's no question that the Ultima series continues to innovate and delight. VI is the first true "sandbox" RPG, with an open world and plenty of things to do in it.

       
3. Lord of the Rings, Vol. I. It took me a while to warm up to it, partly because I'm sick of Tolkien references throughout the entire genre, but the game ended up being surprisingly excellent. It offered an open world, a veritable army of NPCs, true role-playing challenges with multiple solutions, plenty of reasons to backtrack, and a plot that wasn't afraid to diverge from canon. I really look forward to the 1992 sequel.

        
4. Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge. The third highest-rated game of 1990. I may not have liked every element (my comments about the nudity are apparently destined to haunt me for years to come), but it was a solid leap forward from the first five games of the series, and it was the only game of 1990 to offer a quintessential map-making, multi-character, dungeon-crawling experience.

        
Though I can't justify putting any other game on the nominee list, there are a handful that I'll always remember fondly for one element or another. In retrospect, Captive was a much better game than I gave it credit for at the time. The story was absurd, but the mechanics were quite good, and I often found myself wishing I could fire it up and play a few more levels rather than try to figure out MegaTraveller or Hard Nova. Elvira was a very decent adventure/RPG hybrid and might have made a nomination in an earlier year with better RPG elements. King's Bounty was just a fantastically fast, fun strategy game, and I wish it had more RPG elements to make it worthy of a nomination. Quest for Glory II was one of the few games of the year that I found myself "playing around" in--I finished it four times!--but there was just no way it was going to get the title after I gave it to Hero's Quest (AKA Quest for Glory I) for 1989.

I'll announce the winner in a minute, but first let's talk about...

Year-End Superlatives

Total Games Played: 33

Highest-Rated Games: Ultima VI: The False Prophet (68), followed by Champions of Krynn (56), Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (53), Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (50), and Secret of the Silver Blades (50).

Lowest-Rated Games:  Saga (15), The Stone of Telnyr (15), Dragon Lord (22), Crystals of Arborea (23), and Dragon Sword (23).

Longest Played: Dragonflight, at 58 hours. It rated a 36.

Longest Between Start and End: Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, at 379 days. I took over a year off in the middle of it.

Percentage Won: Of games with a winning condition, 30/32, or 94%. I'm still working on Operation: Overkill and may not win it. I couldn't win Legend of Faerghail because of bugs. I counted Dragonflight as a "won" even though I technically didn't see the endgame screen because of a bug.

Highest Category Scores: Ultima VI got a 9 in "Gameplay" and 8s in "Economy" and "NPCs." Quest for the Unicorn got an 8 for "Economy." Lord of the Rings, Vol. I got an 8 for "Game World."

Lowest Category Scores: A ton of games got 0s for "NPCs" and "Economy."

Best Games with a Bad Category: Champions of Krynn and Secret of the Silver Blades with 2 and 1, respectively, in "Economy." The Gold Box games will never learn.

Other themes from the Year

1. Independents' Day. We've seen plenty of independent games in earlier years, but 1990 feels like the year in which they really took off. While few of them came close to rivaling the best commercial titles, they're certainly improving. John Carmack's Dark Designs titles were both satisfying and offered solid RPG experiences in their short lengths. The Dragon Sword did a good job mimicking Wizardry, if making things a little too big, and Quest for the Unicorn offered an excellent adaptation of D&D rules in an open-world, roguelike setting.

And here's something I can't even say about many of the top-rated games of the year: I will remember Fallthru (technically a 1989 game, but I played it in 1990) until the day I die. It was staggeringly original, and if the developer had possessed even the slightest awareness of other contemporary CRPGs, it could have been staggeringly good.

One of the few text RPGs. Not a text adventure, but a text RPG.

        
2. Sex Sells. Either Escape from Hell, Wizardry VI, or Quest for Glory II offered the first nudity in a western RPG, depending on which was released first. In the case of Quest for Glory II, it was fleeting and only on-screen if you took some special effort. The other two games, in particular Wizardry VI, were far more blatant. Even when tops and bottoms didn't come off, developers used improved graphics to offer titillation in Elvira, The Savage Empire, and a few others, and nudity or quasi-nudity are destined to be a part of our lives from now on. While I don't have a problem with it, too much of it presented too artlessly makes me roll my eyes, and the entire trend makes it harder to play games in public.

I don't know which deserves credit for the first, but Wizardry VI definitely gets the award for the most.

3. Over There. The USA is still clearly the king of computer RPGs, but we're starting to get more interesting stuff from the continent. Legend of Faerghail, Dragon Lord, Dragon Flight, Crystals of Arborea, and Lord of Chaos were all interesting misfires, demonstrating enough competence that I think we're going to see some true European contenders in 1991. That brings us to...

1991 Preview

It took me 21 months to finish 33 games in 1990. Granted, I was still picking up early 1980s games at the same time, but I'll be doing that through 1991 as well. My list has 56 games from 1991, and even if I end up rejecting 25% of them as RPGs (about my normal rate), we're looking at 27 months to finish the year if I progress at the 1990 rate.

DOS had clearly stopped sucking by 1991, and a lot of titles had only a DOS release. The next most popular platform, primarily among European titles, seems to be the Amiga. We're going to have two Commodore 64 games (Twin Morg Valley and The Ormus Saga) and a single Apple II title (Dark Designs III). I'll have to dig up a Mac emulator for Shadow Keep, but that should be the only new one I have to learn.

About one-third of the 1991 games are from outside the U.S., including an unprecedented 8 from the U.K. and 4 from Germany. Japan is still mostly staying away from western personal computers, and only a single Japanese title appears: Dragon Knight III: Knights of Xentar, a 1991 game that received a DOS release in 1995.

1991 is solidly in my personal "dark ages," when I was occupied by school, the Army Reserves, and a girlfriend, and not really playing RPGs. Of all the titles on the list, I've only played four: Eye of the Beholder, Death Knights of Krynn, Pools of Darkness, and Might & Magic III, and I don't really remember any of them. (I think that of the four, I only won Might & Magic III.)

We're still in the heyday of the Gold Box series, and in addition to Death Knights and Pools, we're going to see Gateway to the Savage Frontier and Neverwinter Nights. Although I'm sure that I'll like some of these more than others, I know that all will deliver a solid RPG experience, so I'm going to spread them out evenly through the year as cornerstones.

Might & Magic III is definitely my most anticipated game of the year. The bits I can remember, I remember enjoying a lot, and the series really never makes a wrong step until IX. I'm also sure I'll have a good time with The Magic Candle II. As for the others, I'm completely in the dark. I'm vaguely curious whether Elvira II, MegaTraveller 2, and Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams manage to improve on their predecessors, what HeroQuest (which forced a renaming of Hero's Quest) looks like, and whether Paragon does any better with Twilight: 2000 than the tabletop RPGs it adapted in 1990. There are a handful of games that I'm looking forward to for their titles alone, even though I suspect that some of them will turn out not to be RPGs: Bones: the Game of the Haunted Mansion, Dusk of the Gods, Heimdall, Jones in the Fast Lane, The Nine Lives of Secret Agent Katt, and Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron. I know nothing about any of them.

If you had to guess a 1991 Game of the Year right now, what would you put your money on?

Game of the Year

It's Ultima VI. I mean...come on. Seriously. Did any of you read that list of nominees above and think that any other game even had a shot? Did you actually buy my nonsense about "the top-rated game doesn't  necessarily win the prize"? That isn't a lie; 1989's GOTY was the third-highest rated game. But when the top rated game is 12 points higher than its competition...yeah, it gets the prize.

         
More important, it deserves it based on all my criteria. Ultima VI technically ranks lower than Ultima V in my GIMLET, but they're so close that the difference doesn't really matter. I mentally think of VI as the better game. This is the first true "sandbox" game, with a wide-open world ready for exploration in any order you want, lots of side-dungeons and optional areas, NPCs and lore that aren't strictly necessary to win the game, items that do nothing but provide realism to the world, and spells that are good for nothing but messing around.

In this, Ultima VI not only exceeds every game that came before but also every game that I know about that came after except for its own sequel. Games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 might offer bigger game worlds to explore, but they don't equal Ultima VI in the depth of interactions with objects. As I wrote in my final post on the game:

As much as I love the last three Elder Scrolls games, do you know what I can't do in any of them? Destroy a chair. Play an instrument. Batter down a door. Throw a wine bottle across the room and have it shatter on the floor. Row a boat. Start or douse a fire. Lock a door.

I say "every game that I know about that came after" because of course I haven't played every game between 1990 and today. I will spend the rest of my CRPG career hoping for as much freedom to explore and mess around that I had in Ultima VI.

The game's story and quest are a little less impressive than its mechanics, but as I noted repeatedly, it's only because Origin offered such detailed back stories and game worlds that we're able to nitpick them and create nutty fan theories. There are other games, even in 1990, with better economies, combat systems, magic systems, character development, and equipment, but Ultima remains one of the few series that while not always doing everything best, never does anything really bad. I wish I could say the same about the Gold Box series and its economy or the Quest for Glory series and its combat, or Tunnels & Trolls and its character development.

Okay, it occasionally does something really bad. But such moments are rare.

Unfortunately, Ultima VI was over a year ago. Since then, I've worked through a dozen mediocre titles and handful of okay ones. Only a few--Lord of the Rings, Quest for Glory II, Secret of the Silver Blades, maybe Escape from Hell--felt more like fun than work.

At this point, I'm not looking for great things from 1991. I don't want some highly-original setting that turns out to be a little goofy. I don't want a game that thinks it's being clever by eschewing traditional experience and leveling. I don't want to play a pre-named character and act out a complex plot. I'm sure I'll do all of these things in 1991, and at some point I'll enjoy them, but right now I don't want to take a chance on whether an original-sounding game is good or awful. Right now, I just want to make a party, descend into a dungeon, make maps, find equipment, kill orcs, level up, find better equipment, and kill stronger orcs. Is that too much to ask? Can I hope for that from Eye of the Beholder?

Wrapping Up the Early Ages (1975-1983)

With the final post on Moria completed, I have now played and blogged about every RPG released in the western world (at least, that we've been able to collectively identify) through 1983, including console games. I have won all of the winnable ones except Moria. Damn that game.

When I originally started playing and blogging in 2010, I absolutely blasted through this era without any true care or consideration. By Game #9, I was in 1985. It was only a later rescinding of my "DOS-only" rule that got me back to the early days of RPGs. In my actual playing chronology, Ultima III was my 8th game. If I'd not adopted the DOS-only rule in the first place, it would have been 47th. That's really the way it should have been. The game is such a stand-out that I should have taken longer to build to it.

As I wrapped up 1988 (the first time through), I offered a turn-of-the-year post, reflecting on the themes of 1988 and what I was looking forward to in 1989. I also started selecting a "Game of the Year." It's time to do that retroactively for the earlier years, overriding my DOS-only selections with new choices that reflect the other platforms I've now experienced. I'm going to cover a huge swath of time with this post and then do annual posts as I complete 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987.

The lineage of some early RPGs. Ultima III is notably the first game with multiple parents in its lineage.

Rather than covering individual years, I'm going to use this post to talk about general themes throughout this era, but for those readers who haven't read the entirety of my blog over the last five years, it's important to remember some of the games that we've discussed. The major categories are:

1. The PLATO games, developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign between 1975 and 1979. The first ones appeared within a year after the release of the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons and include The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1975), The Game of Dungeons (aka "dnd," 1975), Moria (1975), Orthanc (1975), Oubliette (1977), and Avatar (1979). As these games appeared before the first commercial RPGs, they relied only on each other and tabletop RPGs for their sources.

Oubliette (1978) offered a first-person perspective and multiplayer exploration, with better graphics and RPG mechanics than anything we'd see on the commercial market for several years.

2. The first independent commercial RPGs, generally developed by programmers with some tabletop RPG experience but without experience with the PLATO games. These pioneering authors were feeling their way into an era in which nothing was standardized. Many of these titles launched short-lived series, but they're all somewhat insular, showing little awareness of other titles being released around the same time. For this reason, they are also occasionally innovative, offering features that didn't make it into the later genre. They include:
            

• The Robert Clardy Campaign series, including Dungeon Campaign (1978), Wilderness Campaign (1979), Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure (1980), and Apventure to Atlantis (1981).

• Edu-ware's bizarre science fiction games, at first based on the Traveller RPG. These are Space (1978), Space II (1979), Empire I: World Builders (1981), Empire II: Interstellar Sharks (1982), and Empire III: Armageddon (1984).

• The Dunjonquest series, including Temple of Apshai (1979) and Hellfire Warrior (1980).

• The Maces & Magic series, including Balrog (1979), The Stone of Sisyphus (1980), and Morton's Fork (1981).

• The Stuart Smith series: Fracas (1980), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981), and The Return of Heracles (1983).

• Eamon (1980) and SwordThrust (1981).

• A handful of games published as source code in magazines: The Wizard's Castle (1980), Quest I (1981), The Valley (1982), and Super Quest (1983).

• The Warrior of Ras series: Dunzhin (1982), Kaiv (1982), Wylde (1983), and Ziggurat (1983).

• A fairly large number of independent one-offs, usually by developers who never made any other RPGs. Most of them have limited RPG elements. Representative titles include Beneath Apple Manor (1978), Dungeon (1979), Dungeons and Dragons (1980), Dragon Fire (1981), Caverns of Freitag (1982), Dungeons of Daggorath (1982), Sword of Fargoal (1982), Tunnels of Doom (1982), and Expedition Amazon (1983).  

The Dragon's Eye is one of many Apple II games that had some interesting ideas but never went anywhere.

         
3. The Ultima line, which technically belongs with the games listed above, but are so important that they deserve their own category. Like the other independent commercial RPGs, they were written by someone with no experience playing other computer RPGs. Titles are Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979), Ultima (1981), Ultima II (1982), and Exodus: Ultima III (1983), as well as the first Ultima clone: The Ring of Darkness (1982).

3. The DND line, directly descended from the PLATO Game of Dungeons via Daniel Lawrence's adaptations. In this era, they include only Dungeon of Death (1979) and Telengard (1982) as well as Lawrence's lost versions. We'll see more in 1984 and 1985. They feature top-down gameplay, rapid random encounters, limited mechanics, and permadeath.

Telengard is difficult and random.

4. Roguelikes, starting of course with Rogue (1980) and continuing with Moria (1983). Rogue is starkly original, shows no dependence on earlier games, and offers a complexity in mechanics that is way ahead of its time.

5. The Wizardry line, adapted from the PLATO Oubliette, and consisting of Wizardry (1981), Scenario #2 (1982), Scenario #3 (1983), plus one clone: Maze Master (1983).

There are many "first" games in this era, but Exodus: Ultima III serves well as a "last" game (even if it wasn't technically released last), as it's the first game with an identifiable linage that references more than one prior game. While obviously a child of Ultima II, it was also heavily influenced by Wizardry in its multi-character approach (Richard Garriott has said as much) and any one of several games in its use of a separate tactical combat screen.

Themes of the Early Era

Among the first eight years of RPGs, we can identify several common themes:

1. Single-player was the second choice. To those of us who grew up with single-player commercial RPGs and saw the advent of MMORPGs as an unwelcome offshoot, it may be surprising to learn that the first RPGs were, fundamentally, multi-player. In the context of the time, it makes sense: Tabletop RPGs were a group experience, and the PLATO system was meant to facilitate communication and collaboration. Even the top-down, single-character games had a chat function and allowed various PCs to interact with each other, and the first-person games (Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar) were explicitly meant to be played with a party--to the extent that I found them mostly unsurvivable as a single character. It's amazing to me how fast this functionality appeared.

Jockeying for position in the "Hall of Fame" was a key motivating factor in the PLATO series.

In an era of limited network connectivity, multiplayer games couldn't hope to survive outside the educational environment, and the first commercial RPGs were naturally single-player. But even in this transition, many games were curiously reluctant to give up the idea that RPG playing should be a shared experience. A remarkable number of titles from this era have "leaderboards" that track high scores, even though it was unlikely that people would share copies. Wizardry had password locks on characters, expecting that a single disk might store several players' characters. Space allowed multiple players to engage their characters in duels. Eamon assumed that eager players would trade scenarios. A few titles (e.g., Crown of Arthain, Fracas, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) offered the ability for more than one player to control different characters, and a lot of the era's manuals offered examples and scenarios that assumed friends would be playing side-by-side.

Many games took it for granted that you'd have friends to play along with.

Only as this era drags on do developers seem to realize that CRPG playing is going to be a lonesome, solitary experience. In my opinion, games start to improve in quality as developers include more NPCs, quests, and story rewards to make up for the lack of real-life friends giving high-fives over top scores.

2. Hardware limitations forced considerable compromises. The PLATO games were built on a powerful system whose capacity probably exceeded the time and effort the students were willing to spend programming. As a result, the very first RPGs are anything but primitive. We didn't see commercial games with the complexity and size of Oubliette and Moria for almost a decade.

But on the microcomputer, the story was different. Recollections of developers are rife with stories about cutting material and functionality to fit in the memory and storage media of the era. Offering a splash screen at the beginning of the game might mean the sacrifice of three dungeon levels. A few bloops of sound meant having to cut out combat mechanics.

The result is that there isn't a single game from 1975 to 1982 that has both decent graphics and decent gameplay. The games with the most primitive graphics and sound are those with the best mechanics, as we see in Wizardry, Rogue, Moria, and SwordThrust.

In Eamon (1980) and Swordthrust (1981), a complex set of factors determined accuracy and damage in combat.

Developers are never really freed from these shackles completely, but we start seeing a lot more advanced games as storage media and memory specs improve. By the mid-1980s, we've clearly hit the "good enough" point. We're not there yet, but we almost are with Ultima III.

3. Cross-platform games are still rare. Temple of Apshai was the leader in this regard, with ports to the Apple II, Commodore PET, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and DOS within the first few years of the decade. Most other games were only released for one or two platforms; the exceptions, like Wizardry and Ultima were only because they became wildly popular later.

In comparing games to each other, we always have to keep in mind that some platforms were woefully starved. If you had a TRS-80, you could play the Dunjonquest series, The Wizard's Castle,  the all-text Dungeons and Dragons, and that's about it. PET owners were even more limited and probably cherished Dungeon of Death and DUNGEON for that reason. Even a DOS user was mostly out of luck prior to 1984; most of the games eventually released for it were released years after their originals.

The Ring of Darkness (1982) was probably the best game of the era for the ZX Spectrum or Dragon 32.

4. The era is characterized by innovative dead-ends (at least temporarily). The large number of independent developers, working without any kind of template, came up with remarkably innovative mechanics, many of which didn't make it. Consider Stuart Smith's games, in which every enemy is a named NPC and can actually collect treasure and level up; or Robert Clardy's games, with soldiers in place of hit points. The otherwise-mediocre Crown of Arthain (1981) is notable for using hexes instead of squares. The Dragon's Eye (1981) had action-based side-view combat. Dungeons and Dragons (1980), which I ranked low, is notable for reflecting character speed in the speed of its text-based combat. How long will it be before we see another game with an audible heartbeat, like Dungeons of Daggorath (1982), or a lockpicking minigame, like Tunnels of Doom (1982)? Almost every game of the era, good or bad, at least does something different.

I didn't really like Empire II (1982), but there wasn't any other game of the early 1980s in which I was gambling, doing drugs, and hiring prostitutes.

5. Content takes a back seat to mechanics. Looking over the list of 1975-1983 games, you're hard-pressed to find one with a good story or memorable NPCs. At best, the manual has a framing story, usually goofy, that offers the most banal explanation for why your character is on-screen. The only outliers are Ultima, Eamon, and Temple of Apshai, all of which excel to some degree in story-telling rather than just battle. Starting over the next couple of years, a regular in-game narrative becomes the norm.

It's particularly interesting to reflect on how the text adventure was developing during this period, with games like the Zork series, the Savage Island series, and the Scott Adams Graphic Adventure series offering loads of content and puzzle-solving without any combat mechanics. The two types of games spring from a common source, and it's good to see the approaches re-unified (unified for the first time in computer RPGs, of course) later in the 1980s.

What do you think? Any other major themes that I'm missing?

Games of the Year

When I finished 1988, I retroactively chose "Games of the Year" for 1981-1983, but of course those were based only on the DOS versions. Let's take a look at these choices and see how well they hold up. Since there were less than three games per year prior to 1979, I'm going to start with that year. Keep in mind that in "Game of the Year," I look not only for quality and enjoyability but also for its enduring influence on the genre.

1979. I'm tempted to give it to Akalabeth, but as innovative as Richard Garriott was, I don't think his lasting influence is solidified until Ultima in 1981. Dunjonquest: The Temple of Apshai is the better choice. The developers tried hard to model a classic tabletop RPG experience with the limitations of the times, including a full set of character attributes, a complex inventory system, and detailed descriptions of rooms and treasures in an accompanying game manual. More than any game until perhaps the Gold Box series started in 1988, you really feel like you're playing Dungeons & Dragons on your computer.

1980. Eamon and Fracas are both worthy candidates, offering very different experiences. Eamon is the first RPG/text-adventure hybrid, and it still offers good combat mechanics, inventory, and spellcasting. Fracas is a wonderfully fun game from Stuart Smith with plenty of features we no longer see. But in the end, if I'm talking about excellent mechanics and enduring influence, I can't not give the award to Rogue.

When a game lends its name to an entire sub-genre, it gets "Game of the Year."

1981. Nothing I've played since my "new plan" took effect has come close to challenging Wizardry and Ultima for the title. It's a difficult decision between the two, but I think Wizardry is the clear winner, for enjoyability (it's one of only three or four games from this entire era that I've happily played multiple times), innovation (it's the first multi-character game), and endurance: we owe Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, and Dungeon Master to it, and it even had an influence on Ultima III.

1982. I gave it to Telengard when my only choices were Telengard, Ultima II, and Wizardry II. My reasoning was that Telengard was the best representative of its particular line (the DND games, which we'll be talking more about soon). Now I have 14 games to choose from, and it's a bit tougher. Since I first panned it in a scathing post back when I was just getting started, I've come to feel better about Ultima II. For all its idiocies, it has some decent game mechanics, and it's one of the only games of the era to even recognize the concept of NPCs.

Sword of Fargoal is a fun action RPG from the same year. Tunnels of Doom offered the first tactical combat screen that I know about, as well as the fun lockpicking minigame. The two Warrior of Ras titles had very innovative approaches to combat and exploration.

I'm going to reluctantly switch my choice to Dungeons of Daggorath, which stands out as the most innovative game of the year, if not the most influential. It has features we won't see again for several years: real-time action in a first-person environment (but with text inputs!), a critical importance of sound, and a consideration of fatigue as well as health. I say "reluctantly" because I don't think these features influenced later RPGs so much as anticipated them; I'm not sure that the developers of Dungeon Master, for instance, even heard of Daggorath, let alone played it. But it's hard to see lasting influence from any of the 1982 titles, and Daggorath, if nothing else, is the game I'll remember the longest. Telengard might be the best representative of its line, but its line isn't very good.

The screenshot doesn't do it justice. Daggorath is the most sensory game of the entire era.

1983. I gave it to Ultima III, and there it remains. There are some decent games in 1983, including some starkly original ones--Expedition Amazon, Galactic Adventures, Moria, and The Return of Heracles all have their charm--but Ultima III truly feels like it's pushing us into the next era, with a well-structured plot, a complex spell system, character choices that really matter, NPCs that offer lore and clues, and the best tactical combat screen to date. It's a clear standout in my GIMLET scale: I gave it a 51, 14 points higher than the highest game before it (Wizardry), and it remains the champion until Ultima IV, Might & Magic, and Starflight come along in 1985.

Ultima III isn't just game of the year; it's game of the era.

Looking Ahead

While this post was in its draft form, I already started 1984. I've yet to offer a "Game of the Year" for the year, since the only games I had to pick from, before my backtracking began, were Caverns of Zoarre, DND, and Zyll, none of which I completed.

In many ways, 1984 is an odd year. We might call it the "lost year" of RPGs. None of the major franchises--Ultima and Wizardry, primarily--had 1984 offerings. The "Golden Age" marked by Ultima IV, Phantasie, Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, and Wizard's Crown wouldn't start until 1985. The year encapsulates the rise and fall of computer gamebooks, the last gasps of the inadequate DND lineage, and a series of one-offs that would have been more at home in 1982.

There are a few titles I'm looking forward to. Questron was my first RPG, and it's a crime that I haven't yet played it as part of the blog. (It was supposed to inaugurate my fifth anniversary, but I didn't get to it in time.) I want to go back and finish Zyll, an innovative text RPG, and give another chance to Rivers of Light now that I've played Stuart Smith's other offerings. I've heard good things about SunDog: Frozen Legacy. I'm anxious to try Hack to see how it bridges Rogue and NetHack.

I expected to have more time into Tunnels & Trolls by now, but I still haven't caught up to where I was almost a year ago, so rather than re-hash old territory, I'm going to continue into 1984 with DND. Happy reading!