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Created on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 04:11

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Some Thoughts About the Early Days of Computer Role Playing Games

By Leslie Evans

Computer games for those over fifty who were not tech adopters are mostly an alien terrain, viewed as the morally questionable province of teenage boys. There is some truth to that, but it is also true that the whole of this interactive computer entertainment field, which includes computer games proper, video games played on a console attached to a television set, and coin operated arcade machines hit $9.9 billion in 2004 in the United States alone, taking in more money than movie theaters, excepting the sale of popcorn.

That number is tossed out to try to command respect from nonplayers, although it conflates together a wide variety of technologies, entertainment experiences, and subgenres. What they share in common is interactivity, an element missing from films. While it can't be denied that films are better written, where computer games have any writing in them at all, and provide a deeper moral experience, the computer experience offers the player the ability to become an actor or mostly THE actor in the situation or story.

I am frankly a player not a technician. My perspective is as a consumer, not a designer, and as one who came to this stuff early in its development but late in life. Also my own interest has pursued one strand of the many in this field: medieval fantasy role playing games, RPGs in the shorthand of the genre. Since the early days of the computer game field at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s as graphic technology was first added and then rapidly developed, the various genres solidified: flight, ship, submarine, and giant robot simulators; first-person shooters; hex-based war games; point-and-click adventures; sports simulations; life simulations, notably the Sims; adaptations of traditional board and card games; a wide range of turn-based and real-time strategy games such as Sid Meier's Civilization and the lengthy Warcraft series, and more recently the online persistent worlds of massively multiplayer games such as Everquest, Ultima Online, and Dark Age of Camelot among many, some of which have thousands of people online at the same time. There are even people who make their living brokering game objects such as magical armor and swords for real money, where buyers pay with credit cards to meet purveyors in the game world to collect their merchandise, which can only be used in the game world. There is even a more or less official exchange rate between American dollars and the currencies used in the game worlds.

I am picking out one type among these and ignoring the rest: single player fantasy role playing games.

Infocom and the Commodore 64

My first computer was a Commodore 64, which I bought in the late summer of 1983, a year after they were first released. This proved to be the largest-selling computer of all time, down to the present day. The Apple II had been around longer and already had its own backlog of software game titles.

To pay for my Commodore I sold a 9mm Walther PPK pistol I had purchased from a hard-bitten iron miner on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. I have sometimes regretted that I parted with the Walther and did not find some other way to finance my entrance into the personal computer world.

My Commodore came with a single external disk drive that could write 170K on a single-sided 5-1/4 inch floppy disk. It had a monochrome orangey monitor. The advertised 64K -- 64,000 bytes of RAM compared to the 2 gigabytes or 2 billion bytes of memory in my current computer -- had to first load the operating system, written in an amazingly small 25K of code, leaving 39K of usable memory. No hard drive. The main application was a pretty nifty word processor called PaperClip which could do all the basic things a word processor should, except it could only save 11 pages of text in a single file. There was some cumbersome way to chain files together for printing to keep the page numbers flowing on longer documents, but when you read an 80 page printout and needed to correct something you had to try to remember if the error was in file 5, 6, or 7 and usually had to open all three before finding the mistake. Oh, and the screen displayed a line only 40 characters wide.

The Commodore was also a game machine. It had the fastest graphics of its time and a music synthesizer to boot. Fascinated with the various things the computer could do, and somehow suspecting in that pre-Internet age that some level of real intelligence lurked behind all of its clever programs, I began to buy or copy games.

The outstanding game was Zork: The Great Underground Empire. This was, for those who missed them, a text adventure. No graphics. Just words on the screen. It was written by Marc Blank and David Lebling and a few others on a mainframe at MIT in 1977-79. It had to be broken up into three separate games to run on the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and the Atari.



Zork I begins with the now-famous lines:

"West of House: You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."



The game accepted typed-in commands such as north, south, down (when there was a staircase), pick up (the lantern, the sword, etc.). There was a way into the house through a back window. One of the rooms contained a rug on the floor and if you thought of typing "move rug" you would be rewarded with the message: "There is a trap-door in the floor." Open the trap door, go down, and you were off into the underground empire. Be sure to carry a lighted lantern or the grues would get you. Somewhere lurking in the vast caverns there was also a thief who would steal the treasures you collected. There were puzzles: turning multiple wheels in one room of an installation opened floodgates and drained a passage a few rooms away that would let you into a new area of the underground kingdom. There were inscriptions here and there honoring the long-gone monarch, Lord Dimwit Flathead.

The game, taking up little space since everything was just words, contained 110 rooms and 60 distinct objects, most of which could be picked up and added to the player's inventory. There was a sense of mystery and exhilarating exploration as you wandered from one room to another, encountered trolls, all described to you by the flowing text. The game's parser presented a special challenge: what did it expect you to write to get something to happen? This could be extremely frustrating when nothing seemed to work, but gratifying when you hit on the right phrase to get to the next cave or throne room.

Blank and Lebling in 1979 had founded their own game company, Infocom, which marketed the three installments of the Zork trilogy and then wrote many more, such as Deadline, a mystery; Planetfall, science fiction featuring a robot companion named Floyd; Enchanter; and Witness. All of these were intriguing but the one that made the greatest impression on me was "A Mind Forever Voyaging" written by Steve Meretzky and released in 1985.

The premise was that you thought you were a human but were told that you were really a computer. You had, you thought, lived in a small town which proved to be a computer simulation. You were now asked to return to the "town" to record the projected effects of a piece of congressional legislation that would be a major reorganization of the American political system. The first simulation was a projection 10 years in the future to look for effects of the social reorganization. Everything was fine, you made your report, and the legislation was approved by Congress. Next you were sent 20 years ahead, but this time things were starting to go wrong. At 30 years everything was terrible, which you experienced by typing in directional commands that took you from intersection to intersection in the imaginary town, or into a few accessible buildings. Here is a sample of the 30-year mark. The sentences in all caps are your commands:

>LEAVE THE CAFETERIA
Broadway & Devon
>NORTH
Entrance to Base Devon Street, which continues to the south, ends here at the gate to the National Guard base for this sector of the city. On the west side of the street is a large, imposing building. To the east is Devon Park. The front page of a newspaper is pinned against the fence of the base by the wind.
>READ THE NEWSPAPER
(taking the newspaper first) The headline story is about President Mazzotta's defense of the Martial Law Board's decision to lower the mandatory euthanasia age to 55. "Without this ruling," the President is quoted as saying, "we'd have a full-fledged famine by the end of next year." The President agreed that it was a difficult and unpopular step, but blamed it on decades of neglect by previous administrators. The article ends with a reminder that everyone over the age of 55 has two weeks to report to a Euthanasia Center.

I remember vividly entering the town zoo and finding a poster that read "Monkey torturing, 2 pm in the primate cage." The point was not the writing in the game but your own seeking out each location and piecing together what was going on.

Adventure Games: Sierra's King's Quest Series

In the early days of computer gaming the companies were small and personal. Roberta Williams, unusual in the industry as a woman game designer, founded Sierra software with her husband and business manager Ken and launched the King's Quest series in 1984. These were graphic adventure stories with color pictures on the screen. Your character could walk across the pictured landscape and exit at fixed points where there were roads or doorways. Certain few objects could be picked up or activated by finding the hot spot on the screen and clicking on it -- hence the term point-and-click adventures.

King's Quest 1 came out in 1984, but I only dipped into the series in 1986 when the third installment was released. As a general rule in game software, unlike movies when sequels are repetitive and usually worse than the original, because of rapid technological innovation most series improved with each new episode. The graphics got better, the stories more complex, more objects could be activated, and the level of realism rose year after year.

In 1986 the computer of the day was the IBM 286, a whiz-bang system with 640K of memory and a 20 meg hard drive. The monitors were the EGA standard -- grainy color in 16 shades only -- introduced in 1984, which would be replaced with more or less the current VGA standard in 1987. I started with episode 3 and bought the next two as they came out in 1988 and 1990. By King's Quest V in 1990 the screens had a kind of Walt Disney style of fairy tale animation with ambitious background music and a fairly coherent plot. My response to them was mixed. I appreciated the more elaborate situations, artwork, dialogue, and music, but found them frustrating because of the limited number of choices, the lack of freedom of movement, and the frequent stalemates when you couldn't figure out what to click on to get the story to move forward. In the end I abandoned the adventure genre, although with some regret as the stories, which became fewer in the 1990s and 2000s, clearly became much more complex over the years (as per the reviews of the very tempting Syberia series of recent years).

SSI's Gold Box Series

Moving in another direction was SSI's series of dungeon and dragons games in its famous Gold Box series. Again, I only touched this series briefly, with its Champions of Krynn, released in June 1990. These were adaptations of pen and paper role playing games incorporating the elaborate D&D rules for character advancement. Using an already antiquated EGA crude graphic format, to permit the game to run on the Commodore 64 as well as the IBM and Radio Shack's TRS 80 (known affectionately as the Trash 80), the Gold Box series let you maneuver a party of four over a sketchy landscape to accomplish various missions.

Generally by convention your party included a knight, a mage, a cleric good for healing, and usually a character good with a bow. Your mages had an affiliation as good, evil, or neutral, and their orientation increased or decreased their power with the phases of the moon. Also by convention, the party moved in a square formation with your fighters in the front row and the weaker mage and bowman in the back. Clerics could fight with blunt weapons such as maces or cast healing spells. Setpiece battles would occur as you crossed the terrain and suddenly encountered an enemy party. Winning a turn-based battle was a matter of careful strategy.

Exploring Brittania: Lord British and the Ultima Series

The two games that I spent the most time with in the nineties were Ultima VI by the Origin company of Austin, Texas, the sixth episode of a long series whose earlier installments I had missed; and Daggerfall, second in the Elderscrolls series by Bethesda Softworks of Rockville, Maryland. Except for the theme of adventuring in a large territory and using swords and magic these two projects explored opposite ends of how to construct a computer role playing game.

Origin, and its founder Richard Garriott, created their own mythos in a way absolutely unique among computer gaming companies. They were the Arthur and his round table of the industry where everyone else were only gamers and programmers. Garriott was born in Cambridge, England, to an American astronaut father who was also a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, and a mother who was a professional artist and silver smith

In high school in Texas Garriott was nicknamed Lord British because of his English accent. He studied computer programming on his own, writing one of the first computer role playing games, Akalabeth, when he was nineteen for the Apple II. Sales of this were in plastic baggies, but it made so much money that Garriott dropped out of college to found his own game company, Origin Systems, in Austin, Texas. Origin under Garriott's leadership produced the long-running Ultima series.

At the height of the series popularity in the 1990s Garriott built a 4,500-square-foot hilltop house outside Austin, complete with dungeons, secret passageways, a moat, an indoor swimming pool with artificial rain effects, an observatory, and, in the backyard, a 1,150-foot-long suspension bridge. An amateur scientist, Garriott tracked gorillas in Rwanda, canoed down the Amazon, hunted for meteorites in Antarctica, flew a MiG jet in Russia, and dived to view the Titanic in a submersible with his girlfriend. He would appear at trade shows dressed as Lord British, and cut a striking figure in his doublet and crown.

He was an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, a sort of Renaissance Fair organization. He freely incorporated friends into the story line of his games, which made them a kind of role playing roman a clef. The fantasy land in which the Ultima series is set was originally named Sosaria. Over time it comes to be ruled by Lord British, Richard Garriott's alter ego, and is renamed Britannia. In Ultima V Lord British is imprisoned and the country falls into the hands of the tyrant Blackthorne. The goal of the episode is to unseat Blackthorne, which gamer legend had it was a real associate of Garriottt's with whom he had a falling out.

I arrived in Britannia with Ultima VI. The convention of the series was that you play the Avatar, who is called to Britannia from the United States by Lord British when there is a national crisis. The party your Avatar leads can have various members but usually includes the old knight Dupre, said to be modeled on a man Garriott knew in the Society of Creative Anachronisms. Then there was the young blond fighter Shamino, a name transposed from Garriott's Japanese Shimano bicycle. The third was Iolo, a bowman.

In Ultima VI your party also included a mouse, that is literally a small rodent, named Sherry. Sherry, the legend had it, was actually the girl friend of one of the programmers. As part of the standard machinery of an RPG, you and each of your party members began very weak, that is, with few hit points and thus easily defeated in combat with enemies. The mouse, naturally, was by far the weakest of all, beginning with perhaps 10 hit points. You needed Sherry because in one of the towns on the south coast you had to have a party member small enough to get through a narrow crack in a wall.

While all my other party members were strong enough to wear armor and carry swords and additional weapons, I found that Sherry was only strong enough to carry a dagger. I thought I would try to match her against some very weak opponent to build up her strength. In some of the dungeons the party was attacked by groups of rats. You could move each party member independently of the others, so I would range a few strong members forward on the sides, then send Sherry the mouse in alone with her dagger to fight the rats. If she got into trouble I would have her retreat and a more powerful fighter take over the combat. Over time each party member was rewarded for their victories in fights by increasing their various stats. Sherry soon was strong enough to carry a sword. Then I had her take on creatures like goblins. Eventually she was able to wear armor, although this was before games showed what your characters were wearing or carrying, as the mouse really had no place to put the armor. By the end of the game many weeks later Sherry the mouse was my strongest fighter.

Garriott, more than any other major game developer, tried to use the limited technology to pose moral issues. He invented his own religion in which shrines of various virtues played a major role. He used semi-religious symbols. The Avatar always wears an Egyptian Ankh, and a symbol of the realm is the silver serpent, based on a piece of silver sculpture made years before by his mother. Ultima also used the runic alphabet popularized by Tolkien to label place names on the map included with the game and on all in-game signposts, forcing players to learn the runic script to be able to tell where they were.

In Ultima VI Britannia is invaded by the Gargoyles, drawn to look like traditional demons with red skin and horns. In the early stages of the Avatar's arrival he visits hospitals where injured soldiers curse the enemy. Later he meets a bard who expresses some ambivalence about the purposes of the Gargoyles, and by the end the Avatar discovers that the Gargoyles are responding to the rapid destruction of their world caused by a previous action of the Avatar himself, and he must go to the Gargoyle country where everyone looks like a demon to undo the damage.

Ultima VI despite its top-down graphics and limited resolution had six or seven towns, travel by ship, underground caverns, and nonplayer characters with their own brief stories to tell. In one dungeon, unexpectedly, you are attacked by a group of children. In an interview I read that this was a moral test. If you thought fast enough you could cast a sleep spell on them and not kill them. Other companies have shied away from this dilemma altogether. In the Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda even though the worlds are larger than the old Ultimas with hundreds of characters there are no children, for fear that some players would kill them deliberately and this would incense the right-wing censors who are always looking for grounds to restrict or ban computer games.

In the next installment, Ultima VII, there is one place wandering through a forest where you encounter a large troll. By reflex toward all such nonhuman creatures I killed him. Then walked my character into his cave, and there found his wife and children seated around the dinner table. I still regret that action, definitely bad karma, a measure of the power of the interactive medium.


An annoying innovation in Ultima VII was that the characters in your party got hungry but expected you to feed them. You would have your group, a straggly line, marching through the countryside to get to some town and first one then another would post a text balloon saying "I'm hungry!" Each character had a backpack which you could click on to have a small window on the screen open showing its contents. If you had thought to pack lots of bread and cheese when in the last town you could click on a loaf of bread and drag it over to the complaining party member, and they would be quiet. Then the next one would start in. You spent an inordinate amount of time dragging food items from backpacks to satisfy the digital hunger pangs of your group of followers. There were many complaints about this and the idea was abandoned in Ultima VIII.

In the end Origin Systems ran short of money and Richard Garriott sold the company to Electronic Arts. In short order they sped up the development cycle, released the next few installments unfinished with almost unplayable bugs, and finally killed the franchise except for Ultima Online. The failed games had a few memorable advances, notably the seamless connection between building interiors and exteriors where you could enter a structure and look out the windows, something still not duplicated in such state-of-the-art productions as the Elder Scrolls Oblivion of 2006. Richard Garriott has gone on to other projects, mostly in online gaming, but has never recovered the old magic.

New World Computing's Might and Magic

A word should be said about the Might and Magic series of Jon Van Caneghem. Van Caneghem founded New World Computing in 1983 and created the Might and Magic role playing games. These were distinguished by a landscape of bright primary colors, a first-person viewpoint, and a party usually of six members represented by faces in a row across the bottom of the screen. The series went through nine iterations between 1987 and 2002. I came into the series with episode three in 1991. I spent the most time with Might and Magic VII published in 1998. Here the party was reduced to four, and the interest was mostly tactical, in that you were often confronted with large crowds of computer controlled opponents. To win against them you needed to strike fast and run, or find a narrow hallway or defile where only a few could approach your party at one time. As with Origin, New World Computing fell foul of an acquisition. It was sold to 3DO in 1996. 3DO went bankrupt in 2003, taking New World Computing down with it. Jon Van Caneghem should also be remembered for the turn-based strategy spin-off of the Might and Magic series, Heroes of Might and Magic. This was a game with almost infinite replayability, especially as it included its own map editor which spawned an online community of fans who spent endless hours creating their own detailed maps. Many sought to adapt their maps to tell stories, a seriously difficult project in an open ended strategy game based on capturing castles and resource mines. But many tried, creating maps with hero characters and situations based on the Arthurian legend, on Sherlock Holmes, and on other computer games such as the Ultima series. After the collapse of 3DO the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise was sold to the French company Ubisoft, which brought out Heroes V in 2006, adding a 3D game engine, to mixed reviews.

End of Part I. To Be Continued

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