The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [64]
Its first successor was Pedit5 by Rusty Rutherford. It was named so obscurely to prevent its deletion, as such games were frowned upon at Rutherford’s school. Pedit5 included magical spells, a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure, and continuity with the ability to save the character. Sure enough, Pedit5 was deleted months after its creation (Barton 2008:31). Similar to Pedit5, Don Daglow (he of Neverwinter Nights fame) created DNGEON for the PDP-10 mainframe. Daglow’s game allowed for parties, earning experience points, and leveling (Archer 2004:86).
Eric Roberts started running a Dungeons & Dragons–like game (Mirkwood, according to Barton (2008:26)) that emphasized story-telling and deemphasized mechanical aspects like die-rolling. He tried to create a world that captured the flavor of Tolkien’s Middle-earth while at the same time preserving the immersive experience. One of the players in Roberts’s game was David Lebling, an author of Zork. Another was Will Crowther. Both played thieves (Montfort 2003:86).
In 1975, Crowther, working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created Adventure (originally titled ADVENT because file names could only be six characters long) on a DEC PDP-10 computer. Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, it was the first form of online IF. An accomplished caver, Crowther based ADVENT on his experiences in the Flint Mammoth Cave system. Don Woods expanded upon the game in 1976 at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Woods’s version was inspired by Tolkien and included trolls and elves (2003:10).
Perhaps more interesting was how Adventure emulated Dungeons & Dragons, emphasizing opportunities for creative problem-solving and providing a surmountable challenge. Although there was only a single means of input via the parser, Adventure was conceived as a cooperative game; Crowther had coded it for his two daughters to play, and his collaboration with Woods was how it developed. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure did not keep score (2003:89).
Zork came soon after, in 1977, and became extremely popular on ARPANET. The original leaflet for the FORTRAN port of Zork specifically identified its lineage as being inspired by Adventure and Dungeons &Dragons. When Zork was renamed Dungeon, the text was changed to “the long tradition of fantasy and science fiction adventure” (2003:100). It was also around this time that Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels started work on Zork. They created a company called Infocom.
It’s worth noting that Zork was inspired by a form of live action role-playing at MIT known as Institute Exploring or Tunnel Tours. Late at night, students would visit some of the more obscure basements of the campus (2003:100).
Jon Thackray and David Seal created a game called Acheton in 1978 with over 400 locations. It was also extremely difficult, with wandering monsters and numerous mazes (2003:115).
My introduction to gamebooks was through the Endless Quest series published by TSR in 1982. Beginning with Dungeon of Dread, these books provided fully developed characters and established settings that were part of TSR’s RPG worlds. Dungeons & Dragons, Top Secret, Gamma World and Star Frontiers were all introduced through the Endless Quest line. As a young teen, my perspective on role-playing games was shaped by these books.
Return to Brookmere was a major influence on my first Basic Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Return to Brookmere is most noteworthy for a talking dragon amulet known as the Mouth of Mimulus. This talking amulet was a deus ex machina that allowed the author to provide hints as to how to proceed. I used Mimulus in several of my own Dungeons & Dragons games to help keep the players on the right track (Estes 1982).
The next step in the gamebook’s evolution was Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy line, which followed the traditional gamebook format but added a combat system. The player completely adjudicated the