Low production costs (compared to later periods) let developers produce many an uninspired and buggy hackjob and get away with it - at least, until the market grew saturated and they became a contributing factor in the following Dark Age.

That is not to say that all games from this era were flawless. 2D graphics, annual releases, and Long Runner series were in vogue (in fact, the genre still owes its longest series to this era), and RPGs regularly pushed the boundaries of contemporary gaming technology. The Golden Age of Western RPG (1981≡993) The '80s were the time when the RPG genre (alongside Adventure Games) dominated the PC gaming market, breezing even past The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 with hardly a scratch. This period is crucial to understanding the difference between pen-and-paper role-playing and role-playing video games: while the classic D&D-style RP is one part number crunching, one part freeform make-believe, and one part nerdy get-together, its video game implementations have, from the very beginning, been all about the numbers. The very first computer RPG ever created is commonly thought to have been m199h (1974), whose source code has unfortunately been lost to time. In this era, programming geeks fed the D&D ruleset into their mainframes and implemented text-based interfaces for players to interact with, producing the Ur Examples of the genre like, dnd and Dungeon. Brief History of Western RPGs (Troper-Style) The Primordial Era of Western RPG (1974≡980)īasically, everything between the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and the rise of the Ultima and Wizardry series in the early 80s.

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