Old time geeks heed my call! The folks at Armchair Arcade have just published the first of a three part series article on the history of computer RPGs. This first installment is very through in its coverage, from the first games ever built for gigantic mainframes to the first game in the Ultima series.

Meanwhile, a student at Claremont Graduate University in California, had designed a game called Dungeon, which ran on the university’s PDP-10 mainframes. Like dnd, Dungeon featured a level-up system. However, one key innovation was the ability to create and operate a whole party of adventurers rather than just a single character. To this day, there is debate about whether it’s more fun to control a single character or a whole party of them. Dungeon also featured a graphical map system with “line of sight” vision, which meant that players could only see in the direction their characters were facing–and took lightness and darkness into account (elves and other creatures with infravision could see in the dark).

This is the stuff that made the genre! If you’ve ever been a fan of MUDs this should bring some memories back.

[Armchair Arcade]