How D&D gave birth tothe modern video game industry
- Thread starter Dice4Hire
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Dungeons and Dreamers is a much more interesting history of that relationship. Masters of Doom, too.
I just finished Of Dice And Men, and while there's a lot to like, there are a few problems. See my review here.
I just finished Of Dice And Men, and while there's a lot to like, there are a few problems. See my review here.
I don't think D&D had all that much to do with the rise of video games. Yes, the Gold Box games were a big thing, but the most influential games don't come from this direction until Baldurs Gate. Before that there were Lemmings, Dune/C&C, Doom, the Lucasarts Adventures or the Sierra ones, etc. all which were as important as any D&D simulation or even more so for the rise of video games.
In the concept of "video games like D&D" then you might be right. If you're not a programmer or well versed in the really old computer games, you might not familiar with how far the actual history goes.
But every programmer was a nerd. And every nerd played D&D (and took karate, and learned to play guitar). And every nerd that played D&D and programmed was inspired to write code BY D&D, even if they weren't writing D&D.
Adventure and and The Colossal Cave were inspired by D&D as text based adventure RPGs.
Zork were expansions on the genre.
Lord British (whose RPG game series earned him buttloads of money but I can't remember its name) also predates Baldur's Gate and the D&D gold boxes. One of his earliest game was a line-art First person dungeon crawl called Akalabeth. I have it on floppy for my Apple IIe. I assure you, it is very much inspired by D&D.
Wolfenstein 3d was the first FPS, and it was derived from the concept of those dungeons drawn on 1/4" graph paper. In many ways, it's an expansion on Akalabeth, with greatly enhanced freedom of movement (and graphics).
Doom was the next generation of FPS, from the Wolf3d guys (D&D players).
From Doom came the Doom clones, including the Elder Scrolls guys who definitely saw the FPS as a way to present a single player sandbox environment for D&D. The Elder Scrolls world is based on their campaign world.
Now certainly, there are games that don't trace as directly to D&D. These are usually puzzle games or out of the box thinking games where nobody has done anything like it before. Tetris or Lemmings for example.
Pretty much every RPG came from D&D. Every game involving exploring an environment or map (any FPS or large world game). Every game with a damage system (hit points, hearts, damage bar). Every game with stats for the characters that you can choose a different character or alter/build your own). Every game with an advancement system to improve your character. Every battlefield simulation game was inspired by D&D (and its predecessor war games).
Not every programmer has actually played D&D. But more programmers played D&D than almost any other professional demographic. And those early programmers were influenced by D&D and its ideas inspired them. So the guy who's writing Minecraft may have never played D&D. But his game was inspired by Dwarf Fortress and FPS games, which were inspired by D&D.
Therefore, there is a chain of influence from D&D to many (not all) of the modern games of today.
The problem (that the article attempts to rectify) is not everybody knows the history of video games, of gaming, of programming, to know what inspired what and why.
Just because many early day programmers played D&D doesn't mean that D&D can be credited with the evolution of video games.
I'm sorry, that doesn't follow.
Almost all of the major video game genres spawned by people who played pen and paper RPGs and D&D was the grand-daddy of RPGs which came from wargames, so even military themed video games traces back to pen and paper gaming for influence.
There's probably some exceptions, like the puzzle games (Tetris), racing games or the sports games. I can't tell you who worked on what of those and what their background was, and they are less obvious on traits they would have gotten from RPGs.
But the adventure, platformer, FPS, RPG categories are solidly based on themes and elements from D&D by virtue of the ideas in them and the people who initially invented them being KNOWN as D&D players.
Bear in mind, folks like me giving credit to D&D aren't tracing specific rules from D&D into specific games.
What really happened is that programmers have a brain that works a certain way (which is why lots of them learned karate and took up music). D&D appealed to that type of brain. As did programming, which is how they got into it. By playing D&D, it introduced them to game play concepts and ideas about representing the player's avatar (stats, levelling, first person perspective, etc) which as a programmer was easily representable by code and data structures.
This exposure to entirely different game structures (first person avatar, multi-character management, resource management, exploration, military simulation) was significantly different from any other game that "normal" people had seen. Prior to that, most people played Monopoly, card games or games with balls outside.
Once a programmer is seeing these different concepts at work on paper, they begin thinking about the data structures and code needed to automate it. That's what caused the initial shift in thinking and thus influenced game design beyond Pong, Pac Man and Space Invaders.
It's a small step for Romero and Carmack to think "it'd be cool if we could SEE the dungeon and walk around in it" to then leap to "that looks cool, but it'd be even better if we had guns and could shoot each other"
Having lived it, I can see the evolution. I've experienced the mind-shift effect first hand (been writing code for 30 years).
I have to agree with others that this article really oversells the importance of D+D in early gaming. There was crossover in the fanbases, but that's really not the same thing as "giving birth" to the industry. A correlates to B, and B correlates to C. That doesn't mean A caused C.
IMNSHO, the true core interests that gave birth to both modern video game industry and RPG industry are math and storytelling. D+D and video games are both concurrently developing concepts based on math and storytelling. They were born around the same time, and have fed back and forth into each other constantly over the years. But neither one is the mother of the other.
IMNSHO, the true core interests that gave birth to both modern video game industry and RPG industry are math and storytelling. D+D and video games are both concurrently developing concepts based on math and storytelling. They were born around the same time, and have fed back and forth into each other constantly over the years. But neither one is the mother of the other.
For every programmer and director who has played D&D there is one, if not more, who has not. And the game structure of many video games is so vastly different from a PnP/D&D that there is hardly a relation at all. You seem to be crediting a lot of things to D&D with no proof at all. First Person perspective linked to D&D? Why? Why not to real life? Thats sounds more like wishful thinking on a D&D message board.
You also seem to assume that everyone copied from D&D when their games features something only mildly related to it and completely ignore the possibility of them getting it from other sources or developing it on their own. After all, Gygax was not a inventor of games in general and also was inspired from something.
You also seem to assume that everyone copied from D&D when their games features something only mildly related to it and completely ignore the possibility of them getting it from other sources or developing it on their own. After all, Gygax was not a inventor of games in general and also was inspired from something.
Argyle King
Legend
It's because of D&D that ideas such as being able to have "levels" in the sense that you level up and improve your character became a common idea in video games. Prior to it, I'm not sure if I remember video games which had levels in that same sense. I started with Atari as a kid, and my dad was the proprietor of an arcade/pool-hall. Offhand, I don't remember concepts such as level and being able to personalize your character being common. Most games such as Ghosts & Goblins or Asteroids or even Super Mario (which I experienced for the first time when mom and dad bought me a NES for Christmas,) measured progress either by keeping score or by moving from point A to point B.
Is D&D the reason for everything? No, certainly not, but it is tied to a lot of games which you wouldn't naturally thing of as having inspiration from it. It's reasonable to believe video games would have evolved very differently had early designers not been influenced by D&D or some other rpg. There are a lot of concepts Gygax didn't event, but what he did do was codify them in a way which appealed to his audience, and that is what influenced the audience. Sure, there were board games, and war games, and other tabletop games before D&D, but none of them were the essence of what D&D was. D&D took the parts of all of those things and built something else. That something else was what we now know as rpgs, and many of the concepts introduced via rpgs to early video game designers made their way into the thinking behind how those designers would then create their games. In that way, the influence was paid forward; even in video games which weren't rpgs simply by including things such as leveling up and HP and MP.
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