The 80's: The First Age - continued

With the advent of the very inexpensive, superior quality Commodore 64, one suddenly had access to literally hundreds of games. One game that really showed off what the C64 could do was Pirates! It had everything. In my whole life of playing games, I've never seen one boxed game cover so much and so well. [Civilization? Hey, Sid wrote that game too, after "borrowing" the idea from Avalon Hill's board game of the same name.] And on top of that, due primarily to its entertaining twists and turns, historicity and easy interface, a child could play it.

I guess the AD&D; "gold box" games by SSI kept us going for a time too. After all, it was AD&D;, right? Unfortunately, what began with Pool Of Radiance, as a grand, non-linear quest, ended with endless boring sequels, time wasting mass battles and ridiculous, illogical monster placement.

Wasteland reassured me that there was hope after all for CRPG's. Finally, a mature, smart, wickedly inspired and clever RPG, with a skill system, a non-linear story, and a ton of other innovative features and great ideas. Even more than the Ultimas, Wasteland represented the state of the art in CRPG's in the First Age of computer games. And hey, it wasn't about dwarves, dragons and fireballs either!

"Wasteland reassured me that there was hope after all for CRPG's. Finally, a mature, smart, wickedly inspired and clever rpg, with a skill system, a non-linear story, and a ton of other innovative features and great ideas."

Not that there weren't any other good CRPG's in the 80's. Both the Magic Candle series and the Phantasie series brought their own innovations to an already cliched category, and were absolute marvels to anyone fortunate enough to play them. True, the Might & Magic games offered another style of level based CRPG, but to me they were far too generic and too overlarge to really enjoy or take seriously.

Interstel's Empire presaged the graphic computer war game boom, by presenting the interface that everyone still uses, from Age Of Wonders to Heroes Of Might & Magic, first. Empire was a huge game in every sense of the word in its day.

A terrific strategy game, SSG's Reach For The Stars, really had me hooked for about five years. Inspired by the classic sci-fi board game Stellar Conquest, it was the state of the art for space strategy at the time and kept me interested until EA's Starflight was released.

Starflight was another example of being the right game at the right time. Anyone who had read Voyage Of The Space Beagle, played the Voyage The Pandora board game or watched Star Trek on TV, wanted, needed, to play this game. To me, Starflight was a milestone, and a high water mark, in the evolution of science fiction strategy and role-playing in computer games. Even more so than the ambitious and three dimensional Elite, it's legacy is still guiding the design of computer games in that genre today.

What happened after that? Rogue-like games were appearing in abundance, and the remarkable NetHack, an ASCII game loosely based on Dungeons & Dragons, was just beginning its development. NetHack spans the black gulf between the First and Second Ages; a void of darkness which lasted well into the early 90's. In fact, it may well be the single best fantasy crpg ever created!

MUD's, or multi-user dungeons, became popular as well, and online designers began to create truly interactive persistent worlds for folks to inhabit and adventure in. Being text based, these worlds could be as intricate and complex as the designer and player wished, unhampered by the restraints of a graphic presentation. MUD's are still with us today, and a great example of an extremely successful one, both financially and artistically, is Simutronics's DragonRealms, a rich, detailed fantasy MUD that makes Everquest look like a novice level romp in comparison.

In the dark time before the Second Age, a few titles appeared which promised hope for the future and offered originality in spite of the dearth of rehash that was already choking the computer game industry. Legend Entertainment, with its successful combination of an Infocom-like text parser and point and click graphics, LucasFilm Games [which evolved into LucasArts], with its innovative graphic adventures and occasional forays into sims, and companies like Psygnosis [Lemmings] and Microprose [racing and flight sims], kept the industry alive until the next big thing...

Next: The 90's: A Bold New Decade.



(Or skip ahead to the forum discussion on this topic...)