Re: The first RPG - summary

[mcarmack@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Michael Carmack)]

Fredrik Ekman (ekman@lysator.liu.se) wrote:

: -Adventure (about 1978-1979) [There were obviously two games by this title
: for the Atari 2600, one from Atari and one from Sears. I have no idea
: which of these the mentioning referred to.]

Well, technically, they're the exact same game.  Sears just repackaged it
with their Tele-Games label.  (BTW - If anyone is interested, there's an
incredible version of this for the PC called Indenture.  You can find it
at www.happypuppy.com I believe.)

[snip]

: Akalabeth seems to have been released for the Apple II in -79, but some 
: people report even earlier versions on main-frames. When was this?

I don't see how that's possible since Richard Garriot wrote it on an Apple
in his spare time while working in a computer store.  His boss was so
impressed he sent a copy to California Pacific without telling him, and
the rest is history.  (This info is being dredged from my memory of an
interview with RG that I read about ten years ago, so please forgive any
minor historical inaccuracies.)

: Were RPGs (as defined in this document) inspired by (or a reaction against) 
: text adventures or were both types independent developments of traditional 
: paper-and-dice RPGs?

I don't think there's any hard-core facts that can establish this one way
or the other.  But I would say that they grew up independently.  The
original text adventure makers spent the majority of their programming
time creating better conversation engines;  character stats commonly found
in pen-n-paper RPGs were largely ignored or were hidden from the player. 
But in the graphical RPGs, there was practically NO conversation engine at
all (there still isn't in many cases) and character stat management was an
integral part of the game.

Bottom line:  Both genres attempted to reproduce or imitate pen-n-paper
RPGs on a computer, but they each took a drastically different approach. 
Neither one is really BETTER than the other (although we all have our
favorite);  they both had their strengths and weaknesses.  But neither one
has yet to really do a GREAT job imitating a p-n-p RPG.

: The only undeniable fact that has been established during the thread is 
: that there are many interesting ways to spell Akalabeth. 
[snip]

Heh heh, I've noticed that myself.

: The name almost certainly originally comes from Tolkien's Akallab�th - the 
: fall of N�menor. Did Garriot, too, misspell it? Perhaps on purpose?

Oh, it most certainly came from Tolkien.  I mean, he borrowed an entire
runic alphabet, why not a name as well?  I would guess he misspelled it on
purpose to avoid copyright problems.

My buddy and I used to think we were so cool because we could read the U2
map with its runes.  (As I recall, they didn't print a translation of the
runes in the U2 guide back then;  I don't think they started until U4, but
I could be wrong.)  Now I realize that we were just dorks.  ;-)  
-- 
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