Upscroller Game Evolution (Racing Games Pt. 1)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This is a short history of the evolution of early "upscroller" video games (as mentioned previously, a term coined by Steven Poole, Trigger Happy 2.0, ebook, 2013, chapter 2), better known as "vertically scrolling" games. This type of game has been dominated by the shooter genre, with notable games like River Raid (1982), Xevious (1983), Commando (1985), Raiden (1990), DonPachi (1995), and Ikaruga (2001). But, vertical scrolling got its start in the early 1970s in the car racing genre.

The following analysis focuses on scrolling racing arcade games released by Atari, Taito, and SEGA between 1974 and 1981. This is not an exhaustive analysis of the era, but these examples should show an evolution in graphic styles and technical prowess over these years.

Before the Scroll: Early Car Racing

The earliest known video arcade car racing game is Atari's Gran Trak 10 (1974). It features a fairly realistic steering wheel, gear shift, and gas pedal This game has no scrolling, with the entire racetrack presented on the screen in a fixed frame. The design was successful and Atari (and subsidiary Kee Games) followed it with similar racing titles for many years, like Gran Trak 20 (1974), Formula K (1974), Indy 800 (1975), Sprint 2 (1976), Sprint 8 (1978) and Super Sprint (1986).

Gran Trak 10 (Atari, 1974)

The Ribbon Road (Taito)

Taito game designer and future father of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado, didn't care for the tight twists and turns of Gran Trak 10's racecourse. He wanted to make a game that was more thrilling, with a greater sense of speed, and turned to his own electromechanical (EM) game designs for inspiration (Alexander Smith, They Create Worlds, pg. 199 - citing information from Florent Gorges' official biography of Tomohiro Nishikado, Space Invaders — Comment Tomohiro Nishikado a Donné Naissance au Jeu Vidéo Japonais!, 2018).

Super Road 7 (Taito, 1970) from this video

Nishikado designed Super Road 7 for Taito back in 1970. This EM game features a "scrolling" two-lane road with scenery projected from acetate drums as the player steers a model car left and right to avoid other cars projected onto the scene. Overlapping another car triggers a crash, causing the player to restart their drive from a standstill.

The scrolling scene is an example of induced movement, where the car appears to be moving forward because the scenery is moving downward. This effect is used in all "upscroller" games, even though the only vertical movement seen is of objects moving down the screen.

Speed Race (Taito, 1974) (image source)

Nishikado's Speed Race plays like a video version of Super Road 7. Dashed lines mark the roadsides, like a "ribbon" zipping down the screen as the player accelerates, creating a great sense of speed and likely the first scrolling video game environment. Like Super Road 7, the player must steer their car left and right on the screen to dodge traffic. The environment and cars are drawn orthographically, as if viewed from directly overhead.

The scenery zooms by, relative to the player's position as well as the car's. Arguably, this gives the player a greater sense of "being there," something closer to the experience of driving an actual car than Gran Trak 10 and similar non-scrolling driving games. Like Gran Trak 10, the overhead view of Speed Race feels flat; there is no sense of depth into the z-space of the screen.

Midway published the game in the US as Racer (1975) and Wheels (1975). Taito added a gear shift lever and a timer to Speed Race DX (1975). The screen was split into two straight racetracks and a second steering wheel allowed for two-player action in Wheels II (1975) and Speed Race Twin (1976). The game was later programmed for a Z80 microprocessor and given color graphics for Super Speed Race (1977). Super Speed Race V (1978) was the #2 top-grossing video arcade game in Japan for 1978 (second only to Nishikado's Space Invaders). Speed Race CL-5 (1978) added forked roads and an illuminated headlight effect for driving in tunnels.

Taito made many refinements and improvements to the Speed Race formula over four years, but the visuo-spatial configuration and navigation control are the same. The cars and road are drawn in plan orthographic view (with some oblique views of foliage) and the player navigates the car object moving on the screen (steer left and right, accelerate up, decelerate down).

That started to change with the next game.

Super Speed Race Jr. (1985)

Taito released Super Speed Race Jr. more than 10 years after the original Speed Race, and this "junior" update added a lot to the series: cartoony graphics, obliquely drawn urban environments, and traffic lights (stop so pedestrians can safely cross the street). One less apparent change is that the player navigates the frame moving across the game world. The player car stays centered on the lower part of the screen. As the player steers left, the game world moves right on the screen, a further example of induced movement. This change in navigation from object to frame is a step towards a more immersive and embodied experience where the player controls their view on the virtual world instead of moving an object on the screen (covered in more detail in the next post).

A Bend in the Road (Atari)

Atari engineers were likely influenced by the scrolling road of the original Speed Race when they developed Hi-way (1975). 

Hi-way (Atari, 1975)

Hi-way takes the straight "ribbon" road of Speed Race and adds curves to it one line at a time. As the road is rendered, scanline by scanline, the x-position of the road image may be adjusted to the left or right. The resulting road curves left or right as it is drawn down the screen. The cars on the road are rendered in a similar way, shearing left or right depending on which way they are veering.

This graphic technique must not have been inspiring for use in other games, probably due to the distorted effect it makes.

SEGA Approaches the Horizon

SEGA released its own series of related upscrolling racing games that are similar to Speed Race. The race car graphics of Road Race (Feb 1976) were soon replaced with motorcycles for Moto-Cross (1976). The game was further revised as Man T.T. (Aug 1976) (named for the annual motocross Tourist Trophy (T.T.) race held on the Isle of Man) and as Fonz (Nov 1976) in the USA. Yes, Fonz is a licensed game named for Henry Winkler's popular Happy Days TV character, Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli. Twin Course T.T. (Jan 1977) uses two separate video monitors so two players can race simultaneously, each with their own view of the road.

Moto-Cross (SEGA, 1976), image from a SEGA sales flyer

Each game has minor variations but they all use the same graphical techniques. The road widens from the top of the screen to the bottom, giving a simple impression of parallel lines converging onto the unseen horizon. The racers (whether race cars or motorcycles) are drawn as if seen from a high angle, but not quite directly overhead. The racer graphics are drawn smaller the closer they are to the top of the screen, as if receding into the distance, thanks to SEGA's custom sprite scaling hardware. Otherwise, the game controls and graphics do not stray far from the original Speed Race model.

This series of games starts to create a sense of depth into the z-space of the screen. Combined with the pioneering haptic feedback of vibrating handlebars during each collision, these games impressed their audiences and were among the highest-earning arcade games of 1976 and 1977.

Monaco GP (SEGA, 1979)

Two of SEGA's last TTL (transistor-to-transistor logic) logic board arcade games were the successful Monaco GP (1979) and Pro Monaco GP (1980). These play a lot like the Super Speed Race games and do not incorporate the sense of depth and sprite scaling seen in the Moto-Cross series of games.

Turbo Boost! (SEGA)

SEGA's next big scrolling racer brought back depth effects, incorporated new custom sprite scaling hardware, and is programmed to run on a Z80 microprocessor.

Turbo (SEGA, 1981)

Turbo's roadway recedes to a visible horizon line, where a lateral oblique background image of a cityscape hints at the urban landscape the player will be speeding through. A break in the receding road lines marks a rise in the road (see image above) where encroaching traffic briefly sinks out of view. The road follows the seacoast, curves toward mountains, and leads through dark tunnels and snow-covered forests.

The game has a convincing sense of depth, a good variety of environments, and was one of the highest-earning arcade games of 1981 and 1982. However, the game's design and navigation model still don't stray far from the Speed Race model from 1974, with the player controlling a car object moving around the screen.

Epilogue

Over the first eight years of scrolling racing game history, the spatial structure of games tended to evolve from a flat, orthographic, overhead view into "3rd person view" that mimics a three-dimensional scene with depth. This development did not supplant the original Speed Race model (employed by other successful games like Spy Hunter (Bally Midway, 1983)), but supplemented the options that developers had to creating virtual game spaces.

Next blog post, I'll examine a parallel line of development in "first-person view" racing games and the evolution of graphic and control techniques used.

Spatial Models: Discrete vs. Continuous

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. (2020). How Pac-Man Eats. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Today, I return to the topic of spatial models in digital games. In his book How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin identified two different models of space that all digital games follow: Continuous Spatiality and Discrete Spatiality. These models are equal to what Espen Aarseth calls Geometrical Topology and Topological Topology, respectfully. I blogged about Aarseth's topologies previously and, although they convey the same concepts, I prefer the Wardrip-Fruin's intuitive naming structure (try saying "topological topology" five times fast). 

As republished in my previous blog post, I describe the differences between the two spatial models in my paper, A Taxonomy of Virtual Dimensions (Rowe, unpublished):

Two of the earliest contenders for the title of “first video game” are Christopher Strachey’s Draughts (1951) and Willy Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two (1958). Each title is pioneering in its own right: Draughts is probably the first game a computer game program and the first computer game with graphics on a cathode ray tube while Tennis for Two is the first known two-player action game. Analyzing these two games for their presentation of spatiality would help us articulate what is important about these two works. 

Discrete Spatiality

Draughts (Christopher Strachey, 1951)

Draughts has what Noah Wardrip-Fruin would describe as Discrete Spatiality. The entire game space is “divided into non-overlapping spaces, and each game action involved moving a piece from one discrete space to another with no in-between position available or meaningful” (Wardrip-Fruin, How Pac-Man Eats, 2020). Each square on the checkerboard is a separate point in space. The checkers do not move between the points as there is no “space” to move through. Many strategy games work in this same manner today. Sprites may animate as if they are moving between spaces, but the game only treats them as being in one space or another, never overlapping multiple spaces.

Continuous Spatiality

Tennis for Two (William Higinbotham, 1958)

Conversely, Tennis for Two is the first example of Continuous Spatiality in a digital game, which “requires that there be many potential positions in the virtual space (so many that moving between them creates a feeling of continuousness)” (Wardrip-Fruin, 2020). It is also worth noting that time in the game is discrete (time tracked by alternating game turns of any length) or continuous in each example.

Any digital game can be classified as using one of these two spatial modes: discrete or continuous.

Spatial Model Classification Edge Cases

For most digital games, the spatial model used is obvious. Text adventure, strategy, and digital board games tend to use discrete spatiality while action and sports games often use continuous spatiality. However, there are some edge cases that are not immediately obvious.

Ataxx

Ataxx (Leland Corporation, 1990)

Ataxx is a turn-based arcade game played on a 7 x 7 grid and is similar to the board game Othello. There are only 49 possible discrete spaces in the game, but the player pieces animate as they split and move to those spaces, giving the impression of a continuous space. However, with the clearly turn-based nature and board game-like structure of the game, it should easily be classified as using a discrete spatial model.

Q*bert

Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982)

Q*bert is an action/puzzle game in which the titular hero must jump on all the cubes of a pyramid in order to change their colors. Game characters smoothly jump from cube to cube, giving an impression of continuous space. However, each object may only be located on one discrete cube top at a time, there is not really any space between the spaces. At the start of the gif image above, a red ball appears to drop onto Q*bert's head, which should kill him instantly. By the time the ball reached that space, the player had already initiated a move down and to the left. Even though Q*bert and the red ball appear to cross through the same area, they are not both located at the same discrete space at the same time.

Note also the short pause when each character hops from one space to another. This makes the time in the game feel staggered and two characters move almost as if they are in a real time version of a turn-based game. Each "step" of movement is broken up into a discrete segment of time.

Q*bert appears to use a discrete spatial model and the movement model only accentuates this sense of discreteness.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man (Namco, 1980)

A fast-paced action game like Pac-Man seems like a prototypical example of continuous space with characters smoothly chasing each other around the maze.

The discrete tile grid behind Pac-Man's collision detection, from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009)

While sprite visuals may appear in many positions on the screen, each game object's collision is tracked on a discrete grid of 8 x 8 pixel tiles, as illustrated above. Two game objects collide when they are on the same tile at the same time.

Blinky moves 6 pixels to the right, but he remains in the same collision tile,  from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009) 

Note that the game sprites are much larger than each collision tile. The character is considered to move from one tiles to another when its center point overlaps the next tile in the grid. This simple system reduces the computational load of detecting collisions between many moving objects and works perfectly... almost all of the time.

Illustration of the "pass-thru bug," from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009)

On rare occasions, two game characters moving in opposite directions may pass through each other without colliding if both characters move into different tile grids at the same time, essentially swapping positions on the same frame. Pac-Man players sometimes have the experience of dodging past an enemy ghost monster in this way, miraculously saved from certain doom.

Conclusion

Does Pac-Man convey a discrete or continuous spatial model? The game conveys a sense of a fluid continuum, not only of space but also time. Contrast this with Q*bert's individual cube tops and staggered time intervals that convey a sense of discreteness. If Pac-Man should be considered to be be discrete, then almost every game should also be discrete. How many possible positions are required to consider a space to be "continuous?" 

Freeway (RCA, 1977)

Consider the RCA Studio II game console with its 64 x 32 screen resolution. Even with limited possible positions in visual space, many games on the system are designed around a continuous spatial model (as illustrated by Freeway, above). Contrast this with Civilization V, a discrete-space strategy game with game maps that are up to 128 x 80 tiles in size. Civilization V has a higher density of possible spatial positions, but would not be treated as a continuous spatial model. So, it is not just the number of spatial positions that creates a continuous spatial model.

Some games, like Q*bert and Pac-Man require a judgement call as they convey elements of both continuous and discrete spatial models. Time and space and game mechanics can be taken into account to determine the type of model used.

Spatial Paradigms of early CRPGs and Adventure Games

This post is part of my ongoing research into the spatial aesthetics of digital games. It is cross-posted between this research blog and my Cryptic Archivist blog since it also covers early role-playing game history.

This is part of my ongoing study into the aesthetic qualities of space as experienced in digital games (computer games, console games, arcade games, etc.). These are my current theories on the development of early computer role-playing games by looking at their spatial paradigms - the knowledge, methods, and technologies used to render a virtual space to a screen and how a player is able to navigate that space.  

The Wellspring: Dungeons & Dragons

The Original Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules and supplements (photo by author) 

Almost all digital games examined here are inspired by one tabletop game: Dungeons & Dragons (1974). D&D grew in popularity in the mid to late 1970s, at the same time that computers were first coming to prominence in the American public (with the first true home computers released in 1977). Many young people discovered both computer programming and D&D while enrolled at universities in those years and the two hobbies melded into an outpouring of creativity.

Enter Ender

Author Orson Scott Card is best known for his science fiction novels, especially the Hugo Award-winning Ender's Game. What is less well-known is Card's long-running "Gameplay" column that was published in Compute! magazine during the 1980s and early 1990s. "Gameplay" gave Card an outlet to post his personal reviews of computer games and his early critical examinations of what these games are and how we interact with them as aesthetic objects.

Card made a similar analysis of graphical techniques used by CRPG and adventure games back in 1988, published in a two-part series in Compute! no. 97 and Compute! no. 98. Card compared and contrasted the games to the experience of watching a motion picture, much like other early attempts at what would later be called Game Studies. Card's thoughts on these game types are included in this overview.

Looking at RPGs and AVGs Through Different Lenses

Excerpt from the lecture Role-Playing Game History Part 4: Early Computer RPGs (Rowe (2024))

I subscribe to the theory that computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and adventure games (AVGs, an acronym that only caught on in Japan) tend to focus on specific aspects of the tabletop RPG experience. Each such aspect can be used as a frame of reference or lens through which a game may be examined.

The Tactical aspect of RPGs is exemplified by the movement of miniature figures representing player characters on a map during combat or exploration. This stems from D&D's origins with the medieval miniatures wargame Chainmail. The Storytelling or Conversational aspect is how tabletop roleplaying can be seen as friends sitting around a table and narrating a story together. The First-Person or Experiential aspect is seen in Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP), dressing up in armor and robes and attacking your friends with foam swords and tennis ball magic spells.  LARPing the public's imagination in this early era with stories of illegal explorations of steam tunnels as ersatz dungeons.

Illustrated graphic adventures convey the Dioramic aspect of set-piece environments made with miniature figures to create an artistic adventure scene. Such scenes are closely related to the RPG hobby, populated with painted game figures. They were typically used as store displays to generate interest in the games, not to fight out in-game tactical situations.

Gary Gygax and Mary Jo Powell (Gygax) with Sutherland's castle diorama (source unknown)

Mary Hendryx with Sutherland's castle diorama (Kevin Hendryx (1981))

A perfect example of this such a diorama is the three-story castle created by David C. Sutherland III and displayed in TSR's Dungeon Hobby Shop in Lake Geneva, WI (see above). The castle was divided into nine rooms organized both spatially and temporally. The sequence of room follows the story of a party of adventurers as they fought their way through the structure. Only a handful of the adventurers survive long enough to battle the demon lord in the last room. This was a piece of art to be viewed and enjoyed, not an environment used during gameplay.

Tactical (RPGs)

pedit5 (a.k.a. The Dungeon) (Rusty Rutherford (1975)) (image source)

Rusty Rutherford started playing D&D in 1975 while working as a PLATO programmer in the Population & Energry Group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (where the PLATO computer network system was developed). Rutherford combined his two passions when he created his own computer-moderated D&D-like experience, pedit5 (named for the Population & Energy Group). This game is considered to be the first known graphical CRPG, proven to predate the equally confusingly named m199h back in 2023. 

A "family tree" of early CRPG influences from Role Playing GameSide (2014) vol. 1 (image source)

Rutherford's work inspired many other PLATO CRPGs, such as dnd, Oubliette, and Moria. Telengard, in turn, was influenced by (or heavily "adapted" from) dnd, making a break onto personal computers when it was published by Avalon Hill.

Party of D&D adventurers facing a gelatinous cube (photo by author)

Many CRPGs used the spatial techniques of pedit5, where environments are rendered in plan orthographic view, much like the maps of tabletop D&D dungeons. Characters are shown in elevation view, typically standing and front-facing to better show recognizable details in a small image. This hybrid combination (bird's eye view of the map, front view of the characters) is a simple method to replicate miniature figures positioned on a tabletop map with 2-D graphics. Miniatures are not required to play tabletop D&D, but many players use them to keep track of combatants' tactical positions during battles or the party's position on a wilderness map during overland travel.

Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai for TRS-80 (Jim Connelly, Jon Freeman and Jeff Johnson (1979) Automated Simulations Inc.) 

Temple of Apshai was an early CRPG first published for the Commodore PET and TRS-80, two personal computers that were so limited, they weren't capable of bitmapped graphics (see above) and the rulebook had to be referenced for detailed room descriptions. The creators were experienced D&D players who set out to capture the tabletop experience on computer. Dungeons are navigated in a similar manner to pedit5 with sections of the map revealed as the player character moves. Notably, this game does not use a grid map per se and the player character could travel a variable distance with each move.

Ultima (Richard "Lord British" Garriott (1981) California Pacific Computer)

Richard Garriott learned how to play D&D, learned computer programming, and gained the nickname "Lord British" all while attending a computer summer camp. When he returned to high school, he started developing a series of CRPGs in BASIC on his school's teletype terminal connected to a PDP-11. These early games used text characters as tiles to show the player's dungeon environment, printing out a new map with every move. His early games (titled DND1 to DND28B) evolved into his first published CRPG, Akalabeth for Apple II. Akalabeth included an overhead world for the hero to navigate, dotted with dungeons that the player explored in first-person views (see below for more on Akalabeth's dungeon views).

Akalabeth was followed by the first Ultima game with the explorable world of Sosaria, complete with oceans, land masses, and different terrain types. As Card describes it, "The Ultima series... uses an overhead camera most of the time, looking down on events the way you look down on a map" (Compute! #97). Sosaria expands far beyond the extents of a single computer screen and is divided in a square grid, much like the graph paper used to draw maps for tabletop adventures. This also made movement simple, like moving a piece orthogonally on a chessboard. When the player lands on a town tile, the view is "zoomed in" to the contents of that tile and the world view is replaced by a map of the town buildings, shops selling food, weapons, armor, etc.

Ultima III: Exodus and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar employ the same spatial paradigm for overland (and oversea) travel. In those games, the player controls a party of adventurers instead of a lone hero. When monsters are encountered in the wilderness, the scene "zooms in" to a battle map with a different grid scale, where each party member can be tactically positioned. These games also trace the player party's line of sight, so that occluded sections of a map are not rendered. As Card described, "A picture of one man represents your entire party... However, the map only shows you what your character can actually see. Anything around the corner of a building or deep within a forest shows up as black on your screen and becomes visible only when you put your character in a position to see it" (Compute! #97). "Each place is the size of a single letter on a normal text screen. The characters are tiny, but they can be in thousands of places in the course of a game" (Compute! #98).

Card considers the tradeoffs between graphic fidelity loss with tiled objects and the benefit of a massive virtual world to explore. "The map approach makes sense... In play, you can always see what's going on and the screen is alive with images. To program it, the designers only had to store the graphic image of a whole bunch of tiny reusable objects. But this approach, successful as it is, remains schematic, not movielike" (Compute! #97).

Rogue for UNIX (Glenn Wichman, Michael Toy, and Ken Arnold (1980))

Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy were two students at UC Santa Cruz who played D&D and were learning computer programming. Both were inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (see below) to create new text adventures to challenge each other. Eventually, they hit upon the idea of creating a graphic version of a text adventure, something that would surprise even the designer with something new in each playthrough. With help from Ken Arnold, they were able to use text characters for the graphics and wrote procedural generation routines to randomize dungeon maps, magic item effects, monster placement, and treasure. From this, Rogue was born. The game functions on the same 80-column grid used natively for text display, with each character space serving the same function as an Ultima grid tile. The virtual game world is restricted to just the dungeon, with no overworld to explore. With its smaller scale, Rogue is more similar to earlier titles like pedit5 and dnd, although the creators probably never saw a PLATO system.

Conversational (Text Adventure Games)

Early version of Colossal Cave Adventure (Will Crowther (1976))

William Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), helping lay the foundation for the nascent ARPANET. He was also an avid caver and rock climber and loved to explore the outdoors. His friends introduced him to the then-new game of D&D around 1975 and Crowther rolled up his character, "Willie the Thief." In 1976, he decided to write a computer game in FORTRAN that he could share with his daughters, a project that combined all three of his passions (programming, caving, and D&D). The PDP-10 he developed on didn't have much capacity for graphics, so all of the game information is conveyed by text. He also struck upon the idea of controlling the game through the use of a text parser - the player would type commands with natural English words and the program would interpret them and translate them into game actions. He finished Colossal Cave Adventure (often just called Adventure) and shared the game on the ARPANET, where Don Woods discovered the game and expanded it (with Crowther's permission). This updated version spread like wildfire, inspiring countless other programmers to create their own additions to this new text adventure game genre (a.k.a. interactive fiction).

Crowther's text parser puts the player in a sort of conversation with the computer program, mirroring the interaction between DM and player in a game of D&D. The DM describes the player character's surroundings and often asks, "what do you do?" The player responds by describing their character's actions. The DM determines the results of the actions and informs the player what happens next. This is exactly the same feedback loop seen in text adventures.

Many earlier mainframe games used text description (notably Hammurabi and The Oregon Trail), but those games did not use Adventure's conversational approach to gameplay. 

Text adventure games are typically presented in a second-person point of view (in contrast to graphical first person and third person games). The program often addresses the player character as "you" and describes where "you" are ("YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD..."). This is a literary game genre (or literate, anyway) with virtual spaces navigated through hypertext. Text adventures transform a database of objects and locations into a navigable virtual world, vividly described and rendered in the graphics of the imagination.

Zork (with the working title of Dungeon) (Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and Daniels (1977))

It is hard to overstate Adventure's affect on the nascent computer game industry. The game inspired students at MIT to create their own massive mainframe adventure: Zork. The team formed a new company, Infocom, to publish Zork and many other text adventures for personal computers. Scott Adams played Adventure at his job at an electronics manufacturer, which inspired him to write his own AVGs for the TRS-80 and other personal computers. Roberta Williams was hooked after she first played Adventure, causing her to track down every other text adventure she could find. Roberta added graphics to the adventure game formula, creating Mystery House, the first graphic adventure game. Arguably, the early graphic adventures went on to inform the entire genre of visual novels in Japan. Roy Trubshaw at the University of Essex played an early build of the mainframe version of Zork (called Dungeon at the time), which inspired him to team up with Richard Bartle to create a multiplayer version of the game: M.U.D. (short for Multi User Dungeon). M.U.D. spawned an new genre of MUDs, which directly inspired the creation of graphic MUDs, soon referred to as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games).

First-Person Experiential (RPGs)

A tiny dungeon view in Moria (Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin (~1978?)) (image source)

Moria is another innovative CRPG. It features cooperative networked multiplayer play and a wireframe 3-D first-person view. It is also the very rare early CRPG that is not based directly on D&D. Duncombe stated that they did not know how to play D&D and that he had not read The Lord of the Rings before creating the game (in case you missed it, Moria is the name of an underground Dwarven complex strongly featured in The Fellowship of the Ring)! Moria started as a prototype around 1976 with a 2-D, map-like, bird's eye view of the dungeon, much like dnd. Multiplayer play and the first-person view were added later, completed around 1978. 

Catching burglars by surprise in Oubliette (Jim Schwaiger (~1977-78?))

Moria has long been considered to be the first of its kind, but it may have been preceded by Oubliette, a similar PLATO CRPG with a first-person perspective (see above).

Maze War running on an early 1970s Imlac PDS-1, as featured in a 2004 DigiBarn Computer Museum restoration project. (image source)

Moria and Oubliette's 3-D wireframe tunnels in one-point perspective closely mirror the rendering techniques seen in earlier computer games like Maze a.k.a. Maze War (Colley, Thompson, and Palmer (1973) and Lebling (1974)).

"William Dear and his colleague Dick Riddle walk through one of the cleaner and more accessible parts of the tunnel" (Pat Beck (1979) Detroit Free Press) reprinted in The Dungeon Master (William Dear (1984))

First person dungeon crawl games rose to prominence on personal computers in an era when the public vision of D&D often involved getting lost in underground steam tunnels. A young computer science student and D&D player named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his dorm room at Michigan State University in 1979. Investigator William Dear hypothesized that Egbert was lost in the eight miles of steam tunnels that run underneath the MSU campus while playing a live action D&D adventure. Egbert was not in the tunnels, but the image that playing D&D literally involved creeping around underground in low-ceilinged, rectangular tunnels (see above). The 1981 novel Mazes and Monsters iserved as a fictionalized retelling of Egbert's tragedy, and was made into a TV movie of the same name that year (with Tom Hanks in his first leading role). Mazes and Monsters propelled the steam tunnel myth over the TV airwaves as the Satanic Panic was starting to grip the USA.

Richard Garriott in character (Richard Garriott (ca. 1981)) (image source)

The experiential nature of living a fantasy adventure through one's own eyes is also close to LARPing and similar forms of role play, like the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Richard Garriott was a member of the SCA (see above), like many luminaries of tabletop RPG design, like Steve Perrin (RuneQuest, Stormbringer), Steve Jackson (The Fantasy Trip, GURPS), and Aaron Allston (Autoduel Champions, Justice, Inc., Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia). SCA members create medieval personas, dress in period garb, and participate in medieval era activities (tournaments, crafting, banquets, brewing, heraldry, etc.). It is not a Live Action Role Playing game, but shares some of the same aspects (including swordfights and similar mock battles). This might be seen as the ultimate expression of first person play.

Akalabeth (Richard "Lord British" Garriott (1980) California Pacific Computer)

The Ultima series is typically associated with its tile grid overworld map, but Garriott's games also feature underground exploration using a 3-D first person view. As Card described the Ultima series (and Akalabeth), "only in the corridors of the dungeons do you find yourself looking at the scene from eye level" (Compute! #97). Monsters can be spotted in the distance and will be seen advancing into melee range, one grid unit at a time, something missing from Wizardry.

"Designer's Notes: Akalabeth" (Richard "Lord British" Garriott (1981) The Space Gamer no. 39, pg. 15)

Garriott designer's notes for Akalabeth show that he was inspired by Silas Warner's Apple II game Escape! (1978, MUSE) (yes, the same Silas Warner who went on to create the original Castle Wolfenstein games). Garriott replaced Warner's colorful but blocky graphics with higher resolution black-and-white line drawings of the dungeons and their denizens. He also briefly notes his involvement in the SCA.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead (1981) Sir-Tech)

Wizardry creators Greenberg and Woodhead were PLATO users and D&D players who were heavily inspired by Oubliette when they worked together to build their own CRPG for Apple II.

In the Wizardry game series, the overworld is simplified down to a single town and castle with no real spatial representation. The functions of civilization in Wizardry is expressed as a series of text menus (training ground, tavern, inn, temple, and trading post). The dungeon is a "ten level deep fortress maze" under the castle with an entrance near the edge of town. The player explores this maze with its paper-thin walls one square at a time, easily mapped with the same graph paper used in tabletop RPG games. PLATO-style networked multiplayer was not possible on home computers, but Wizardry adapts Oubliette's party system by making the one player command an entire group of adventurers at once.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead (1981) Sir-Tech)

During combat, the first person view of the current location is erased and replaced with an image of one of the combatants. Unlike Akalabeth, the dungeon denizens are not seen in the environment - you can't spot a group of orcs just down the hall. When the player party's location lands on the same square as a group of monsters, they appear suddenly, as if out of nowhere.

"Goblin" (Dave Trampier (1978) Monster Manual, TSR)

Wizardry's combat images are full-length portrait illustrations of monster archetypes. They do not convey a sense of distance between the party and the combatants and don't seem like they are meant to convey the literal view before the player character's eyes. These combat illustrations are extremely similar to the illustrations of creatures in the AD&D Monster Manual (compare the goblin illustration above with orc in the Wizardry screen shot).

"Demogorgon" (David C. Sutherland III (1978) Monster Manual, TSR) and a screen shot from Dungeon (1983, Koei) (image source)

Felipe Pepe of the CRPG Book Project cited a perfect example that shows the influence of Monster Manual illustrations on CRPG combat art. Koei's 1983 CRPG Dungeon appears to be inspired by Ultima, with a tile-based overland world and first person 3-D graphics for the titular dungeon. As Pepe notes, many of combat images in the game were directly adapted from Monster Manual illustrations (see above).

The Bard's Tale (Michael Cranford (1985) Interplay)

The Bard's Tale expanded on Wizardry's established formula with detailed graphics and a completely navigable town of Skara Brae to explore in first person. As Card describes, "Bard's Tale I is 'filmed' entirely through 'point-of-view' shots, as if you were looking through the characters' eyes. What you see in on the screen is only what the characters in the game would see, you don't see the characters themselves" (Compute! #97). "Each place requires a complete picture, drawn in perspective. Because you're seeing it through the character's eyes, you can't watch the characters do anything in the scene" (Compute! #98).

The Bard's Tale (Michael Cranford (1985) Interplay)

Much like Wizardry, combat graphics in The Bard's Tale were archetypal illustrations with flat backgrounds, removed from the player party's location in the virtual world (see above). These images included minor animations.

Alternate Reality: The City (Philip Price (1985) Datasoft)

Alternate Reality: The City placed animated combat character sprites in the 3-D world with your unseen player character. However, other denizens still cannot be seen from afar and only one character sprite is shown at a time, no matter how many monsters are in combat.

Might and Magic (Jon Van Canegham (1986) New World Computing)

Might and Magic features the World of Varn, a large continent where overland travel is in a Wizardry style first person view. Technically, the forests and mountains the block the party function like dungeon walls and the world is divided into 16 x 16 sections, much like floors of a dungeon.

Dungeon Master (1987, FTL Games)

Dungeon Master took advantage of the advanced graphic capabilities of the new 16-bit computers that were available in the late 1980s. This game evolved the Wizardry paradigm by adding real-time play and new ways to interact with the first person view (objects can be manipulated in the scene with the mouse cursor, groups of enemies can be seen moving at a distance, doors animate open and closed).

Dioramic (Graphic Adventure Games)

Mystery House (Roberta Williams (1982) On-Line Systems)

Ken and Roberta Williams are credited with adding images of scenes described in text adventure games and creating the new genre of graphic adventure games. Early graphic adventures used a hybrid approach, where the screen is dominated by an image with a small region for text underneath it.

Designer Roberta Williams was not directly influenced by D&D, as far as I know. She took inspireation from the vast library of AVGs she played: Colossal Cave Adventure, Scott Adams' Adventure International collection, Softape's Journey, etc. She developed a dioramic space paradigm of graphic adventure games that does not have much of a connection to tabletop RPG play. Roberta sketched each scene herself, digitizing the drawings line by line with a VersaWriter tablet.

The Williams' early graphic adventures (the Hi-Res Adventure series) showed fairly static drawings of the scenes that are described in text. The player still interacts with the text parser in a conversational method, typing short commands for their character's actions. As the player's actions make changes in the scene (pick up item, open door), the graphics are changed to show the updated state of the game.

The Dark Crystal (Roberta Williams (1983) Sierra On-Line)

The graphics in these games often show environments in one-point perspective with an elevated point of view, much like looking into a miniature diorama from above. Note that Hi-Res Adventuer #6: The Dark Crystal is an unusual adventure game title as the story is told in third person instead of second person point of view (the game refers to the player character as "Jen" instead of "you"). Another unusual aspect is that the player character is seen in the game's environment. With other graphic adventures, it is often assumed that you see the world as if through your own eyes.

"Terraced Room" (David C. Sutherland III (1979) S2: White Plume Mountain, TSR)

These early graphic adventure examples remind me of illustration booklets included in some of TSR's AD&D adventure modules (notably in the "S" series of modules). As the player characters enter a new area, the dungeon master would show the players a keyed illustration of the environment. This was especially helpful for complex spaces that are difficult to describe (such as the complex "Terraced Room" full of monsters, above).

King's Quest (Roberta Williams (1984) Sierra On-Line)

After a few years, the Williams evolved the graphic adventure concept with the King's Quest series. The game screen is still a mix of graphics and text, but the graphic image had become a navigable space to explore, not just a static view. The player's character Sir Grahame is represented on-screen with a colorful sprite that can be controlled on the screen with a joystick (a big change from the static views of Jen in the world of The Dark Crystal). The player can use a combination of joystick to move and typed commands for other actions. Players at the time were mostly impressed with this new paradigm, with numerous reviewers declaring "it's like playing an animated cartoon." 

The King's Quest style of games used a similar dioramic view as earlier graphic adventures, with each scene typically drawn in one-point perspective. The interior spaces look like little shoebox dioramas, with one side and the lid removed from the box. The player character navigates to other spaces by moving to the edge of the screen or crossing a threshold (like a door). The new environment image is drawn to the screen with the player character moved as if entering the new space from the opposite screen edge.

Card reviewed Sierra's The Black Cauldron (1986), based on the Disney animated film of the same name. The Black Cauldron looks and plays like King's Quest and even uses the same Adventure Game Interpreter 1 (AGI1) engine. Card stated that this game "feels like an animated movie. Instead of the overhead map shots of Ultima... or the point-of-view shots of Bard's Tale... The Black Cauldron shows the main character... moving through a remarkably detailed scene - just like a movie" (Compute! #98).

Card and his children were impressed by seeing the player character (Taran) moving through the environment, taking actions, and interacting with other characters. What they describe is like watching a puppet or actor on a stage under the player's control. "We could move Taran behind trees, rocks, or buildings, and he'd disappear... When we moved him into the stream, he swam. When we used a magic spell, he flew... Other characters moved around him; the goat butted him, and he fell down. The whole family gathered around to watch as each child explored the world of The Black Cauldron" (Compute! #98). Card's review may have been, shall we say, overzealous when he declared that, "Sierra has done for home computer animation what Disney did for the cartoon back in the 1930s" (Compute! #98).

Evolution in Japan

These spatial paradigms for CRPGs developed in the USA soon made their way to Japan, where game designers adapted these graphics methods in innovative ways.

Text commands in Dragon & Princess (Koei (1982))

Tactical combat in Dragon & Princess (Koei (1982))

Koei's Dragon & Princess is an unusual title. Most of the game is played as a text adventure, but battles are waged on a tactical map, predating Ultima III's tactical combat screen by two years (see above).

クフ王の秘密 The Secret of Khufu (Koei (1983))

The Secret of Khufu is a dungeon crawler set in an Ancient Egyptian pyramid and bills itself as a "ROLL PLAYING GAME." It uses a plan orthographic view (birds eye view) for the environment, much like the Ultima series. The player character is also rendered in the same method, a strange gray figure with arms flailing in two directions and a prominent nose facing forward. This loses much of the recognizable details of Ultima's elevation view front-facing characters. The blocky graphics are similar to those seen in early versions of Temple of Apshai.

ミステリーハウス Mystery House (Toshihiro Shintai (1982) Micro Cabin Corp.)

Mystery House is sometimes called the first Japanese graphic adventure game. It appears to be inspired by Roberta Williams' game of the same name and features similar dioramic line drawings of the house interior. Unlike the original Mystery House, this game is a treasure hunt instead of a murder mystery.

ポートピア連続殺人事件 Portopia Serial Murder Case for PC-6001 (Yuji Horii (1983) Enix)

The graphic adventure Portopia Serial Murder Case was one of Yuji Horii's first published computer games. As can be guessed from the title, this game is a murder mystery, with the player in the role of a police detective who must solve the crime by exploring the city of Kobe. Horii specifically wanted to write a program in which the player is having a conversation with the computer.

ポートピア連続殺人事件 Portopia Serial Murder Case for Famicom/NES (Yuji Horii (1985) Enix)

By 1985, Horii was partnered with Koichi Nakamura to port Portopia to Nintendo's Famicom console (NES). Hori and Nakamura had travelled to an Apple festival in California together where they first laid eyes on Wizardry, which they were clearly inspired by. The Famicom version of Portopia is different from the original versions of the game for computers. For one thing, there is a secret door in the floor near where the body was found.

ポートピア連続殺人事件 Portopia Serial Murder Case for Famicom/NES (Yuji Horii (1985) Enix)

The secret door leads to a vast underground basement labyrinth, explored in first person view and looking very similar to a Wizardry dungeon (it even has some one-way walls). This is a somewhat jarring sequence which is completely unlike the standard graphic adventure presentation of the rest of the game. Nevertheless, this version of the game, with its "mystery, a 3D dungeon, and humor" is a major reason why Hideo Kojima decided to start making games. If there is any doubt that this labyrinth is inspired by Wizardry, your police assistant Yasu reads some graffiti on the wall that proves it (see above).

ヤス「もんすたあさぷらいずどゆうとかいてあります???」

Yasu: "It says 'MONSTER SURPRISED YOU'???"

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead (1981) Sir-Tech)

Wizardry pops up a "THE MONSTER(S) SURPRISED YOU" message when your adventuring party is ambushed by monsters in combat. It was a message that some Japanese players found puzzling.

Excerpt from ドラゴンクエストへの道 Road to Dragon Quest manga (Enix (1990))

Horii and Nakamura were heavily inspired by both Wizardry and Ultima (see above) when they set out to create an RPG for the Famicom/NES console. Their goal was to combine the large overworld of Ultima with the character graphics and leveling of Wizardry, but the entirety of the game had to fit into two 32KB ROM chips for Famicom. Horii reached out to artist Akira Toriyama (Dr. Slump, Dragon Ball) to design the art for the game, and thus the main Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior in the USA) team was assembled.

Tiled overland travel a la Ultima, Dragon Quest (Horii, Nakamura, and Toriyama (1987) Enix)

Full length combat portrait a la Wizardry, Dragon Quest (Horii, Nakamura, and Toriyama (1987) Enix)

Dragon Quest was a huge success in Japan and set the prototype for what would later be called a JRPG, typically defined as a digital RPG designed in Japan with game console friendly controls, manga-inspired graphics, and an epic storyline. The game was kept simple to adapt to game console play, with the player controlling only a single character. Akira Toriyama filled the game with charming and memorable creatures. As for the story, the evil Dragonlord has plunged the land into chaos and you, the hero, are the only one who can defeat him. For a touch of personalization, the player can choose the name of the hero and text boxes will refer to them by name.

Final Note: Lebling is Everywhere

Dave Lebling (1982) (image source)

While writing these notes, I noticed that one name kept popping up again and again: Dave Lebling. Lebling was at MIT's computer science lab in 1974 when he helped make an 8-player version of Greg Thompson's Maze/Maze War, probably the first networked first person shooter. Soon after Will Crowther stopped playing in the "Mirkwood Tales" D&D campaign with his buddies at BBN, Lebling joined the group. There was also his Imlac ports of Spacewar!, Hunt the Wumpus, and his trivia game created with thousands of questions sourced from the ARPANET.

All that was before Lebling co-authored Zork with other folks at MIT and helped found Infocom, the biggest name in text adventure games throughout the 1980s.