" The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout The Digital Antiquarian
The Digital Antiquarian
A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher
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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout
24<br>Jan
This early advertisement for Fallout makes a not-so-subtle dig at gaming’s then-current flavor of the month, the highly streamlined — or, in the view of some, dumbed-down — CRPG Diablo.
Those of you who are regular readers of these histories will surely have noticed the relative dearth of coverage of the CRPG genre over the last few years. This isn’t reflective of any big shift in editorial policy; it’s rather reflective of the fortunes of the genre itself, which were not particularly good in the mid-1990s. Let’s take a moment to review how the CRPG found itself on the outside looking in while the rest of the games industry was growing by leaps and bounds.
The early efforts of pioneers like Jon Freeman, Richard Garriott, Robert Woodhead, and Andrew Greenberg culminated in the CRPG’s commercial breakout in 1985. That year Ultima IV and The Bard’s Tale, conveying two very different but equally tempting visions of what the genre could do and be, both became major hits. CRPGs continued on a steady upward trajectory thereafter, with ever more of them being released. Another watershed was reached in 1988, when Pool of Radiance, the first full-fledged, licensed implementation of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop rules on computers, sold over 250,000 copies to become the most successful game ever published by SSI, heretofore a modest purveyor of computerized wargames. More CRPGs came thick and fast after that.
By 1992, however, CRPGs were beginning to seem like too much of a single, fairly homogeneous thing. Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Might and Magic, The Magic Candle… even when the games were made with passion and love, which for the most part they were, they were becoming a bit difficult for even the cognoscenti to distinguish from one another. With their intense focus on statistics and their usually turn-based combat systems, these games seemed increasingly out of touch with the broader trends in gaming, whether one spoke of the flashy multimedia presentation of interactive movies or the visceral action of DOOM and its contemporaries.
The genre tried to adapt to the changing times by streamlining itself, replacing turn-based with real-time combat systems and making more use of multimedia. A couple of these "CRPG Lites" met with some success; Westwood’s Lands of Lore and Interplay’s Stonekeep both managed to sell more copies in the expanded marketplace of the mid-1990s than Pool of Radiance had at the end of the previous decade. But they were the exceptions that proved the rule. CRPGs stopped appearing regularly on the bestseller charts. As a result, most American publishers washed their hands of the genre entirely, leaving it to European importers and boutique diehards like SSI, who continued to flood the market with ever more underwhelming Dungeons & Dragons product until TSR, the maker of the tabletop game, finally took their license to do so away.
And then, just as 1996 was turning into 1997, along came a little game called Diablo, from Blizzard Entertainment. It did streamlining right; it took the traditional attributes of the CRPG, simplified them enough to make them intuitively understandable without ever cracking open a manual, polished the living hell out of every facet of their presentation and implementation, and then added the secret sauce of procedural generation to yield a game that was, in theory at least, infinitely replayable. In fact, Diablo was so streamlined that gamers have continued to argue to this day over whether it ought to qualify as a "real" CRPG at all. Yet its fast-paced accessibility and addictive nature made it a mainstream hit on a scale which no earlier CRPG could touch. In thus demonstrating to the world that there was some life yet in the old paradigm of exploring dungeons, killing monsters, collecting loot, and leveling up your character, it provided the first glimmer of a CRPG Renaissance that was lurking just over the horizon.
At the time, though, there was ample reason to wonder whether the Diablo model was all that the genre could aspire to in the future. What about the more conceptually ambitious CRPGs of yore, the ones that had striven to be about more than just loot and stats, that had often attempted — to be sure, sometimes clumsily — to present real interactive stories, set in compelling, internally consistent worlds? Those whom Diablo left still wishing for those things had their wish granted ten months later, by a more full-faceted herald of the CRPG Renaissance that went by the name of Fallout.
Tim Cain during the development of Fallout.
In 1990, Tim Cain was a graduate student at the University of...