Five Awesome Gifts Dungeons & Dragons Gave to Video Games

IGN has made the weekend a little more entertaining by cranking out a list of “five awesome gifts” that have emerged due to the inception of Dungeons & Dragons, the lot of which include most of the CRPGs and MMORPGs ever created, player choice and their relative consequences, and more. While the former are definitely valid, I’m not sure I can quite get on board with this one:

Quake and Deus Ex

In the early 90s, the development team at id Software took breaks from working on Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom with tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. Among the characters created for this campaign was a hammer-wielding mystical entity named Quake. In addition to his monstrous weapon, Quake commanded the power of the sentient Hellgate Cube, a floating magical companion. When the id staff were tossing around ideas for a FPS follow-up to Doom, they turned to their D&D game for inspiration. John Romero co-opted the Quake character and publicly declared him the protagonist of the new shooter. Quake would use his signature lightning hammer against foes, and the semi-autonomous Hellgate Cube would allow him to syphon power from nearby enemies. The design team ultimately deviated from the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired elements, but the cavernous gothic legacy of id’s (other) flagship FPS owes its inception to a humble tabletop role playing campaign.

Quake wasn’t the only famous FPS to grow out of Carmack and Romero’s D&D world. Another important element of their campaign’s mythology was the Daikatana – a mystical blade of immense power. After Romero left id and formed Ion Storm, he named his company’s first big game for the magical sword. Plagued by public-relations blunders, corporate infighting, and numerous delays, the development of Daikatana ultimately destroyed Ion Storm, but not before a small branch of the studio headed by Warren Spector completed a little side-project called Deus Ex.

So maybe it’s a little bit of a stretch to declare that Deus Ex’s existence is owed to D&D but. we think it still counts.