From Tabletop to Online: How Did We Get Here?

RPG Vault has posted a new two-page feature called “From Tabletop to Online: How Did We Get Here?”, in which Octopi’s Tom George talks about how Dungeons & Dragons inspired modern day online games.

Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and wanting to replicate social and game experiences on computers, a first-year student in Stanford’s graduate computer science program, Don Woods, created a text game called Adventure in 1976. (4) The game involved no graphics, but did provide descriptions of environs and allowed the player to input numbers to indicate actions from a given list. The following year, several MIT students modified the game and called their version Zork. This version was groundbreaking in that it utilized a parser to understand common language commands. (5) This was the first true interactive computer role-playing game. Items in it could be picked up and moved; the player could do most anything, though the game still lacked graphics.

In 1980, British computer users created the first multi-user dungeon (MUD). The MUD expanded on the work done for Adventure and Zork, but what set it apart was that it was an online, networked game. (6) Finally, here was what role-playing gamers were looking for from a computer, the interactive experience other computer game developers were trying to re-create on standalone hardware. In a MUD, players could interact with one another and their environment, explore dungeons, fight one another, or just hang out chatting.