The CRPG Addict Blog Interview

The CRPG Addict is a long-running blog built around the daunting task of playing every single CRPG in a chronological order. At this point, it’s been operational for over a decade, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be shutting down anytime soon. And if you’d like to learn more about the man who would undertake such a behemoth of a quest, you should check out this PC Gamer interview with him.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs to get you started:

So far, Chester has ventured through the very first mainframe-based computer role-playing games, charted the rise of Ultima, and battled through generations of computers. He’s faced adversity, balancing the thousands of hours his adventure demands against the needs of his personal life. He’s worked on it from his home in Maine, grappling with emulators and translations, and from hotels across the US while travelling for his job. He gave up on the whole endeavour once. But he’s just as active now as he was when he started, and that’s despite knowing that the whole thing is impossible.

It’s already taken him over two years to play through the games of 1992, from Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (“has a way of feeding the player overwrought prose”) to Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (“groundbreaking, innovative, well-produced, addictive, enormously fun to play—and at the same time a bit disappointing in what they did and didn’t do with the story”). And also the games you won’t remember, from Bandor: The Search for the Storm Giant King (“I binged a decent chunk of TV series episodes while playing the game because I needed some other source of entertainment”) to Ultizurk II: The Shadow Master (“extremely basic”).

Chester Bolingbroke isn’t the author of CRPG Addict’s real name, since he prefers to stay anonymous. “I’m mostly concerned that if anyone in my work life finds out about the blog and I’m late with some project and they go on my timeline and see that I’ve post a couple of entries on games.” But he goes by Chet on the blog, which is his real-life nickname too, so that’s what we’ll call him. Anyway, as he forges ahead, Chet knows the number of games released per year will only increase. “If I don’t start rejecting more games or finding other ways to change how I approach the chronology, I’ll die before I get out of the 1990s,” he says.