How long have you been playing computer RPGs?

Thanks to Luethar for this new poll, which is about when you started playing RPGs. From memory, I think we had something similar, but it had different poll options and it was such a long time ago that we forgot it anyway

Baldur's Gate & Fallout were my first games on the PC. I remember that as my first Pc cost me $2,000 dollars and wasn't really that powerful by today's standards.

If I recall it was a first generation Pentium Packard Bell desktop. Still I also played consoles before that so I can also say Atari played a large part in the 1980's.

Since 10pm last night..... I should sleep...

Text games starting in 1980 at high school, then continuing to Ultima games and Wizardry ones at university. There are days that I really miss the Apple computers and all the devices that came with them.

Wrote a text adventure on my Commodore 64. Might have been the Vic 20. I slayed that rubber-necked dragon in Adventure! more times than was healthy for a sane person.

Edit: That death pose is hard to forget, but just how much the dragon looked like an upright duck slipped my mind.

first gothic at the end of 2003

In between choice 1 and 2. I started in the mid '80s, (Ultima IV, Wizard's Crown, etc) a few years before the Gold Box games started to appear.

I too played text adventures before that (Scott Adams on the VIC20, and later Infocom) but I don't consider any of those RPGs.

Fallout 1 predates Baldur's Gate 1, and Fallout 2 predates Baldur's Gate 2, so I dunno about the labelling of the '90s and '00s.

end of 2003 for me too. Morrowind and Gothic2 very shortly after.

Early 80s - the C64 was my first computer.

1988? First one was Bard's Tale 2 on am IBM PS/2 model 70. Then U5. After that - can't remember exactly, but I played all the following Ultimas, Underworlds and the Martian Dream spin-off. First one set in Dungeons And Dragons was I think Ravenloft.

Come to think of it, also played ES1.

a pibbur who wasn''t pibbur back then

Dungeon Master on Atari ST was my first. Followed shortly by Ultima V.

Hmm, hard to remember the first RPG I played, it might have been Bards Tale 1 on the C64.....

I picked 80s but it was the late 80s of 1989 with Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory. Next up was Qfg2 in 1990 and then Eye of the Beholder in 91, which was my first D&D RPG - I dropped it due to no automap. I was only familiar with the rpgs of the 80s through magazine articles and ads and my brother advised me they were largely stat driven and uninteresting/unfriendly to play. I didn't have disposable cash of my own and largely played adventure games from Sierra.

I didn't really get into RPGs until Fallout 2 in 98, then later Baldur's Gate 2, I played the second entries before the first entries of both series. I finally got my hands on Betrayal at Krondor and played it on the ole 386 which was great also.

Not easy to poinpoint, and it depends on what is considered an RPG.

My first computer was a ZX81 in the mid-80s. But with only 1K of memory, I'm pretty sure there was no such game (Pac-man? Hmm). Then a ZX Spectrum, I think the original Elite by David Braben qualifies (yes, on a Spectrum! Graphics were different than the Elite: Dangerous version), or perhaps The Hobbit (that was called "an adventure game"). So that'd be end of the 80s.

Shortly after, a C64 must have counted a few of them too.

The first cRPG was Neverwinter Nights on a PC, must have been 2003

I picked 2000s. I started playing RPGs like Gothic and Fallout initially as well as Diablo II.
Those were my initial entries into the genre. It then expanded quite a lot.

Picked 2000s. BG2 was probably the first real RPG I played.

I had consoles before my first computer (1997) but BG1 is the first game that I truly fell in love with. I miss big boxes with things in. Work colleagues spent their breaks behind newspapers or fashion magazines, I studied my map and little glossy manual.

I think the poll should have been split between early and late 90s as these are basically two distinctive waves and Baldurs Gate with a Release of 1998 is a very late one, invigorating the genre - together with Fallout 1/2 which actually released in 1997 and 1998 - but this one is mentioned as 2000s, probably refering to Fallout 3 and NV, basically completely leaving out the classic games.

So I didnt chose any of the options in this poll as they din't quite represent me. But from the years alone it would be 1990s. But the early ones. My first RPGs were
-Eye of the Beholder (1990)
-Dark Sun (1991)
-Realms of Arkania (1992)
-Wizardry 7 (1992)
-Lands of Lore (1993)

So yeah, I am feeling as being a part of the Dark Sun Generation, and people who joined with Baldurs Gate being "the new kids on the block"
Nothing wrong with it, but the type of games and even the Operating systems were very distinctive in these eras.

I played Adventure on Atari. I still have my old Atari somewhere in basement. Some contractors did some work in my basement a few years ago and one of them asked my wife if she would sell the Atari? She told him not if she wanted to stay married :lol:. 1981 or 1982 was when I really started with Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Whenever Wizardry was released.

HiddenX said:

Early 80s - the C64 was my first computer.

Click to expand...

I had the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Commodore Vic20, C64, C128. My very first gaming interaction on a computer was a strategy game called Hamurabi. I played it on a mainframe at a museum in Houston. I was 9, so 1973. Let me google Hamurabi real quick.

Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language.

The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. The Sumer Game was inspired by The Sumerian Game, a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children, developed from 1964 to 1966 by designer and elementary school teacher Mabel Addis and IBM programmer William McKay.

Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL language, but around 1971 David H. Ahl ported it to DEC BASIC and in 1973 published it in 101 BASIC Games. This was later republished in Microsoft BASIC form in 1978's BASIC Computer Games. His expanded version of the game, titled Hamurabi, quickly became the more prominent version due to the popularity of both the book and the programming language. Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is also an antecedent to the city-building genre.

This game turned me into a computer geek I was amazed and it influenced the rest of my life.