Interview: The CRPG Addict

The Life & Times of Video Games

The man behind The CRPG Addict, a blog dedicated to playing through the entire history of computer role-playing games in roughly-chronological order, discusses his decade-long (and counting!) conquest and the roots of his passion.

We also explore how his approach has changed as he's learnt more about the genre's history, the merits and failings of a scoring system for comparing games, the value of talking about a tiny niche within a niche in such detail, how he learnt to stop feeling guilty about loving role-playing games, and more.

Interview conducted April 30, 2020.

A super-basic overview of the CRPG lineage/family tree, as posited by Chet:

• The top level is PLATO games, the Ultima series, and Wizardry (though it also came from PLATO RPGs), plus SSI's early games
• Then you have key derivatives of these: Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, and SSI's RPGs
• And "at least half" of the genre going into the 1990s branches off directly from these
• The period between roughly 1978-83 was the primordial stage, where there were lots and lots of weird ideas that turned out to be evolutionary dead ends
• As an example of how this works, he pointed to The Witcher III, which he believes has a clear antecedent in the Aurora engine games, including Neverwinter Nights, which took influence from the Infinity Engine games, which go back to SSI's Gold Box games, which go back to the early SSI titles. It's the CRPG equivalent to six degrees of separation.

My full list of links from the episode is too long to fit into the summary field, so if you'd like to be directed to all the websites and blog entries and other things that relate to our discussion, you'll have to do so via lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-crpg-addict

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