Fallout - The CRPG Renaissance

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The Digital Antiquarian looks back at Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game:

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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout

This early advertisement for Fallout makes a not-so-subtle dig at gaming's then-current flavor of the month, the highly streamlined - or, in the view of some, dumbed-down - CRPG Diablo.

Those of you who are regular readers of these histories will surely have noticed the relative dearth of coverage of the CRPG genre over the last few years. This isn't reflective of any big shift in editorial policy; it's rather reflective of the fortunes of the genre itself, which were not particularly good in the mid-1990s. Let's take a moment to review how the CRPG found itself on the outside looking in while the rest of the games industry was growing by leaps and bounds.

The early efforts of pioneers like Jon Freeman, Richard Garriott, Robert Woodhead, and Andrew Greenberg culminated in the CRPG's commercial breakout in 1985. That year Ultima IV and The Bard's Tale, conveying two very different but equally tempting visions of what the genre could do and be, both became major hits. CRPGs continued on a steady upward trajectory thereafter, with ever more of them being released. Another watershed was reached in 1988, when Pool of Radiance, the first full-fledged, licensed implementation of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop rules on computers, sold over 250,000 copies to become the most successful game ever published by SSI, heretofore a modest purveyor of computerized wargames. More CRPGs came thick and fast after that.

By 1992, however, CRPGs were beginning to seem like too much of a single, fairly homogeneous thing. Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Might and Magic, The Magic Candle, Lands of Lore, Disciples of Steel... even when the games were made with passion and love, which for the most part they were, they were becoming a bit difficult for even the cognoscenti to distinguish from one another. With their intense focus on statistics and their usually turn-based combat systems, these games seemed increasingly out of touch with the broader trends in gaming, whether one spoke of the flashy multimedia presentation of interactive movies or the visceral action of DOOM and its contemporaries. CRPGs stopped appearing regularly on the bestseller charts. As a result, most American publishers washed their hands of the genre entirely, leaving it to European importers and boutique diehards like SSI, who continued to flood the market with ever more underwhelming Dungeons & Dragons product until TSR, the maker of the tabletop game, finally took their license to do so away. The CRPG, it seemed, had no new ideas and no new places left to go.

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