Picture a game where the hero traverses winding corridors populated with wandering monsters. This is a dark realm where caches of treasure give our hero just enough power to fight back for a short time. This is an adventure. This is D&D. This is Pacman.
Released in 1980, Pac-Man took the world by storm. Indeed, given the excitement and number of man-hours gobbled up in recent days by Google Pacman it still does. 30 years on, the game has lost none of its charm or addictiveness.
I’m pretty sure that when the good folks at Namco designed Pac-Man they’d never heard of this fledgling role-playing hobby, but in a happy case of convergent evolution there are several similarities between our little yellow hungry friend and Dungeons & Dragons.
We have the hero, alone and outclassed. Anyone who has played a solo adventure will know how that feels. The Wandering Monsters (so popular back in the day, now all but forgotten) each have a personality of their own, and employ different strategies to assault our lone adventurer.
Then there’s the treasure: those Power Pellets which equip our hero with a Sword +1, a Wand of Fireballs or whatever other D&D metaphor takes your fancy. He has enough power to fight back at last – until the monsters themselves increase in power and gain a few more Hit Dice, and the cycle begins again.
And all the while, the Experience Points score steadily rises…..
Discuss.
Don’t forget that the ever-expanding Blogwalk Fantasy: The Curse of the Vault is still ongoing. Join in the adventure today!
UPDATE: As has rightly been pointed out, Zork predates Pac-Man as a computer game. Blogpost title changed to “arcade game” accordingly.
I’m not sure if Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or Space Invaders was the first, but I think all of them qualify for the RPG tag regardless.
Donkey Kong, you’re levelling up, beating the monster at the end. Pac-Man you covered, and Space Invaders was the inexorable hordes of Mordor spewing from the Black Gate with you trying hard to whittle them down to let the plucky little Hobbits complete their sacred mission so you could all win, go home, then feed the elves to the Aliens.
.-= Moonwolf´s last blog ..Giftart Render for DianeT =-.
Pac-Man was a port of Rogue to the arcades (both were created in 1980). ;-)
They just implemented a real-time system instead turn based.
Venture was just an Atari version of the game. Rogue was well made, and I think if it were made now it would be graphically intensive.
Like Morrowind or Oblivion.
.-= Elton´s last blog ..Anny the Barbarian =-.