“Starting around 1970, fans of wargames started experimenting with a new type of game in which players controlled individuals instead of directing armies. The most significant of these was the “Blackmoor campaign,” a late medieval wargame run by Dave Wesley and Dave Arneson”
“Whereas most of these experimental games were exercises in pure storytelling, Arneson added mechanics to the game using Chainmail, a wargame rulebook that had been co-developed by Gary Gygax, one of Arneson’s collaborators in the wargame space”
“This was the genesis of Dungeons & Dragons, officially introduced to the world in 1974. Much has been said about the influence that Dungeons & Dragons exerted on the burgeoning video game market, and yet it never seems like enough”
“I’d go so far as to say that video games as we know them might not exist at all were it not for the work undertaken by Gygax and Arneson.”
“Barely a year after the commercial release of Dungeons & Dragons, Rusty Rutherford created its first electronic adaptation under the peculiar name “pedit5.””
“The name was an artifact of the times. While the creator might have intended the game to be known by another name (both “The Dungeon” and “Monsters” are often cited), he was limited by the system. This program was in the fifth pedit slot, hence it is now known to history as pedit5”
“First developed the same year as pedit5, DND (a.k.a. The Game of Dungeons) was a parallel effort by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood to develop a Dungeons & Dragons game”
“Development of the first MUDs started around 1977, just two years after the initial dissemination of pedit5 and DND. The first significant release was Oubliette, a game that would eventually inspire the Wizardry series”
“This was followed by Moria, a group-based RPG that had been in development since at least 1976. The most refined game is Avatar (pictured above), which began development in 1976 and was formally released in 1979”