Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main Blizzard office.
The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.
Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.
He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.
I spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 2 through middle school-graduate school, developing bots, etc.; it's where I really got interested in computers and reverse engineering. My dad locked the disk in our family's safe at one point to prevent me from playing, and I've had hundreds of cd-keys banned from Battle.net. I'm sure many people out there are the same, but it's hard to overstate how much that one game influenced my life. Awesome to see that it was made by such a great guy.
It's so nice for me to read this and be able to relate. I probably wouldn't be working as a software developer today if I hadn't spent those countless hours as a kid hacking the game, setting up (d2jsp) bots, fiddling to run multiple instances on the same computer, scripting together bot detection evasion patterns etc etc.
Recently installed it again during lockdown after not playing for a good 10 years. Still has some 20k+ people online at times. Really solid game.
This post portem is gold. I recall seeing it before and realizing how sometimes gold really is just a few brushes of dust and dirt away, but you need to be diligent in testing out new ideas for the sake of seeing a product in different versions. Its an exciting process
I’m pretty sure NetHack works that way (Perhaps the whole genre all the way back to the original Rogue, but nethack is the one that I’ve personally played)
PC-88 and PC-98 software is super fascinating. Thousands of games, many with mind-blowingly beautiful pixel art which was leaps and bounds better than their American counterparts. Displays really needed to be better in Japan because of the challenge of displaying elaborate Japanese characters.
As an aside, both were infamous for huge libraries of pornographic games (eroge). Game companies like Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom made eroge for those platforms before they found mainstream success.
Anyways, there's a ton of very cool and cutting edge gaming history, and the sad thing is how inaccessible a lot of it is since most of it never saw translations. For example, Yu-No was a groundbreaking visual novel that influenced games like Steins;Gate (both had similar themes of parallel worlds), but never got brought over because it was text heavy and (unsurprisingly) laden with smut. Many japanese games and series that we now consider classic first came about on PC-88/PC-98/MSX2 or had side games on them.
One of my favorite twitter bots is PC-98 Bot, which posts screengrabs of PC-98 games: https://twitter.com/PC98_bot
The Tower of Druaga was an arcade game, release in June 1984, that has many action-RPG elements. No "stat points", but lots of items, akin to Zelda.
With this "Dragon Slayer" game from September 1984 being pushed in this article... I'd argue that Tower of Druaga has the realtime elements (being an arcade game), as well as being released a few months earlier.
I don't know if Tower of Druaga is the earliest "action RPG" game, but... it has to be one of the earlier ones. Just a few months predating Dragon Slayer.
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Tower of Druaga as the nasty arcade game that was unbeatable if you forgot to pickup items from earlier floors. Once you advance to the next level, you can never return to an earlier level. If you have an "unbeatable" scenario, then I guess try harder next time, thank you for your $0.25.
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EDIT: With that being said, this "The Caverns of Freitag" game is 1982, predating both Dragon Slayer and Tower of Druaga. So Caverns of Freitag sounds like the earliest known Action RPG.
The article doesn't go into Freitag until a bit later. I guess I read the lead and assumed it'd be about Dragon Slayer.
Caverns of Freitag was beaten by 2 years by Adventure on the Atari 2600.
It seems to me the definition of Action RPG is somewhat arbitrary and where you draw the line determines who is first. The only hard requirements being that it is not turn based and is role playing in some respect.
for NES all I played was Zelda, I felt like snes really turned out alot of great titles, Lagoon, Wanders from Ys III, Secret of Mana, possibly Equinox(maybe more puzzle than rpg) but all great.
If anyone reading this has not played Secret of Mana try it out, you are in for a treat. IMO the best game on SNES with a good story, playable for three players at the same time and AMAZING music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3oxjanw72w
The sequel Seiken Densetsu III is great too, got playable for non japanese through fan translations. You can choose your party of three from six characters. Found a nice video intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSTwjVnlNss
Anyone interested in an Action/rougelike from yesteryear should check out Cave Noire for the original Gameboy. Surprisingly comprehensive rougelike for the time.
This was an interesting, fun story. The I was pleased that it took place in Beep. I visited Beep last time I was in Tokyo and was just amazed. It’s tiny, but packed with Japanese PCs, many of them running games you can play, along with software, and more. Well worth a visit.
Gateway to Apshai was also early in 1983, though I think it didn't have a level up mechanism. Same pathfinding tricks were required to survive harder monsters.
Why don't you think it qualifies? You have an inventory, you have money and buy items, you advance your character (not through experience points, but through finding secrets and beating major enemies).
You don't really make choices in most Zelda game. All the character advancement is coupled to story progression (you get an item in the 1st dungeon that lets you access the 2nd dungeon and so on). I think that reduces the "role playing" that goes on and makes Zelda more of an Action/Adventure series.
It's not even true for many of the "classic" Zelda games like Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time. Sure, there's a series of mandatory quests with associated items -- but there's also a bunch of side quests to pick up optional items, like extra heart containers, additional bottles, and various tools (like the Cape of Byrna in LttP or the masks in OoT).
Those numbers are important! In classic rpgs, both western and Japanese, skillful play consists in strategically manipulating those numbers to defeat challenges. It's a very different feeling than in an action game where skillful play is about manipulating the virtual physics of your avatar.
Paper Mario is clearly an RPG, but it has a similar amount of numbers backing it's system as your average Zelda. It's just that Zelda hides the numbers from you and Paper Mario does not.
A good way of thinking about this is that the Zelda games are genetically rpgs, in the sense that Miyamoto was doing his spin on the style of game that Nihon Falcom had introduced. Obviously, the absense of numerical character abilities in LoZ makes it feel somewhat different than quintessential Japanese ARPGs like YS or Seiken Denetsu (Legend of Mana).
It's a silly thing to do. Diablo copies a lot from roguelikes. In fact, it is considered the first commercial roguelike.
"Diablo by Blizzard is considered by many to be a commercial roguelike, a roguelike that was graphical and real-time. Developers Brevik and Schaefer had in mind a graphic version of the "old Unix-based games". Eight months into development, the decision was made to make the game real-time as opposed to turn-based. Diablo is by all accounts a Roguelike, but with graphics and real-time gameplay."
The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.
Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.
He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc