Big week alert! Along with the incoming flurry of new game reveals and trailers that will be hitting from Summer Game Fest this weekend, this week also marks the long-awaited release of the Nintendo Switch 2! That means we’ll see some Switch 2 games on this week’s list of new RPGs, along with a few other interesting titles.

Peruse the list for yourself below, and then consider leaving a comment on what games you’re excited for and whether you’ve managed to snag a rare Nintendo Switch 2 preorder1.

Programming note: I’ve chosen not to include the Nintendo Switch 2 Editions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in the list below, because they’re primarily minor performance upgrades for two relatively recent games. That said, they’re the two games I’m perhaps most excited to boot up whenever I get a Switch 2, and the Zelda Notes feature sounds extremely cool.

Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster

Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Developer: Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: June 5, 2025

Here it is! Our first Nintendo Switch 2 game on the big list2! Originally released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2013, Bravely Default was followed up by a direct sequel in 2016 and a follow-up set in a different world in 2021. Instead of a hypothetical Bravely Default III or Bravely Third, though, Square Enix is celebrating the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 by resurrecting that original game and saving it from the obscurity of outdated hardware.

For what it’s worth, the 3DS version of Bravely Default garnered a positive reception, earning a respectable Metacritic score of 85. Along with the expected HD-ified visuals and a user interface redesign to make up for the switch from 3DS to a single-screen platform, Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster will also include some quality of life features that have popped up in a lot of recent Square Enix remasters, such as the ability to speed up battles, fast-forward through story sequences, and raise or lower encounter rates. It will also gain a couple of new mini-games that will unlock new lore tidbits, so there’s something fresh here even if you’ve already played the original.

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint (leaving Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: Trese Brothers
Publisher: Trese Brothers
Release Date: June 2, 2025

We’ve got a couple unique indie RPGs leaving early access this week. First up is Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, a cyberpunk-themed squad-based tactical RPG. Think of it as something like Cyberpunk 2077 meets XCOM: Enemy Unknown with more than a little bit of Shadowrun tossed in for good measure.

Almost two years on since it originally hit early access in late 2023, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint boasts a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with user reviews praising everything from how missions are structured to the game’s great, tense use of stealth to game’s impressive storytelling, which weaves character backstories into the missions.

It’s worth noting, as well, that developer Trese Brothers is a legit indie team, made up of a very small team led by (you guessed it) the Trese Brothers, Cory and Andrew. They’ve been making cool indie RPGs and sim titles since 2014, including their first PC game, Heroes of Steel RPG, and 2018’s very well-regarded Star Traders: Frontiers. Flashpoint certainly appears to carry on that legacy of quality.

Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Developer: Toby Fox
Publisher: Toby Fox
Release Date: June 5, 2025

Though I absolutely adored Undertale (like basically everyone else), I’ve held off on checking out the follow-up game, Deltarune, thus far. That can mostly be chalked up to the episodic release schedule—I think it’s a cool experiment for developer Toby Fox, but I don’t trust myself to play an early batch of chapters and then actually return to it and remember anything about what’s going on by whenever the next chapter is available.

Unfortunately, I’m likely going to be continuing that trend for some time. Although the simultaneous launch of chapters 3 and 4 marks the first official paid release for Deltarune (the previous two chapters were available for free, essentially operating as demos for the project), the game is expected to comprise seven chapters in total.

For those who are preparing to jump into Deltarune this week, whether for the first time or as returning players, I salute you. Please know that I wish I could join you. While I wait for the rest of the chapters, I’m going to comfort myself by listening to “Megalovania” on repeat and gently sobbing.

Dragon Is Dead (leaving Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: TeamSuneat
Publisher: PM Studios Inc.
Release Date: June 6, 2025

Dragon Is Dead is a sort of Castlevania- or Blasphemous-looking roguelike that’s been available in early access form for almost exactly one year. In that time, it’s garnered a “Very Positive” rating from Steam users, with one also bringing up comparisons to Diablo II and Dark Souls. Seems worth a shot, and personally, I love when games don’t stay in early access for too long. A year feels just right to me.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PC
Developer: Marvelous
Publishers: Marvelous, XSEED Games
Release Date: June 5, 2025

Here’s one we’ve got a lot of hype for at the Cartoon Ghost Manor! For those not already in the know, the Rune Factory series is the more action-RPG spin-off of the farming sim Story of Seasons games (which is, itself, the modern version of the original Harvest Moon games, since Marvelous lost the North American rights to that name a decade or so back).

While Rune Factory features some of the farming and life-sim elements of Story of Seasons, it also blends in more traditional fantasy RPG elements like combat and dungeon crawling. In the case of Guardians of Azuma specifically, players take on the role of an “Earth Dancer,” which means the game’s flashy combat is inspired by traditional Japanese dances used to purify the land from evil spirits. The Eastern aesthetic sets Guardians of Azuma apart from previous Rune Factory games and has me extremely eager to check it out.

Early reviews for Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma have been solid, with the game landing a current Metacritic of 82 on Nintendo Switch and 79 on PC. One of my favorite Switch-focused YouTube channels, SwitchUp, gave the Nintendo Switch version of the game an 80, citing great village management and generally fast, fun gameplay, but slightly janky combat and an inconsistent performance. That last bit will hopefully be less of an issue on PC and with the Nintendo Switch 2 version.

Voidsayer

Platform: PC
Developer: Pavel Auseitasau
Publisher: Indie.io
Release Date: June 2, 2025

As a roguelite obsessive, I’ve had my eye on Voidsayer for a minute, but believe me when I say, this isn’t just another roguelite. No, Voidsayer comes across like the bastard spawn of Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Pokémon. Players will have to journey across a dark, broken-down world, recruiting monsters that tend to be less cute and cuddly and more toward the “Lovecraftian freak” categorization.

It’s still very early, but Steam user reviews for Voidsayer are currently resting at “Mostly Positive.” Some of the less stoked players say the game is lacking variety and gets a bit dull, as well as complaining about permadeath, but hey, that’s part of the deal with roguelites. Other reviewers have celebrated the game’s cheap price and indie spirit, suggesting that this is a great starting point for developer Pavel Auseitasau to build off in the future.

And that’s this week’s list of new RPG releases! Please share this post and Substack with any RPG lovers in your life who might also want to be kept updated on the latest launches. And if you’re up for it, consider leaving a comment letting me know which games on this week’s list have captured your attention.

Hello and welcome to this week’s look at the new RPG video game launches you have to look forward to over the course of this seven-day stretch of eternity! To all Cartoon Ghost’s United States-based readers, I hope you had a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. I spent a good chunk of mine outside but devoted a lot of Memorial Day itself to finally making some real progress on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’m out of Act 1 finally!

But enough about old RPGs! Let’s talk about the new hotness. Check out the list of what’s coming out this week below, and leave a comment if I missed anything or if there’s any specific games coming out that you’re extremely hyped for.

Cattle Country

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Castle Pixel LLC
Publisher: Playtonic Friends
Release Date: May 27, 2025

A new week inevitably means at least one new pixel-art life sim. In fact, there’s more than one this week—surprise surprise!—but at least both of them have some unique elements. In the case of Cattle Country, developer Castle Pixel LLC has traded in the fantasy setting of most games in this genre for a Wild West frontier-inspired aesthetic.

With that setting shift comes a focus on, well, cattle, as well as more modern technologies like guns, trains, and dynamite for mining. Add in the requisite batch of nearly 20 romanceable characters, and it may just be enough to set Cattle Country apart from being just another Stardew Valley clone. The game just launched today, but early user reviews on Steam are positive so far.

Crystal of Atlan

Platforms: Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation 5
Developer: Nuverse
Publisher: Skystone Games
Release Date: May 28, 2025

It’s rare for a mobile title to sneak its way onto these lists1, but as a Genshin Impact competitor, Crystal of Atlan deserves at least a little bit of attention. I actually got the chance to try this one out for myself waaaaay back during a technical beta in late 2023. You can read my thoughts here, courtesy of my former employer, but to sum it up: I was pretty impressed!

With free-to-play titles like this, it’s always hard to gauge how things are going to turn out long-term. A game can have combat that feels awesome, beautiful anime visuals, and cozy life-sim elements, but if it ends up locking away all that content behind systems that aggressively push players to spend money, it’s all for naught. That said, this at least looks like one of the most promising free-to-play action-RPGs of the last few years, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that they won’t mess it up with bad monetization.

Elden Ring Nightreign

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer: FromSoftware Inc.
Publishers: FromSoftware Inc., Bandai Namco Entertainment
Release Date: May 29, 2025

In what’s sure to be a massively influential launch one way or another, Elden Ring Nightreign returns players to the messed up world of FromSoftware’s genuinely unbelievably popular Elden Ring. Unlike last year’s excellent Shadow of the Erdtree, Nightreign is not an expansion to the base game but rather a stand-alone title. And not just any stand-alone title, but one that looks to experiment and push at the boundaries of what a Soulslike can be.

To be specific, Nightreign reimagines the core Soulslike gameplay loop by focusing on roguelike-inspired design and three-player cooperative gameplay. Most of FromSoft’s Souls titles have some form of co-op implemented, but Nightreign appears to emphasize it to a far greater degree—although notably, playing solo is still an option.

After spending a brisk 225 hours in Elden Ring and the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC over the last year,2 there’s no doubt that I’ll be jumping into Nightreign at some point. But even beyond playing it, I’m fascinated to see how this test turns out and what that will mean for the future of one of my favorite game studios of all time. Will Elden Ring’s world hit as hard when exploration is downplayed? Will players be pulled to spend as much time with it when there’s limited long-term progression and (presumably) a lot less of that deliciously weird FromSoft plot and lore to chew on?

And perhaps most pressingly, how will Nightreign’s success or failure reflect on the studio’s only other currently announced project, the equally multiplayer-centric Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods? That title also throws in player-versus-player antics to go along with the cooperative monster-slaying, so it feels like there’s even more skepticism and concern from a certain portion of the FromSoft/Soulslike fan base.3 Players should start to see for themselves this week whether Nightreign is setting this legendary developer up for more multiplayer-heavy titles in the future.

Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer: CyberConnect2
Publisher: CyberConnect2
Release Date: May 28, 2025

The furry aesthetic may be a turnoff to some,4 but don’t let that turn you away. The previous two entries of the tactical RPG series have been widely praised by those who checked them out. The third game is being marketed as the grand finale, so probably not one to start with. This franchise is definitely on my list to get around to one of these days though.

One other noteworthy fact about Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3: As with the previous Fuga games, it’s being both developed and self-published by CyberConnect2. That studio has been around in some form since 1996 and is particularly known for action-RPGs and anime-based fighters. Interestingly, CyberConnect2 was originally hired on as a developer for Final Fantasy VII Remake way back in 2015. That partnership ended in 2017 with Square Enix taking development for the remake in-house in order to have a strong grasp on quality control and scheduling. Makes sense why CyberConnect2 would want to keep exploring self-publishing as long as they’re able!

Nice Day for Fishing

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5
Developer: FusionPlay
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: May 29, 2025

Who doesn’t love a good fishing mini-game? Now how about if fishing was the game? I’ve always felt like we don’t get enough fishing-focused RPGs to stand alongside all the gardening-heavy life sims out there, but Nice Day for Fishing has arrived to fill that void.

In this delightfully silly game, players take on the role of Baelin, a “fisherman NPC.” NPC no longer, however! When the land’s heroes vanish, Baelin has to step up and save his village with the only tool he has: his trusty fishing rod. Alongside a massive bestiary of fish to collect, players will be able to gear up with new rods, hooks, bait, and other upgrades that will impact each cast into the water. Here’s hoping this game pulls off being as charming as it appears in trailers and screenshots.

That’s the list for this week! Leave a comment and let me know what games have grabbed your attention. Maybe I’ll catch some of you in Nightreign this weekend?

The bad news? I’m late on posting last week’s new RPG releases because I was under the weather last week.

The good news? Well, I’ve been kind of wanting to shift the “new releases” post to the start of the week before the games come out rather than the end of the week after. So what better time for that than now?

With that in mind, this week’s post I’ll go over all the new RPGs that came out last week (the week of May 12, 2025) and those coming out this week (the week of May 19, 2025). Going forward, I’ll be aiming to publish the new releases post on Sunday or Monday of each week.

Thanks as always for your patience, and feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts on the scheduling plan! Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

Blades of Fire

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: MercurySteam
Publisher: 505 Games
Release Date: May 22, 2025

Wow, ok, here is a game I didn’t guess I would be hype for, and yet I absolutely am hyped beyond belief. At first glance, Blades of Fire may strike viewers as a fairly generic-looking fantasy action-RPG with some of the requisite Dark Souls influence. But when I look at this game, I see one thing and one thing only: a successor to 2010’s deeply underrated Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

There’s a good reason for the similarities too. Blades of Fire comes from Lords of Shadow developer MercurySteam and shares that game’s director, Enric Álvarez. And sure, Lords of Shadow 2 may have been a massive letdown, but this team more than deserves another swing at things. Besides, almost no one makes this type of epic, cinematic, entirely single-player-focused action-RPG anymore. I’m absolutely planning to try it for myself.

(Note: I used a screenshot rather than a trailer for this entry, because the trailer is age-restricted, so it cannot be embedded/played outside of YouTube. You can check out a gameplay trailer for yourself at this link.)

Death End Re;Quest: Code Z

Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (PC later this year)
Developers: Compile Heart, Idea Factory
Publisher: Idea Factory International
Release Date: May 13, 2025

I haven’t dipped my toes into the Death End Re;Quest franchise before, but I’ve always been curious. I love Japanese RPGs, and I also love the horror aesthetic and the blend of visual novel storytelling that this franchise is known for.

Code Z twists that formula in a new direction, though, by replacing the traditional third-person RPG exploration and combat with a traditional, top-down roguelike approach. It sounds like it follows a new protagonist and a side story from the main games to go along with the gameplay shift. I could always use more roguelikes for my Steam Deck, so I’ll check this out when it makes its way to PC later this year.

(Note: I used a screenshot rather than a trailer for this entry, because the trailer is age-restricted, so it cannot be embedded/played outside of YouTube. You can check out a gameplay trailer for yourself at this link.)

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series (Nintendo Switch 2 later)
Developer: Level-5 Inc.
Publisher: Level-5 Inc.
Release Date: May 21, 2025

I was obsessed with the original Fantasy Life when it first came to North America on the 3DS way back in 2014. It was a game that had all the cozy life-sim elements that fans of Story of Seasons and Stardew Valley love, but it also had some more traditional RPG elements. And best of all, I didn’t have to stick to just one way of playing: I could swap between playing on the life path of a chef to that of a blacksmith to that of a mercenary to that of an angler, based on whatever I felt like progressing at the time.

Fantasy Life i looks to carry on that lovely blend of crafting, gathering, combat, and exploration, except this time it is wisely available on all major platforms. On top of that, The Girl Who Steals Time promises a much bigger open world and expanded multiplayer options. Barring disastrous first impressions from reviewers, this is a no-brainer day-one purchase for me!

Lynked: Banner of the Spark (leaving Early Access)

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: FuzzyBot
Publisher: Dreamhaven
Release Date: May 22, 2025

This cartoony action-RPG has been in early access on Steam since October 2024, but as of this week, it will enter its full 1.0 launch, as well as arriving on consoles. The game promises a mix of roguelite progression with chill life-sim elements. Think of it as something like Hades meets Animal Crossing with an art style reminiscent of Ratchet & Clank.

For what it’s worth, the reaction to early access on Steam has been “Very Positive.” User reviews have praised the game’s cute aesthetics, good vibes, and fun combat, as well as the ease of dropping in and out of co-op with friends. The 1.0 launch will include a bunch of new story chapters, missions, and enemies. I just hope it doesn’t go under the radar the way some early access games tend to.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Battle Destiny Remastered

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Developer: Bandai Namco Forge Digitals
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc.
Release Date: May 21, 2025

Lore reveal: I’m kind of a Gundam nut. I haven’t watched all of various Gundam shows—not even close—but I really love a lot of the older series. Moreover, I’m always looking for a great video game adaptation, which it feels like we haven’t had for quite some time.

Enter Battle Destiny Remastered, an updated version of a Japan-only Vita game from 2012. As you might expect, the game’s action-packed missions have players facing off against other mechas in support of one of three factions. Between missions, players can modify and level up their Gundam, or jump into more than 100 different Mobile Suits from across the history for the franchise. If the trailer is anything to go by, it looks great in action!

(Now can we please get another Dynasty Warriors: Gundam game, or even just a PC rerelease of the originals?)

Palia: The Elderwood Expansion

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Singularity 6 Corporation
Publisher: Singularity 6 Corporation
Release Date: May 13, 2025

May 13 was a big date for cozy MMO Palia! First off, the game arrived for the first time on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. On top of that, developer Singularity 6 introduced Elderwood, a huge free expansion that adds a new adventure zone full of springy mushrooms to jump from and bizarre artifacts to ponder. There’s also a whole new Relics equipment system. I spent a fair bit of time checking out Palia last year and really enjoyed it. Maybe this is a good time to check back in!

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (leaving Early Access)

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Questline
Publisher: Awaken Realms
Release Date: May 23, 2025

Let’s get this out of the way first: PLAY THIS GAME. Yes, this is one of the rare cases where I have had a chance to play one of the games on this list prior to launch (in this case, through its early access release on Steam, which has been live since March 2023). As such, I can happily confirm that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a very special CRPG, and it deserves your attention.

The quick pitch for The Fall of Avalon is that it’s sort of like an Oblivion-era Elder Scrolls game but built around a very dark, very interesting take on Arthurian legend. I played the game when it first hit early access, and even in that most rough of states, I was blown away by how much more it captured my imagination than anything Bethesda has put out since Fallout 3.

After playing five to ten hours in early access, I decided to set Tainted Grail aside until the full launch. Now that is almost here, and it will include an estimated fifty to seventy hours of gameplay, hundreds of sidequests, unique weapons, and NPCs to interact with, dozens of dungeons to conquer, and more. Developer Awaken Realms also promises that the branching main story quest leads to “hundreds of different endings,” which seems like an awfully tall order, but I like to see the ambition at least.

Tales of Seikyu (Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: ACE Entertainment
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Release Date: May 21, 2025

Tales of Seikyu is an adorable-looking life-sim where players use powers granted from yokai1 to help take care of their crops and explore the island of Seikyu. It looks like the game will feature some combat and dating sim elements as well. The look of the game is great, at least. If everything else about it lines up, I could definitely see this game getting interest from a wider audience.

Trident’s Tale

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer: 3DClouds
Publisher: 3DClouds
Release Date: May 22, 2025

It feels safe to say that there has never been enough pirate-themed RPGs. Trident’s Tale seeks to fill that void with a very Fable-meets-Sea of Thieves look that could be quite nice. It also appears to have plenty of ship customization, which is a must for a pirate game.

That said, I don’t know much about 3DClouds, the Italy-based developer behind this title. It seems that most of their past games have been licensed titles based on kid-friendly IP like Paw Patrol, Transformers, and Hot Wheels. They previously tested the pirate RPG waters with 2021’s King of Seas, but reviews for that were mixed, noting a lack of variety and a bland world. Fingers crossed that the studio has had time to improve on some of those ideas in the years since.

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: 7Quark
Publishers: 7Quark, Game Source Entertainment
Release Date: May 14, 2025

I’ve had my eye on this very stylish, Japanese myth-inspired roguelite since it was successfully funded on Kickstarter late last year. Unfortunately, the launch has been more than a little rough. Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade currently has a rating of “Mixed” on Steam, with negative user reviews pointing to some major bugs and a lack of content.

To developer 7Quark’s credit, they did launch with a roadmap promising at least two meaty-sounding updates this year—one for August and one for November. And there are a fair number of positive reviews as well, so hopefully they can turn the ship around. This is one of those rare cases where I wonder if the game may have been better off launching in early access to properly set expectations.

And that’s it for this week! …And last week!

Besides Tainted Grail (which I again implore you to check out at some point if you enjoy Elder Scrolls-style RPGs at all), is there anything on the list you’re looking forward to? Leave a comment with what you’ll be playing, and I promise to put down Fantasy Life i long enough to respond!

It’s another slow week for new RPGs, but the indies are carrying things. The games below may be smaller and lesser-known, but some of them look extremely cool, especially given that they were developed with much smaller teams—in fact, in one case, a team of just one! Actually, let’s jump right in to that game.

Creature Keeper

Platform: PC
Developer: Fervir Games
Publisher: Graffiti Games
Release Date: May 8, 2025

Do you like Pokémon? Now what if Pokémon but it’s an action-RPG and the cute monsters you’re collecting have unique skill trees and other methods of improving their stats and customizing them beyond just leveling up? Sounds pretty good, right?

Creature Keeper raised just over $50,000 on Kickstarter back in 2019, and it’s finally ready for the spotlight. Early Steam reviews are Mixed, but the main criticism I’ve read seems to be focused around balance issues. I’m willing to give some grace, seeing as it was developed by a solo dev, and also seeing as it looks extremely cute. At least one professional review—from gaming site Noisy Pixel—has proclaimed Creature Keeper a must-play!

Empyreal

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Silent Games
Publisher: Secret Mode
Release Date: May 8, 2025

One of the most interesting launches of the week is this indie action-RPG from a studio started by former Ubisoft developers. That team’s first release is Empyreal, a fast-paced, loot-centric action-RPG that kind of gives me vibes of Dark Souls mixed with Destiny.

Empyreal reportedly includes very deep systems for modifying gear and unlocking new abilities, but the most interesting feature is the “Cartogram” system. Players find these blueprints and use them to tweak the next area they’ll visit. In other words, players have some level of control over the next zone they adventure through, including its aesthetic, enemy types, difficulty, and more.

All in all, it sounds fascinating, although it’s worth noting that early reactions (both professional and from random Steam reviewers) are mixed. It sounds like the biggest complaint is that the game can come across as very obtuse, with all those systems snaking together and playing off of each other in ways that aren’t entirely clear. Still, I’ll be keeping an eye on Empyreal, because it feels like there’s a lot of promise here if it gets some strong patches and content updates in the future. Doesn’t hurt that it’s launching at only $29.99 either.

Pixelshire

Platform: PC
Developer: Kappa Bits
Publisher: Merge Games
Release Date: May 8, 2025

Pixelshire is the latest in a long, proud tradition of Stardew Valley-esque pixel-art life sim RPGs. These games can be a blast—there’s a reason there’s so many of them!—but unfortunately the early buzz around this one is not good. It has a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, with reviews full of complaints about major bugs, control issues, and even broken tutorial quests. One user review even calls it “damn near unplayable.” Yikes.

According to publisher Merge Games, Pixelshire is planned for release on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch later this year. Maybe by then, some of the rough parts will be smoothed out. Fingers crossed.

Wings of Endless

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Developer: Isoca Games
Publisher: JanduSoft
Release Date: May 8, 2025

Call me a sucker, but you show me an action-RPG platformer with Metroidvania-style maps, and yep, that’s going right on my wishlist. Wings of Endless builds on that winning formula by allowing players to swap between three different characters on the fly, with each character boasting unique abilities.

This lovely pixel art title comes from an indie developer based in Uruguay who previously created a Link to the Past-inspired top-down roguelike called LootLite. So far, Wings of Endless hasn’t garnered many reviews, but I’m certainly eager to give it a try.

Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall

Platform: PC
Developer: Brave at Night
Publisher: Brave at Night
Release Date: May 8, 2025

I haven’t checked out the original Yes, Your Grace, but I know it was a much-loved kingdom management RPG. Snowfall builds on that legacy, letting players step into the role of the king of a fantasy kingdom inspired by Slavic folklore. Being royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though, as you’ll have to decide how to best use your resources, balance your relationships, and keep your kingdom safe.

Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall is only available on PC at launch, but the first game eventually made its way to Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series. Here’s hoping this one follows suit!

And that’s it for this week!

Let me know in the comments if any of this week’s new RPG releases jumped out at you, or if you’re desperately waiting for some of the biggest launches coming later this year. Personally, I really want to jump into Wings of Endless and Creature Keeper both.

After a massive week for new RPG releases last week, things have slowed down a lot. There are still a few intriguing titles to talk about, though, even if they’re much smaller.

Age of Reforging: The Freelands

Platform: PC
Developer: PersonaeGame Studio
Publisher: Kunpan Games
Release Date: April 28, 2025

From the limited information I can find, the developer behind Age of Reforging: The Freelands, PersonaeGame Studio, seems to be based in China and primarily creates weird little indie CRPGs like 2020’s Blackthorn Arena. I’ve loved seeing the growth of the Chinese game development scene over the last five-plus years, and it’s always fascinating seeing another culture’s take on a style of fantasy that feels distinctly Western.

If that’s not enough to sell you on checking out Age of Reforging, though, make sure to check out the trailer above. The absolutely baffling accent from the trailer’s narrator deserves to be heard for yourself!

Castle Craft (Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: Twin Earth
Publisher: Astra Logical
Release Date: April 28, 2025

Now here’s something surprisingly cool-looking. Castle Craft’s voxel art style means it initially comes across as yet another Minecraft clone survival game. In reality, though, this title mixes together elements from real-time strategy, tower defense, farm sim, horde mode, automation sim, and RPGs, combining it all into something that looks totally unique. The voxel graphics are put to good use in allowing everything to be fully destructible, and I love games that have the tactical gameplay of a great city-builder or strategy title but still allow the player to get up close to the action.

Conquest Dark (Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: Eldritch Sword Games
Publisher: Mad Mushroom
Release Date: April 30, 2025

Like Halls of Torment before it, Conquest Dark appears to marry the sensory-overload horde massacring joy of Vampire Survivors to something more akin to the art style and character progressing of Diablo. The game promises to take players through the progression curve of an action-RPG in each run, and as I can attest from my more than 80 hours in Halls of Torment, that’s a pretty killer feeling if they can pull it off. I don’t think I’ll play Conquest Dark while it’s in early access, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it for sure.

Freeride

Platform: PC
Developer: Flightyfelon Games Inc.
Publishers: Future Friends Games, Flightyfelon Games Inc.
Release Date: May 1, 2025

We’ve seen plenty of pixel art games emulating the look of the NES and Genesis era, and in recent years there’s been an uptick of games using the low-poly style of the N64/PlayStation 1 days. But Freeride may be the first modern game I’ve seen that appears to be going for a 3DS vibe with its visuals. I love it!

Beyond the look, though, I’m also curious about this narrative RPG’s branching storyline. Apparently the game operates as a personality test of sorts, assigning players with a title like “Hero,” “Guardian,” “Tyrant,” or “Fool” at the end. And with playthroughs only taking around four hours, it shouldn’t be too difficult to go for new paths.

Gates of Skeldal

Platform: PC
Developer: Napoleon Games
Publisher: Jindřich Skeldal
Release Date: November 1, 1998 (English rerelease on April 30, 2025)

If you’re an RPG history sicko like me—and if you’re subscribed to this Substack, I’ve got to assume you are—then this is one you’ll want to pay attention to. Gates of Skeldal (aka Brány Skeldalu) is a computer RPG that was originally released in Czech only in 1998. The game’s charming cartoony enemy design, deep lore, and challenging dungeon crawling earned it enough cult classic credibility to receive an English translation fan patch many years later, but as far as I can tell, it’s never been officially released in English before now.

I’m a huge fan of obscure bits of RPG history being made more widely available, especially in a language I can read. And even better, Gates of Skeldal’s 2002 sequel, The Fifth Disciple also received a Steam release earlier this year. The third game in the series, 2016’s 7 Mages, is not currently available on Steam, but hopefully an updated version will show up soon.

Kaamos

Platform: PC
Developer: Pepperbox Studios
Publisher: Indie.io
Release Date: April 28, 2025

I’m a sucker for puzzle/RPG hybrids like Puzzle Quest. Add in roguelike design with an emphasis on build variety and, yeah, I’m pretty much sold.

Kaamos comes from a small indie team in Finland. The name is a Finnish word that refers to polar night, the phenomenon on the extreme southern and northern regions of Earth where there is no sun for more than 24 hours at a stretch. It’s a cool concept to pull from, even for a little pixelated roguelike puzzle game. This one looks like it will be a great choice for Steam Deck users.

Kiborg

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer: Sobaka Studio
Publisher: Sobaka Studio
Release Date: April 30, 2025

Kiborg definitely falls heavier on the “action” side of the action-RPG spectrum. However, it’s also a rogue-lite, which means players can expect plenty of progression both throughout and in-between runs primarily focused on beat-em-up brawler style gameplay.

Last year, Rock Paper Shotgun compared combat in the demo version of Kiborg to Batman: Arkham Asylum. Again, maybe not an RPG in the strictest sense of the genre, but that’s a point of comparison that has caught my interest.

And that’s it for this week!

Let me know in the comments if any of these smaller titles grabbed your attention. Meanwhile, I’m going to read everything I can about Gates of Skeldal. What a cool surprise!

Part of this is just understanding and accepting that the main Codex entry posts take a long time to write. They require a lot of time and research to put together if I want to do them right, which I do!

Rather than compromise on the quality and depth of those primary Codex entries, I’m going to work on some lighter lift ideas that will keep more regular posts coming (and hopefully provide some entertainment and value for you!) but without draining my creative energy entirely from the longer, more complicated posts I want to continue creating.

I’m hoping these posts will also provide more opportunities for reader comments. With that in mind, I’ll be opening up comments for all readers, not just subscribers, for these posts in particular.

Consider this post a sort of pilot attempt at one of those ideas. The goal is a weekly post updating on major new releases in the RPG world. Ideally, I’d like to back this up with some other weekly ideas, but let’s start here first.

All that said, let me know what you think in comments or via email, and thank you as always for your patience!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Sandfall Interactive
Publisher: Kepler Interactive
Release Date: April 24, 2025

I couldn’t have guessed it from the trailer alone, but despite its gorgeous production values, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is actually the debut entry from a new studio, Sandfall Interactive. And despite being clearly inspired by Japanese RPGs like the Persona games, that new studio is based in France. It’s rare to see something with this much ambition, style, and hype as the first game from a new studio!

Another rarity: Regardless of the games it’s pulling ideas from, Clair Obscur is a decidedly—some might even say startlingly—original concept. The game is set in a world where some inexplicable being named the Paintress wakes up once a year to paint a cursed number. Soon after the number has been painted, all humans of that age vanish. And every year, the number gets lower, wiping out an even greater swath of humanity. Players take control of the members of Expedition 33, so-named because of their age, as they attempt to finally put an end to this ritual once and for all.

Between the lovely visuals and the intriguing world, I can’t wait to check this one out. Even better, it’s available on Xbox Game Pass, so subscribers can check it out without coughing up more money.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developers: Bethesda Game Studios, Virtuos
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: April 22, 2025

Surprise! Or not so much. After weeks of very loud leaks, Bethesda and Microsoft surprise-launched this new take on one of their classic Elder Scrolls titles this week. Leaks aside, I love the guts it takes to reveal a project like this and then say, “Hey, it’s out now, go play it.” Great stuff!

Despite the “Remastered” part of the title, it’s worth noting that Oblivion Remastered seems to be more than just an HD upgrade. The entire game has been shifted over to Unreal Engine 5, ensuring it looks very nice, and many of the core game systems have received a lot of changes. For example, the original Oblivion’s notoriously exploitable leveling system has been reworked into something that’s a little closer to the leveling system from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Given that Skyrim is far and away the best-selling game in the series, that’s probably a smart change.

Oblivion isn’t my favorite game in The Elder Scrolls series, but I’ve got to admit that the nostalgia is hitting me hard here. I still remember the first time I popped Oblivion into my Xbox 360 way back in 2006 and almost immediately felt like my purchase of that console was absolutely worth it. It’s also good to hear that Virtuos has worked to keep a lot of the goofy elements that hardcore fans will remember. It’s even got horse armor DLC!

Escape the Mad Empire (Early Access)

Platform: PC
Developer: XperimentalZ Games
Publisher: Paradox Arc
Release Date: April 22, 2025

Here’s a fun retro option from Paradox’s indie publishing wing. Escape the Mad Empire looks to emulate the feel of old-school computer RPGs, but with a lot more chaos. It also utilizes a Slay the Spire-style roguelite structure where players choose between multiple potential encounters to path out their journey through the dungeon. I probably won’t check it out until it’s out of early access, but there’s a lot of potential for something cool here.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Developers: Media.Vision, Too Kyo Games
Publishers: Aniplex, Xseed Games
Release Date: April 24, 2025

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy represents a sort of supergroup collaboration for fans of visual novels. The game is co-directed by Kazutaka Kodaka — writer of the beloved Danganronpa games — and Kotaro Uchikoshi — writer of the cult classic Zero Escape series of games.

Together at last, these two imaginative creators have come up with exactly what fans of those two franchises have come to expect: a twisty, dark, anime-tinged title that’s heavy on plot. The Hundred Line’s story follows a group of 15 students at the titular Last Defense Academy who must defend their school from invading monsters for the next one hundred days.

Though it seems to still focus heavily on the visual novel side of things, The Hundred Line also adds strategy RPG-style battles to the equation. The game also reportedly features one hundred distinct endings, with Uchikoshi insisting that each and every one of those endings is developed enough to be a “true” ending. No easy endings, no shortcuts. That seems hard to believe, but I sure would like to witness how they pull it off, if they’re able to!

Maliki: Poison of the Past

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Developer: Blue Banshee
Publisher: Ankama Games
Release Date: April 22, 2025

I don’t know a ton about Maliki: Poison of the Past, but what I can say is that I absolutely adore its style. Those animated cutscenes look gorgeous, and I’m a huge fan of turn-based RPGs that emphasize using abilities to affect the turn order. All that, plus seemingly Stardew Valley-esque farming? Sign me up! I’ll see how Steam reviews look, but this has very quickly made its way onto my list of games to check out this year.

Rise of Rebellion

Platform: PC
Developer: Team 疾鷹
Publisher: Kodansha
Release Date: April 21, 2025

Game titles don’t get much more generic than Rise of Rebellion, but hopefully the game has some more depth to it. This Soulslike has an interesting background at least. It was apparently created by a solo developer but is being published by Kodansha, a huge Japanese company known for its many manga magazines and book publishing. It also seems to focus primarily on combat, which is a bummer, since exploration is my personal favorite part of Soulslikes.

Sunderfolk

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
Developer: Secret Door
Publisher: Dreamhaven
Release date: April 23, 2025

As one of the first games published by Dreamhaven, the company created by former Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime, I’m extremely curious to see how Sunderfolk turns out. This co-op-focused tactical RPG looks to capture the feel of tabletop roleplaying games, but with the added bonus of bright, cartoony visuals. It also requires a smartphone to play, as individual players will control their experience through their own phone.

And that’s it for this week!

Leave a comment and let me know if any of these games are getting added to your must-play list!

Shortly after publishing that article, I reached out to one of the game’s developers, Paul Resch. Thankfully, he was open to speaking with me, and a few weeks later, we spent around an hour discussing the earliest days of game development, what made PLATO special, and what he went on to do after college. Please enjoy the full interview below.

This transcription has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Cartoon Ghost (CG): Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. To start off with, for anyone reading this interview who’s never heard of Paul Resch or Orthanc, how would you introduce yourself?

Paul Resch (PR): Most of my career I’ve been a software engineer. Actually, I started off in high school by teaching myself Fortran1. I picked up programming languages all over the place. When I went to school, I went to the University of Illinois in Chicago. My parents thought I should be in accounting, because they thought that’s where the money was. That was before software engineering was actually a real thing. So they pushed me in that direction, but I took every computer class that was offered at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

One of those classes was in TUTOR, which was the language of PLATO—which is where all of the gaming that I eventually found was located. It was really an educational software system. It was not trying to be a gaming system. But I ended up joining the system staff, and it was pretty clear that they realized that the recreational side of PLATO was actually driving the needs for the system. It pushed where the system was going. So that was how I ended up getting involved with PLATO. Learning TUTOR was just one more of the courses that I was taking at the time.

I wanted to join the PLATO system staff down at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, so I asked if I could. The guy who was leading the organization at the time said, “Well, you’d have to be down here.”

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “And I’d need you to come down to interview at 4:00 this afternoon.”

This was 10 in the morning, and it was a three-hour drive. I said, “Okay.” [laughs]

I think he thought I wasn’t going to be able to do any of that. But I went down there right away and signed up. I did a lot of things on the system staff there. I was involved with rewriting the email program that they had. The PLATO system had a lot more than just games. Because of the communication capabilities, it had the equivalent of group notes, email, online chat—all of that was part of PLATO. It did a lot of different things, and that led me down the rest of my career. Somebody would ask me, “Do you know how to do graphics?” And I could say, “Sure, I did graphics on this PLATO system.” “Do you know how to do system software?” “Oh, sure, I wrote system software for the PLATO.”

CG: As you say, PLATO was essentially there for educational purposes initially, but it very quickly became clear that there were students pushing it in the direction of gaming. What’s your first memory involving gaming on PLATO?

PR: I think the first game that I played was something called Moonwar. The PLATO had a little screen, and for Moonwar, they put three to five circles on the screen. You were playing against someone else, and the idea was that you had to shoot a laser at them. These circles were supposed to be mountains or something on the moon. But in order for you to hit the other person, because you could hide behind those circles, you had to put in an angle for your shot, and then it would bounce off the sides of the screen and hit something. It would stop if it hit one of the circles. That was my first interaction with gaming on PLATO. I was like, “Wow, this is really something.” It’s not like it was a very exciting game. You were doing math mostly. [laughs] “I think I’ll aim thirty-three-and-a-half degrees.” [laughs]

CG: [laughs] But you were going up against other real people at the time, right?

PR: Correct. I think that they made a computer-controlled player in case nobody else was there. But mostly you were going after other people.

CG: Was Moonwar turn-based? Like you’d enter the angle for your shot and let it go, and then the other person would take their turn?

PR: Exactly. It was turn by turn.

CG: Because the idea of video games as a medium didn’t exist at this time, I’m curious if you and others who were playing games on PLATO and starting to program games on PLATO, if you had some sense that video games were going to become a medium unto themselves? Or at the time was it more that it just felt like a toy? Like just something you were messing around with?

PR: Some of the stuff that people were working on was pretty cool. There was a tank war game where you actually got a first-person view out of the turret2. You were shooting at enemies, and it would actually rotate in almost real-time. Not really real-time, but pretty close. There was a flight simulator3 that actually did kind of fly realistically. There were a lot of things that really pushed the boundaries of what computing was at the time.

In fact, my first full-time job after college was with a company that became AT&T doing billing software. It was not very exciting at all. But I had to use punch cards for that job. After working programming on a screen with graphics for so long in school, it made me realize that the rest of the world had a long way to go.

Another interesting anecdote I have from then: I’d talk to my family after I’d come home from doing all of this stuff. I was still living at home for part of this time. I would tell them about email and chat and these kinds of things. This was in the mid-’70s. Twenty years later, the internet is coming around, and you get chat, and you get email and all of these things. I remember, my sister came to me and said, “Is this what you were talking about?” All of that was there on PLATO. It was pretty cool. And we knew it at the time.

CG: So at the time, when you were playing some of those early video games on PLATO, you already had this sense that there was something special there and not just a distraction?

PR: That’s right.

CG: When did you realize that rather than just playing games on PLATO, you wanted to program one of your own?

PR: I read your article about Orthanc, and yes, we had been playing pedit54, the original.

CG: Oh wow, you know what? It’s so funny hearing you say that. I’ve read the name pedit5 so many times and read so much about it while preparing to write about that game. But in my head, I’ve always pronounced it as “pedit5.” Hearing you say “p-edit 5,” it’s like... Of course! That makes so much more sense! Because it’s all named after the education programming. Sorry, this just unlocked a piece of knowledge for me!

PR: Right! And the name was because there was “p-edit 1” and “p-edit 2” and so on. Each of them were assigned to some person who could use it for something. This guy, Rusty Rutherford, decided to write a dungeon game. He was playing with it, and eventually, he stopped working on it. There were some things in there that he wanted to add but never got to. In fact, I have access to the original code for all of that stuff now. There were notes in there about what Rusty wanted to add to the game. “I’d like to be able to do this and that.”

But Larry Kemp and Eric Hagstrom and I had been playing this game and talking about things. Larry and I were both at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He was the monitor for the lab that had all these PLATO terminals in it. I got to know him because of that. He played pedit5 and said, “We could do so much better. There’s so much more that you could add to fill it out and make it much more complete.” Pedit5 just had one level. You’ve played it, no doubt. It re-drew the screen every time you moved.

I had written a lot of other software for PLATO. So I said to Larry, “We don’t even have to do that. We can do other things.” We built this whole screen that was information-based. We decided more levels is better. We wanted more monsters. As you pointed out, we realized that we should have real monsters. Eric was mostly the guy who understood the Dungeons & Dragons side of things. He was the real D&D guy. I was the programmer. If you read through the help information, Larry wrote most of that. He sort of wrote the backstory. We all wrote code too; it wasn’t just me. And we were in two separate places. Larry and I were together in one place, and Eric was off in Indiana.

CG: I didn’t realize that you weren’t all on the same campus. That’s really fascinating. You communicated using PLATO?

PR: Yes, absolutely. I met Eric, I think, once in person. [laughs]

CG: While I’m researching these early RPG video games, I keep stumbling onto examples of like, oh, this must have been the first boss fight, or this must have been the first example of multiplayer. Hearing this, it strikes me that Orthanc may have been the first example of a remote development team in gaming. [laughs]

PR: But there were a lot of people working like that! I was writing software for different parts of the university. I wouldn’t necessarily be in the same room with people I was working with. I would be in one lab, and someone else would be in a different lab. Or I’d be working on system software when I was up in Chicago, and the main development was down in Urbana-Champaign. It was very natural, and it worked. All of those systems that were built around long-distance communication helped us do that.

There were, I think, five hundred PLATO terminals around that time. Maybe three hundred of those were in Urbana-Champaign, and the rest were in other parts of the country—Iowa and Indiana were big sites, many places in Illinois, the community college system in Chicago had many different labs. We were all over, and we didn’t necessarily know each other other than our online personas.

CG: We’ve talked a little about how PLATO and all of the elements of PLATO were in many ways very ahead of its time. It had all of these ideas that would come to fruition more in the future. One thing that struck me with Orthanc was the addition of multiplayer. You talked about Moonwar having multiplayer too, but multiplayer in a dungeon crawler RPG seems more daunting to implement—at least, from my perspective as somebody who doesn’t program. When did you get the idea to add multiplayer and how did you make that happen?

PR: When we were creating the game, we didn’t do it all at once. We didn’t sit down and write the game and then ship it. It was an iterative process, where we would add something, try out an idea, test it. We would find out, “Oh, you know, the odds for this are a little too high or a little too low.” “People are just dying here.” “Players are using this mechanic to get lots of points without doing much.” We were tweaking the whole thing as we went.

While we were doing that, one thing we did through the graphic system was drawing out what the map looked like on each level. It was a twenty-by-twenty-four-grid map, and it fit on the PLATO screen in a reasonable way. That’s how we originally built the mazes. Then we realized, now that we could see the maze, we could see where different players were in the game. We would watch the players move around. Then we realized, why not see where the monsters are and see where players run into them? Actually, we even got further, and we could drop a monster on top of a player live as well, just to see what happened.

CG: Basically like a live dungeon master!

PR: Kind of, yes. [laughs] But we could see these players passing each other and not seeing each other. So we thought that we should be able to have them do something. Maybe they could beat each other up. So I wrote the code to allow for that.

There were three choices when you encountered another player: You could try to run away from them, try to fight them, or talk to them. Talking was something that you could do at any point anywhere on the PLATO system. You could always talk to somebody; it didn’t need to be in our game. But I can’t tell you how weird it was to watch people bump into each other and just hang out and talk. I wasn’t watching the conversations, but we could see that they were just sitting there in the talking loop, just sitting there for hours, it seemed like. They could have been somewhere else on PLATO doing the same thing, in other software. But the fact that they bumped into each other in Orthanc...

It’s funny, I actually did this on Cyber15. Somebody had told me, “Hey, this thing in the game doesn’t seem to be working right,” so I logged on to try it out. I walked into the dungeon and bumped into somebody and chatted. The guy was freaking out, like, “Oh, you’re the author! Oooh!”

So with Orthanc, it’s not that we specifically thought, “Let’s add multiplayer!” It was more like watching the players live in the maze and wondering, “Why wouldn’t they run into each other?”

CG: It sounds more like bit by bit, as you had the tools, you realized, “Wait a second. We could do this.”

I’m really an engineer, and I like writing video games more than I like playing them. For sure, writing them is much more interesting to me. I ended up going to Atari for the same reason. I ended up working on an arcade game while I was there. I’ve always liked writing games. That’s like Dungeons & Dragons for me. [laughs] Going in there and finding and killing the problems, and all the rest of that.

After we had gotten Orthanc into more or less a solid state where we liked it, the three of us—Eric and Larry and I—got together at my house in a suburb of Chicago and tried to come up with an idea for a new version. The new version would have been much larger. There would be more than one dungeon, and you could go from town to town. Of course, there were other games on PLATO by this time that had elements like that. We were seeing some of those things too. We came up with some ideas for how all of it would work, including the idea of people being able to play together as a group, as a party. But we never wrote it. I think I still have a document somewhere from the ideas that we had for it.

We only got as far as thinking about those ideas, though. Larry graduated, and I was offered a job, so I ended up going off to do that. It just never happened. We were talking about doing that next step of really having groups together, but I think that really came as much from the other games that were on the system already where you could kind of hang out together.

CG: That brings me to some questions about your career after you were in college and after you worked on Orthanc. You mentioned that you worked on an arcade game with Atari. What game was that?

PR: It was called Cloud 9. It never went anywhere at the time. This was in the heyday of arcades. Atari at that time decided that if a game was put into one arcade in Silicon Valley for a week and made more money than all the rest of the games in that arcade, it was a hit. But the converse, they decided, was also true: If it didn’t make more money than the rest of the games in that one arcade across one week, it was not a hit. Even though, if you know anything about statistics, you know that that’s not enough sampling. [laughs] I actually had a statistics background, so I went in and said, “You know, we should try this a little bit more, in more places, and see what it’s like.” They basically wrote me off and said, “We know what we’re doing.”

I had written Cloud 9 in six months, and at the time it was taking two years for most people to write games. So Atari thought I could just write another game right after that. If you search for Cloud 9, somebody on YouTube has recorded their playthrough of it.

There was only ever one cabinet produced. It’s sitting in my son’s garage right now. He played it. It was fun. It wasn’t a very exciting game. It was sort of a cross between Breakout and Space Invaders. It was amusing. In fact, I’m in the middle of—in the same way that I released Orthanc on Android and iOS6—I’m working on a version of Cloud 9 for Android and iOS, just for fun.

CG: I’ll look forward to checking that out. I mentioned this when I first reached out to you, but I’m so grateful that you put Orthanc on Android and iOS. Obviously, the Cyber1 system exists to let people emulate PLATO, but it’s great to have this piece of RPG history more readily, easily available in that format on Android. I really enjoyed playing it that way.

So after college, you went and worked with Atari. It sounds like it was maybe not the best experience for you. Is that when you decided to move more into the more general tech engineering space rather than focusing on game development?

PR: I’ve always been a general engineer. The work I did on PLATO included email systems, graphics drawing tools, some of the system software, a whole bunch of educational software. I worked on all of that stuff while I was there. From there, my first full-time job was with a telephone company—Illinois Bell Telephone, as they were known at the time—writing billing software. So when somebody would make a phone call, my software would help figure out what we wanted to charge them for it. It was not very exciting work, but they paid a lot.

I knew somebody who was working at Atari. He gave my resume to somebody. They happend to be in downtown Chicago, where I was working for the phone company, and they invited me to dinner to talk to them. I had graphics and other kinds of software in my background already, so this Atari representative was like, “Wow, you could probably write arcade video games.” They were little 8-bit processors, which were sort of the other end from what I’d been working on. But I said, “Sure, why not?” So I did that.

After I created Cloud 9, a group within Atari was working on a new computer. At the time, there were the original video game consoles. There were also a couple of home computers that Atari had. They were working on a new version of one of those computers, and I joined that group to work on the operating system for that computer. It was a different direction but within the same company.

Unfortunately—I remember, we had T-shirts when I worked for the coin-op division of Atari. The T-shirts read, “Coin-Op: The Real Atari.” [laughs] Everybody in the world thought of the home consoles when they heard the name Atari, but the consoles never made any money. The arcade games made a lot of money. So Atari actually collapsed. It ended up being bought by the people who ran Commodore, the Tramiel family7. They basically laid everybody off.

CG: So you were at Atari during the collapse?

PR: Yes. I was one of the layoffs. I found a job working for an educational software company, a little company out here run by a Stanford professor. The company was called Computer Curriculum Corporation. They were using text-only terminals connected to mini-computers to teach basic skills—math and reading. But they wanted to expand beyond “two plus two.” They wanted to teach geometry. Well, you can’t teach geometry very well on an ASCII8 terminal, so they wanted to do graphics. They hired me because not only had I worked on educational software, but I also knew how to do graphics. So I helped set them up to be able to use graphics. That was several years’ worth of work, including building file systems that were shared across the terminals. I wrote the drawing tools that they used to draw pictures on the hardware.

Computer Curriculum Corporation ended up being bought by Simon & Schuster, the book publisher, who was owned by Paramount. Paramount decided that they should actually take advantage of this technology and created a technology group in Silicon Valley to explore possibilities for all of the Paramount content and how it could be expanded on formats like CD-ROM.

There wasn’t a lot on the internet at this point in time. It was just coming into existence. I actually registered “paramount.com” as a domain. All of Paramount’s email went through the building that we had there at the time. I created the first version of the website for Star Trek: Voyager, the TV show. If you go back to some of the archived versions of that website, there was a quiz that you took. Paramount didn’t want us to have a credits screen on the website, but if you went in to look at the list of people who had taken the quiz, the names of the people who put the site together are there. My name is on that list. I wasn’t the content guy. I didn’t do any of the drawings or any of that stuff. I just built the tech behind it.

Then Viacom merged with Paramount and decided that the technology group needed to be in New York, because they didn’t want to be so far away from controlling such a thing. So they said, “Either you move to New York, or you’re being laid off.”

I said, “Okay, well, no, I’m not moving to New York.” So the last thing I had done for them was building websites. We’d also done some prototypes for interactive television shows. We were trying to figure out how to let the audience interact using a cable system. We had this idea of using multiple cable channels to interact and choose the next step, and it would stream different outcomes. It was an interesting idea, but it never really went anywhere. The technology wasn’t ready for it.

So I went from doing that kind of work to joining Apple. I knew somebody at Apple. They said, “You should hire this guy.” I went in there, and the first thing I did at Apple was to rewrite the interrupt handler for MacOS. So I went from about the highest level of software web interface stuff from being all the way down at the bottom of the operating system.

I love that story, because it shows—I’m interested in sort of the whole picture. I like all of that stuff. None of it was something that I didn’t want to do. I’ve done applications. I’ve done apps for phones. Games. Business software. Development tools. Whatever it is.

I did a whole bunch of operating system stuff for Apple, and then after thirteen years there, I joined Google and was working on operating system stuff for their data center. The last thing I did before I retired is that I was responsible for security and privacy for ChromeOS, the operating system.

CG: So just a couple of small companies you worked for there. You know, Apple and Google, tiny little companies.

PR: And all over the place! That’s kind of the way that I’ve been. Give me an interesting problem, and I’ll go after it. Games was certainly one of them. If you play or watch the video of Cloud 9, you’ll see how that game was much more interactive than Orthanc.

CG: You’ve mentioned that you’ve always enjoyed the programming side moreso than playing video games. Did you keep playing video games at all over the years?

PR: Yeah, I play a little bit now and then.

CG: Do you have any particular favorites, or anything that you’re playing right now that’s exciting for you?

PR: I’ve been playing Titan Quest9. That’s very much in the Dungeons & Dragons style with all the classes and all the rest of that stuff. As I was working on porting Orthanc to Android, I was worried about the naming of the monsters, because there are rights with all of that, even though we had received a letter giving us permission through the mail. [laughs]

CG: [laughs] I did want to ask you about that too. So TSR, the publisher behind Dungeons & Dragons sent you a letter giving you permission to use the same monsters from the pen-and-paper game in Orthanc?

PR: The impression we got was that TSR didn’t really understand what we were asking about, but as long as we weren’t going to sell it and make money on it, they were okay with it. I think it sounded like this little niche thing to them, and it was. It wasn’t really a threat. It actually drove players to Dungeons & Dragons probably. It had that kind of positive feedback loop. But when I went through and looked at Orthanc, I realized there was only one monster name that essentially wasn’t allowed: an umber hulk. That’s a proprietary monster from Dungeons & Dragons, and we had that one. If you play Orthanc on PLATO, it’s still there. On the Android version, it’s a brown hulk instead. I just didn’t want to have anybody argue with me about it.

CG: That’s probably smart to just not have to worry about it.

PR: And I’m not making any money off of it! It’s a free game. But somebody could say that I’m taking away revenue that somebody else could make off that property. Yeah, maybe. But all the rest of the monsters were things that were either already established or had been allowed.

CG: Compared to some of the other early PLATO RPGs that I’ve played, I thought it was interesting that Orthanc had no final boss to overcome or no magical artifact to rescue to win the game. Was there any reason that you chose to have this more free-form approach to winning the game?

PR: Pedit5 didn’t have a final boss or goal either. People just wanted to make it to the Hall of Fame. They wanted to be the top-ranked person there. That was all that they cared about at that point. It wasn’t about accomplishing something within the game world. It didn’t seem like players needed that. There were other games that followed up that had the idea of having a more concrete goal, but I don’t think we ever had that in mind. Even the new version that we were talking about was not about having a quest. It was about conquering this space.

CG: I wanted to ask about the name as well. I know the word “Orthanc” comes from The Lord of the Rings. Did you envision the game as having more of a Tolkien-esque flair to it? Or was it just a name that you thought was cool?

PR: It was partly a name that we thought was cool. It actually was “Orthanc Labyrinth.” As you pointed out, Orthanc in The Lord of the Rings was a tower. So we wanted to call it “Orthanc Labyrinth,” but games were all named one word. The file name had to be ten characters or less. So it ended up being Orthanc, but the full name was The Orthanc Labyrinth inside the game. That’s why it wasn’t just the tower. It’s supposed to be the part under the tower.

I forget who—it wasn’t me. It was either Larry or Eric who came up with the name. They knew Tolkien. I had read The Lord of the Rings, but I wasn’t a giant fan. I wasn’t living and breathing Tolkien. I knew people who were. Since then, I’ve become much more aware, and I’ve read the books several times now. In fact, there’s a new book out, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century, which is looking at implementations of his stories and how they’ve been affected and interacted with each other. It was interesting to read that too.

CG: It sounds like you rediscovered Orthanc on PLATO through the Cyber1 platform in the mid-2000s or somewhere in there?

PR: The early 2000s, yeah.

CG: When you rediscovered it, you immediately jumped in and started programming in new stuff. What made you decide to just jump right back in?

PR: I heard about Cyber1. Having been on the system staff for PLATO, I knew that I could help. There were a lot of things that were broken on Cyber1. We had no idea about how long PLATO would last. We weren’t thinking about the millennium. This was in the ’70s. It was a long time before the year 2000. The group notes and user groups that we had online had essentially four bits—sixteen years worth—of dates. [laughs] So they ran out of dates.

Space had been at a premium on PLATO. The size of Orthanc in terms of space on disc—right now, for us, it’s an error bit. You’d never even notice losing that much space. But back then, there was a real premium on space. We were very careful about how we used space. What I was doing for Cyber1 was not really focusing on Orthanc. It was how to help the system work better in the twenty-first century. I was fixing the tools that everybody had used so that they were all working reasonably.

As you’ve seen in the game, the visuals are orange and black. That’s because the plasma panel was invented for PLATO, and they happened to pick gases that made orange. Eventually, they came up with other-colored terminals. Color ended up being added, so that was another thing that I did for Cyber1. I went back and added color to some of the system tools that people could use.

After I did that, I thought, “Well, I could make Orthanc in color.” So I went in and added some color. It’s a little garish, I think. I was trying to stick with the primary colors. You could make it really nice, but most of it was close to the primary colors.

But while I was in there, I realized, “You know, I don’t remember this maze.” I had to go back and figure out how to see the maze layout. Then I thought, “Why didn’t we have a map that was there for players?” But I also didn’t want to force it on players if they want to get the original experience. So you actually have to ask for it. You have to press a key to bring it up. I wanted people to have that original experience without the new stuff if they wanted to see what it was really like just having to remember the layout or drawing the map on paper, which is what people did. But it didn’t take much to create the map.

Again, I had to find space to store memory of where a player had been, because I only wanted the map to show that far. But TUTOR, the language of PLATO is actually pretty powerful. It wasn’t that hard to get back into it. I can’t tell you how many programming languages I know, because I don’t know how many I know. I learned Swift to create the iOS version of Orthanc. I pick up languages easily. It’s not a big deal for me. Walking back into a language that was, at that point, something I’d learned thirty years or more earlier, it wasn’t that hard to pick it back up again. And the language is pretty powerful, so I was able to make some changes. It really did only take a few hours to write that map.

CG: Have you made updates to the PLATO version of Orthanc beyond adding the auto-mapping feature? Or are there any updates that you’d like to do at some point?

PR: I turned on the ability for a monster to appear in a room at random. That had been turned off, but I turned it back on. Mostly, though, I wanted to keep it kind of the way it was. Mostly. I enjoyed the narrative that you can read through in the instructions in-game. It’s a little hokey, but it’s cute. I wanted to keep it that way.

There’s so much that I could do now if I was to try to write a new version of Orthanc. In fact, when I first put together the Android and iOS versions, I gave access to the app to Larry and Eric to let them try it out first. Larry’s first reaction was, “You’re writing Orthanc and not Orthanc 2? Why would you do that?!” [laughs]

CG: [laughs] Of course. I’d wanted to ask if you’d stayed in touch with Larry and Eric or reconnected with them at all.

PR: Larry came to my wedding years ago, back in the ’80s. He lives in the Chicago area. I’m here in California. We don’t really run into each other, but you know, I wished him happy birthday just recently. He’s still around. He hasn’t quite retired yet. Eric and Larry and I did a lot on Orthanc, but Eric wasn’t really involved with us other than that. I have his email address. I stay in touch with him. That’s how I reached out about the mobile version of the game. But no, I haven’t really followed up with Eric that much.

CG: Well, maybe once Larry retires, you two can get down to really getting Orthanc 2 out there.

PR: [laughs]

CG: You mentioned that you’re working on mobile ports of Cloud 9 as well. Once that’s done, would you like to make something new or make something that’s a follow-up?

PR: It’s funny. In my entire career at Google, I was an engineering manager, so I wasn’t really writing software. I was helping other people write their software. It was a lot of team-oriented stuff. It’s funny that when I was retiring, that’s what I said to the people who were on my teams: “I’m gonna retire, and I’m going to be doing your job.” Because I like it! I like writing software.

It’s an interesting idea. Like I said, I have the notes that Larry and Eric and I put together for what an Orthanc 2 might be like. It would be an interesting thing to explore at some point. I don’t know. It might be interesting to see. I hadn’t thought about getting Larry involved in it again, but he might get a kick out of that too.

In my retirement, I also have a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, and we just got a German shepherd. He’s now eight months old, so I’m spending a lot of time training him. He’s in full puppy mode. It’s sort of like having two toddlers in the house at the same time. So that’s keeping me busy right now, but yes, for sure I’m not hanging up my engineer shingle and putting it away.

CG: It certainly comes across from talking to you that you love doing that programming side of things. If you’re enjoying it, even if you’re retired, if it’s not actually a job for you and you’re just having fun...

PR: Right. Nobody’s doing code reviews on me and telling me, “No, no, no, you can’t write it that way.” Yes, I can!

CG: Well, by all means, please, if you ever do end up working on any future games, please feel free to reach out and I’ll let Cartoon Ghost’s readers know. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I’ve really enjoyed checking out Orthanc and learning about this piece of RPG history.

PR: There’s been a whole lot of questioning over what was the first RPG on PLATO. Pedit5 was, as far as I know, really kind of the first one. It was the only one that was around at all. Orthanc was very derivative directly from the idea of pedit5. We had talked to Rusty about it and asked, “Can we use these ideas?” He said, “Oh sure, no problem.”

In your post on Orthanc, you pointed out that Mark Nakada did the character set for the game. He did the character sets for other games as well, but we asked him to create these. We would say, “We need something that looks like it would have this name,” and he came up with all of these. It was excellent. All of that stuff, where that came from, was really a special time. It kicked off my entire career.

There are so many people who came out of that space. Ray Ozzie, the CTO for Microsoft for a while10, was in school when I was there. Lotus Notes, which Ray Ozzie helped create, was based on ideas from PLATO. The people who worked on PLATO went across the entire tech industry and no doubt had an impact on everything. It was a very formative thing. You’ve probably read The Friendly Orange Glow?

CG: Yes!11 I devoured that book a few years ago when I was first starting to do research into this project. That was one of the first things I picked up. That history is so incredible. And as a Midwestern boy myself, it was kind of fun realizing that all of this tech stuff really kicked off here. It wasn’t in Silicon Valley.

PR: That book is pretty close to reality. It was kind of amazing. One other chapter in that book was about a mahjong game. The guy who wrote it was a quadriplegic, and he actually wrote the game on PLATO with a pencil in his mouth. I remember playing that game and thinking, “Wow, that is pretty cool.”

As I was reading The Friendly Orange Glow and was reminded of that game, I said, “Well, there must be an Android version of mahjong.” Every single one of them was ad-driven. I couldn’t buy one! I would’ve paid for one. I hate ads even though I worked for Google. So I said, “Well, I can write one.” So I actually have an Android and iOS version of mahjong12 based on the one from PLATO. It’s been fully colorized, as opposed to the PLATO version, which was just orange and black. But at the end, if you win a game, it draws an orange-and-black dragon, which the developer had drawn originally himself.

CG: I will definitely check those out! Thank you again, Paul.

Just to reiterate something I’ve said before: Although paid subscriptions are deeply appreciated, I have no intention of putting a Substack paywall in front of any of Cartoon Ghost’s content until such a time as I’m able to commit to regular posts. And even at that time, I don’t plan to make the main Codex entries subscription-only ever. If you want to read these, they’ll be available to you. As long as you have the patience to wait for me to write them, that is.

I can’t promise things will come a lot faster from here on out, but I can say that very little in my life (besides the dad stuff!) gives me as much happiness as researching and writing these posts. No matter how long of a break there might be between these entries, I will keep returning. For those reading this, whether you’re new here or have been reading since the beginning, thank you for your patience and for giving this obscure topic from an obscure writer a little of your attention. It means the world to me.

And one other good piece of news before we jump into this one: Today’s game is not only still playable today, it doesn’t even require getting onto the Cyber1 PLATO emulation server (though I still recommend doing so, because it’s awesome). I’ll save details for the entry below, but an Android version of Orthanc exists and is ready to be downloaded and enjoyed right now! Check it out at this link. I’ve been messing around with it for weeks now, and most of my screenshots in this entry will be from my time with the Android version.

Game: Orthanc
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: 1975

THE STORY

What do you imagine when you hear the word “Orthanc”? If your answer involves a giant tower ruled by an evil wizard or anything about the fictional world of Middle-Earth, congratulations, you’ve earned some bonus points for today’s lesson! As with most of its brethren early RPG video games created for the PLATO mainframe, Orthanc was inspired by a shared love of Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings. In this case, the latter took center stage—at least as far as the title is concerned.

If you’re not big on Tolkien,1 don’t worry. I'm no hardcore Lord of the Rings lore hound, but I’ve scoured enough wikis to break this down for you. In the world of Middle-Earth, Orthanc is a massive, pitch-black tower lorded over by the wizard Saruman, an evil counterpart to Gandalf who demonstrates what happens when a magic-wielder is corrupted by their power. Gandalf himself is held prisoner at the top of the tower for some time after refusing to join forces with Saruman.

English lit dork that J.R.R. Tolkien was, it’s believed that he took the name “Orthanc” from an Old English poem named “The Ruin” that is presumed to have been written in the eighth or ninth century2. Specifically, Tolkien was inspired by the first word of the phrase “orþonc ærsceaft” which translates roughly to “skilled ancient work” in Modern English. The rubble in “The Ruin” is being lauded as a skilled ancient work rotted away by time; the setting of Orthanc in The Lord of the Rings is a skilled ancient work rotted away by the evil in control of it, at least during the time of Tolkien’s main trilogy.

So what does all of this etymology have to do with the PLATO video game Orthanc? Well, uh... Not that much. I just thought it was interesting! Certainly much more interesting than the game’s actual plot, which, as you can safely assume at this point, is minimal.

In Orthanc, players take on the role of an unnamed knight who has been tasked to explore a dangerous dungeon3 carrying the game’s name. The goal is not to slay a specific evil or track down a certain precious treasure. Rather, this knight is looking to build up his reputation so that he can retire at the side of his beloved king. Curiously enough, achieving that happy ending simply requires gathering enough experience. No quest, no epic final boss battle, just a big dungeon. Sometimes that’s all you need!

THE GAMEPLAY

We’ll dig into this a lot more in the background section below, but from all reports, Orthanc’s gameplay is very liberally inspired by pedit5, a game I’ll be discussing very soon in the Codex. Like, uh, the next entry soon4.

However, Orthanc also looks very familiar to one of our earlier entries, dnd. Like that game, Orthanc features a top-down view of the player-character as they wander a mazelike dungeon. Where dnd had stats listed in the upper right-hand corner, Orthanc employs a more elegant (if potentially overwhelming) approach of splitting all the information the player might need across multiple windows.

In practical terms, this means the view of the actual game world is smaller, but there are individual boxes allowing players to track anything they might want to: their current stats, spell units, active spells, money, equipment, magical items and so on. There’s even a map that automatically fills in (though, as I’ll explain later, this is something that was added to the game much more recently, not some insanely ahead-of-its-time feature).

Unlike dnd, there is no real character creation in Orthanc beyond rolling stats. Players cannot select a race, class, or gender for their character; in fact, players don’t even name the character unless they make it to the end and add their chosen name to the leaderboard. Rather, when starting a new character, one is presented with four primary stats—Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, and Dexterity—as well as hit points (or Hits, as the game calls it). Each stat is assigned a random number between 3 and 18, and players can reroll those numbers as many times as they want, emulating the process of rolling for stats during character creation in Dungeons & Dragons.

As is common in these early role-playing video games, every character in Orthanc is a hybrid, capable of both melee combat and magic. However, it seems that magic is at least heavily encouraged if not strictly necessary for success, especially in the early game. Orthanc’s dungeon is full of enemies who can take out a level 1 or 2 character in a single lucky hit, especially if they get to attack first, which they often will. And death, naturally, is permanent. Players only get one chance to win per character and must start over from zero when they die.

Sidenote: I died a lot of times while playing Orthanc for this entry, and though the deaths may not have always been pleasant, I enjoyed the faux sincerity with which the game treats a character’s death. Upon each failure I was met with the message: “With great regret, we must announce your death in battle with the forces of chaos. Farewell, mighty warrior!” Awfully kind of the game to name the many level 1 chumps I lost in the dungeon as “mighty warrior[s]”!

Enemies pop up randomly as players explore the dungeon. When they show up, the player is presented with three options: fight, which attacks with whatever melee weapon the character has equipped; cast spell; and run, which is only available if you’re not in a tight hallway or enclosed space.

In early levels, at least, magic is by far the most reliable option. Of the lower level spells, Sleep is an instant kill when it hits on any non-undead enemies. And if a player happens to run into a pesky skeleton or zombie, the Magic Missile spell can usually do the trick.

While Orthanc is an undeniably simple game, as anyone would expect from an RPG created this early in gaming’s history, it does feature a surprisingly deep and well-rounded spell system that makes it fun to stick with a wizard-type character. Players have access to 22 spells in total, and the options range from offensive (Charm, Magic Missile, Blastbolt) to defensive (Protection, Speed, Invisibility) to navigation-based (Light, Levitation, Passwall, Pass Ceiling). Higher level characters with access to more spell points have a lot of fun options at their disposal, which will be necessary to survive dives into the depths of the dungeon.

While Orthanc offers a lot of fun magical options to play around with, I was most impressed by the navigation spells, which provide players with more strategic options than I expected from such an early RPG. For example, Levitation allows the player-character to float safely over traps that could cause damage or send them plummeting to lower floors. Passwall can help provide faster navigation of a map by “noclipping.” And Pass Ceiling allows for a quick retreat up to less dangerous floors or to the entrance itself, which feels downright essential in the late game as the player delves into ever more challenging locations. The further into the game I made it, the more I needed to monitor my spell points and make sure I had enough to escape if things got hairy.

Speaking of spell points, this is the primary resource determining whether a character can cast a spell. Since Orthanc does not use a class system and has limited stats, every character technically has access to all spells, but every character also begins with a mere four spell points. Each time a character levels up, they gain three more spell points.

To determine how many spell points a single cast will use, players must consider the spell’s “level.” There are four ranks of spells (called levels), and the level itself tells you how many spell points are necessary. A level 1 spell like Cure uses one spell unit. A level 2 spell like Find Traps uses two. A level 3 spell like Hold Monster consumes three spell units. And fourth-level spells like Dimension Door (which teleports the enemy away from you) costs a hefty four spell units. In other words, a fresh level 1 hero will only be able to cast a handful of level 1 spells or a single level 4 spell before being totally out of juice.

Luckily, said juice can be quickly restored. A character’s hits and spell points regenerate slowly as they move through the dungeon, and both are refreshed completely upon exiting the dungeon. Leaving the dungeon will also convert any gold a character has picked up—dropped by defeated enemies, naturally—into experience points. As in dnd, this design means that one of the most common and successful tactics for survival in Orthanc is quickly darting in and out of the dungeon, grabbing a handful of treasure near the entrance on the first floor and quickly exchanging it for experience until one’s player-character is leveled up enough to more dependably survive a deeper dive into the dungeon.

That strategy doesn’t work great for long, though. Orthanc has a notably steep leveling curve, with the amount of experience needed doubling for each level. When I played, I was able to zoom from level 1 to 2 by gathering up 1000 experience points in a matter of maybe ten minutes. By the time I hit level 6, things had slowed to a crawl, with a whopping 32,000 experience points needed to eke out the next upgrade. Grinding out early levels is wise, but just sitting on the first floor and leveling endlessly isn’t a realistic proposition beyond maybe level 5 or 6.

In addition to spells, players can discover magic items in Orthanc, such as boots, weapons, armor and rings. On top of the fleshed-out spell system and items, Orthanc contains a staggering one hundred different enemy types. Those hundred types are split into eight main categories—bugs, men, goblin, animals, undead, mythical, magic users, and animated—with types of the same category often sharing strengths and weaknesses and sometimes sharing visual styles. It’s a pretty stacked bestiary for an early RPG.

Another complicating factor for those looking to conquer Orthanc is the unique way it handles its dungeon layout. The game’s dungeon features ten floors in total, each of which are laid out on a 24- by 22-square grid. As usual, the monsters present on these floors get more difficult to handle (i.e. higher level) the deeper down you go. (See the useful chart above showcasing the percentage chance of meeting a monster of y level on x dungeon floor.) However, stairs (and traps) in the game do not necessarily lead down in a linear fashion. A set of stairs on the first floor could lead you to the third, for example, or a flight of stairs leading up discovered on the fifth floor might take you all the way back to the second.

While this adds another layer of challenge to exploring, players have a few benefits they can fall back on. For one, there’s the Depth spell, which helpfully informs players what floor of the dungeon their character is on. More importantly, though, and unlike many similar games, the layout of Orthanc’s dungeon does not change between runs. Remember how I mentioned dying over and over earlier? Well, I consistently made more progress with each subsequent run. And that’s because each time I started a new character, I had a slightly better sense of what I was dealing with, because I had explored some new corner of at least the first floor.

That’s not to say that the Orthanc dungeon I tackled is precisely the same as the one students were taking on in 1975. Presumably with the leaderboard aspect of the game in mind, Orthanc’s developers made the choice to reset the Hall of Fame once every 180 days (or approximately six months). At the same time as the leaderboard resets, the dungeon layout is also reconfigured. It always surprises me seeing hints in such early games of design elements that have become commonplace in contemporary gaming; with this one, I can’t help but think of “seasonal content” that shows up in live-service games like Path of Exile and Diablo IV, although obviously the form is much simpler here.

Regarding the Hall of Fame, you’ll recall that the goal of Orthanc is for the player-character to retire at the side of the king. The Hall of Fame is the representation that one’s character has achieved that high honor, and it doesn’t require overcoming any specific challenge other than surpassing the experience total of the next lowest player currently featured on the Hall of Fame. Every time the character returns to the surface of the dungeon, the player is given a choice to retire them, but it’s only if they’ve gathered up enough experience that they’ll actually be able to add a name to the Hall of Fame and thus “win.”

Somehow I’ve come this far into this entry without even mentioning what may be Orthanc’s biggest and most impressive claim to fame: This game has multiplayer. As far as I can tell, it may be the earliest example of fully and truly implemented multiplayer in the genre5. I wrote in the subhead for this entry that it could be considered the first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) ever, which was certainly facetious...but only just a little bit.

Here’s how it worked: players on the PLATO mainframe who were exploring Orthanc’s dungeon at the same time could encounter each other. The game had no cooperative play functionality, but players in the same vicinity could chat or or even fight each other. Reportedly, the game’s lead developer removed the option for player-versus-player combat on the third floor, because he quickly discovered that high-level players would hang out there and gank newbies. I guess some gamer behavior really does transcend generations!

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe the multiplayer functionality exists in the Android version of Orthanc. Although it’s simple in execution, I can’t help but be impressed at how forward-thinking this was for the time at which the game was created. Now let’s look at how it was created!

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THE BACKGROUND

Orthanc is credited to three main developers: Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom. Additionally, Mark Nakada created the character set used to display the game’s imaginative array of monsters. Notably, Mark Nakada is also listed on the title screen credits for Dungeon, the lost game I covered in my last Codex entry. It seems likely that he simply created a character set that was then used by multiple amateur game developers at the time, although it’s noteworthy and commendable that he was given proper credit across multiple projects.

In keeping with the pattern that’s been formed up to this point, all of those developers had one thing in common: They were college students. Specifically, this group was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the handful of Midwest campuses that had fully embraced the PLATO mainframe hardware.

As mentioned earlier in this entry, Resch and friends were reportedly heavily inspired by pedit5, another extremely popular RPG of the era. But like so many games being coded on the PLATO system, pedit5 would regularly get deleted by admins. At some point, instead of just waiting around for the game to reappear, this crew decided to put together their own RPG.

Like essentially every RPG being made on PLATO, Orthanc was by and large an attempt to replicate Dungeons & Dragons. However, these developers took that attempt to another level entirely.

Remember that huge list of one hundred enemies in the game? It turns out that most of these creatures were borrowed directly from the pen-and-paper role-playing sensation. According to Resch, he and his codevelopers sent a handwritten letter to TSR Inc., the newly-formed publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, asking for permission to borrow monster types and stats directly from the game.

Amazingly—and in a sign of how young and presumably lawyer-less the company was—TSR responded. The reply letter had a slightly baffled tone but, incredibly, gave Resch and his team the green light to use whatever they wanted from Dungeons & Dragons, as long as the game wasn’t being sold or used to make money in any way. Given the realities of gaming on the PLATO mainframe, the Orthanc team was in the clear.

Interestingly, Orthanc’s development didn’t end when Resch and team graduated—or, put another way, it was picked back up much later. One of the most impressive elements of the game from modern eyes is that it uses an auto-map functionality to draw the dungeon map as the player explores. It turns out this feature was added by Paul Resch in the 2000s, shortly after Orthanc first became playable via the emulated PLATO mainframe on Cyber1. Resch told CRPG Addict that he looked at the game’s code for the first time in decades and “wrote the auto-mapper in just a few hours.”

Sadly, I wasn’t able to find much more information on the development of Orthanc. Of the four developers I mentioned above, only Eric Hagstrom seems to have gone on to much further game development, working as a programmer on a number of games with Sony in the mid to late ‘90s. Most notably, he is listed as an additional programmer on EverQuest and its first two expansion packs. Perhaps his early experiences in pulling together an early multiplayer game made him a great choice for working on one of the first major 3D MMORPGs.

For his part, Paul Resch went on to a long career in the tech industry. According to his LinkedIn profile, he developed an arcade game with Atari (though it’s not clear which game). Later, he took on lengthy tenures as a software architect at Apple and a senior engineering manager at Google before retiring in 2023. Thankfully, Resch is still active in his retirement, having released the Android port of Orthanc just this year. Once again, I strongly recommend downloading and playing this. It’s a fantastic window into the past and an essential piece of RPG history to have preserved—and it’s also genuinely just pretty fun. I’m so grateful that Resch has made it available.

Sources for this entry

Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “Game 123: Orthanc (1975).” November 11, 2013. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-123-orthanc-1977.html.

Hagstrom, Eric; Kemp, Larry; Nakada, Mark; Resch, Paul. Orthanc. PLATO. 1975

How to Make an RPG. “Orthanc Labyrinth.” Publication date unknown. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/orthanc.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Game 3: Orthanc (1975).” October 14, 2014. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2014/10/orthanc-1975.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Orthanc: Grinding to Failure.” March 24, 2015. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2015/03/orthanc-grinding-to-failure.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Orthanc: Like The Dungeon, But Not Quite.” February 24, 2015. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2015/02/orthanc-like-dungeon-but-not-quite.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Orthanc: Magic Items.” March 17, 2015. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2015/03/orthanc-magic-items.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Orthanc: Spells.” March 10, 2015. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2015/03/orthanc-spells.html.

Mahney, Nathan P. CRPG Adventures. “Orthanc: What Level Am I On Again?” October 21, 2014. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2014/10/orthanc-what-level-am-i-on-again.html.

MobyGames. “Eric Hagstrom.” Publication date unknown. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/person/13603/eric-hagstrom/.

MobyGames. “Orthanc.” January 24, 2018. Last modified July 18, 2023. Last accessed October 21, 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/game/101845/orthanc/.

Resch, Paul. Orthanc. Android. February 2, 2024.

Hello, Codexheads and Cartoon Ghostfans! Please accept my apologies for the radio silence over the last couple of months. I started a new day job in June—a very boring, just-to-pay-the-bills thing, nothing exciting, I promise—and between getting into the swing of that and other frustrating real life things, I haven’t had much time to write here. I appreciate your grace and patience.

It’s not all bad news, though! In my limited free time, I’ve been squeezing in research for my next entry in the Codex. I’m almost ready to sit down and write it, so I’m cautiously optimistic that will be going up soon. Maybe next week, maybe the week after, but soon! And I have some other really cool stuff in the works to supplement the regular Codex posts. I’m excited to share that with you in the near future.

While I haven’t had a lot of gaming time, I have a few games I’ve been winding down with throughout the summer. In the name of actual RPG video game content, here’s some quick thoughts on what I’ve been playing recently.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

I’ve been on the Final Fantasy XIV train for over a decade now, as impossible as that seems. But even with all that experience, Dawntrail, the MMO’s fifth expansion, marks a major milestone.

2021’s Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker marked the end of a complex, powerful story arc that director Naoki Yoshida and his team at Square Enix had been telling since the game’s relaunch as A Realm Reborn (and even tying together elements from its disastrous original version). Endwalker was an incredible feat, pulling together dozens of story threads and even more characters and providing a genuinely satisfying finale. Its final zone is one of the best MMO zones I’ve ever played through, and the end left me absolutely emotionally spent.

But with such a big conclusion, where do they go from there? Dawntrail, which launched in July, is the answer. It sees the Warrior of Light (as played by the game’s millions of subscribers) traveling to “the New World”—a South America-inspired continent called Tural.

For a game with such a notoriously rabid fan base, the reaction to Dawntrail has been pretty muted. I expected as much, given it almost operates as a soft reboot, taking familiar characters into a new direction and rebuilding elements of intrigue that, presumably, the game will continue adding to and answering across the next two to three expansions.

That said, the slower pacing of Dawntrail as it languidly introduces all of these fresh elements has made it difficult for me to get into. I played during the pre-launch but have only managed to eke out around 10 or 15 hours in the expansion so far. 10 or 15 hours may be a full game with some indie titles, or a solid chunk out of the average RPG even, but any MMO player can tell you that it’s barely even scratching the surface for a game (or expansion) in this genre.

It’s not that I don’t like what I’ve played. What I’ve seen of Tural before is absolutely beautiful, aided by a visual upgrade that Square implemented shortly before the expansion launched. Meeting the major players and navigating the twisty politics of the unfamiliar nation of Tuliyollal has been entertaining enough. The groundwork that’s being laid is inviting.

It’s just...really slow. And that’s not new or abnormal for Final Fantasy XIV! This is a game that proudly boasts hundreds of hours of cutscenes in its main plot alone. I’m fine with the game taking its time, but it’s tough to work through that when I only have maybe an hour or two at most to play per session—and maybe only two or three of those sessions in a week, depending on how busy I am.

All of this is to say: Dawntrail is promising, and I think I will grow to like it a lot once I’m able to push through it all. But that may have to wait until things slow down a little. This game has always been something I enjoy playing more during the winter, when it’s too cold to go outside much anyway, so perhaps I’ll find the time to focus on it more during the holidays this year.

World of Warcraft: The War Within (but actually World of Warcraft: Dragonflight)

Hey, speaking of new MMO expansions that mark a major shift for the game: here’s the latest, tenth expansion set for World of Warcraft! The War Within just launched this past week. Among other notable features, it serves as the beginning of “The Worldsoul Saga,” an ambitious new storytelling experiment where Blizzard will be producing a trilogy of connected expansions telling a single story rather than their usual more stand-alone approach.

Put another way: World of Warcraft is finally learning from Final Fantasy XIV, which just so happens to be the first real competition it’s had in the MMO space in the twenty years since it came out.

The early buzz around The War Within has been extremely positive. In true me fashion, though, I...haven’t actually played it yet. That’s because I remembered last week that I had never actually finished the main quest line from 2022’s World of Warcraft: Dragonflight expansion. While my main character—an undead mage named Quinlan who I have played since the day World of Warcraft launched in 2004—is at the Dragonflight level cap of 70 and I could just jump right into The War Within now, I can’t bring myself to not play through all of the primary Dragonflight content first.

The good news, though, is that said Dragonflight content is really good. If The War Within represents a more substantial reset in how Blizzard approaches its behemoth of an MMO, Dragonflight was the necessary first steps in that direction. It has a more relaxed, grounded story1, a revised and very fun flight system, and a brisker pace for new content and experiments to keep players busy.

I’m around two-thirds of the way through Dragonflight’s story now, and what really sticks out to me is how different the writing feels. While the main story is fine2, I’ve been especially impressed by some of the little side stories that play out via optional quests as I’m exploring the expansion’s zones. A couple fun examples from the Azure Span, a snowy, mountainous region of the Dragon Isles.

While flying around, I came across two Tuskarr3 huddled around a campfire in some very foreboding woods. It took me a moment to realize there was also a Human mage lying next to them, seemingly dead or injured. Upon talking to the Tuskarr, I discovered that they had ventured into this forest looking for an ancient and powerful relic which also being sought by the local bad guy faction of dragonkin. Over the course of the next twenty or thirty minutes, I completed a series of quests, fighting through tons of gross spiders and powerful mini-dragons to heal the mage and learn the truth about this relic: that it had possessed and driven mad every person who ever tried to take control of it.

The recovered mage, clearly already under the relic’s spell, refused to heed my warning and rushed off to nab the relic anyway. In the quest’s conclusion, I fought and killed the mage and was then tempted by the relic myself. “My power changes based on who controls me. The others were just too weak. Surely you can do better than them.” Before it could say anymore, I crushed the relic and released the spirits of the mage, and every other mortal the relic had possessed throughout its history.4

In another scenario, I teamed up with an odd couple: Rannan Korren, a Human tinkerer obsessed with creating weird inventions and Lathos Sunband, a Blood Elf who’s regularly annoyed by Rannan’s antics. With these two by my side, I ventured into some ruins where strange arcane magic anomalies had been detected.

I got some good laughs out of Lathos’s exhausted interactions with Rannan, but the humor just made the punch line hit even harder: In the climax of this quest line, Rannan equipped me with an invention that was meant to dispel the dangerous arcane magic in the air. Unfortunately, the device malfunctioned. With no time to try anything else and the danger of the rogue magic blowing up the entirety of the Dragon Isles, Lathos leapt into action. “I failed my people at the Sunwell. I won’t fail them here,” he proclaimed, sacrificing himself as Rannan watched on in shock. It was a sudden moment of high drama with a great callback to some Warcraft lore. It caught me by surprise, and I loved it.

Neither of these two quests are particularly brilliant or groundbreaking writing, at least not as written out in my clumsy words. But you’ve got to remember that so many of World of Warcraft’s sidequests are just...nothing. “Bring me five bear butts.” “Kill this demon who you’ve never met and don’t care about but trust me he’s bad.” “Bring me, mmm, let’s say ten bear butts this time.” They’re functional to push players along in exploring and leveling up and getting gear, but they don’t tell actual stories, or not stories that would even be worth writing out like this.

Before and following the launch of The War Within, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostos has been doing tons of interviews, such as his talk with World of Warcraft YouTubers Taliesin & Evitel during Gamescom. What stood out to me most from this discussion, as written up by WowCarry, were details about how Blizzard has shifted its approach to storytelling and content creation in recent years:

Unlike earlier times where expansion frameworks were set first, the team now establishes a setting and allows the story to unfold through the desires and creativity of its creators. This method injects a fresh zeal into the narrative, aimed at capturing genuine enthusiasm within its development.

While this shift towards a more creator-driven approach has invigorated the development process, it also presents challenges in maintaining cohesive coordination across the diverse voices within the team. However, these challenges are met with a robust creative vision that not only spans three expansions but also smartly incorporates the nuances brought forth by the entire development team.

I’ve interviewed Hazzikostos before, so I know from personal experience that sometimes his answers can come across as very rehearsed and full of buzzwords. But if The War Within does carry forward this more intentional, character-driven sidequest writing from Dragonflight, I’m ready and willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here. I can’t wait to find out for myself.

Elden Ring (but not Shadow of the Erdtree...yet)

Surprise, surprise, I’m behind the times AGAIN. Here’s the problem: When Elden Ring came out in 2022, I was not writing about games either professionally or casually. I love FromSoftware’s games, so of course I bought Elden Ring, and I quickly sunk maybe fifty or sixty hours into it. But I did not complete it before getting pulled away by something else. Such is the life of an adult who doesn’t have enough time to focus on games. It’s frankly disgraceful.

Thus, with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC approaching, I decided my best course of action was to start over again with a new save. Rookie mistake, I know, but I honestly don’t think jumping back in to my level 70+ save without any memory of what I was doing or how to actually play would have produced a good experience.

So the bad news: I haven’t even made it to Shadow of the Erdtree yet. The good news: I’m now over eighty hours into my second attempt to finish Elden Ring, and it still rules so much. In fact, with the previous fifty-plus hours of experience backing me up, I feel like I’m better situated to enjoy the game than I was previously. I had a blast working back through all the old content I’d already cleared, and I’m well into new territory now and totally in love. I beat Starscourge Radahn a few weeks ago at like 2 a.m. and was too hyped to even sleep afterward. What a boss! What a game!

I’ll hopefully make it to the DLC eventually, but I’m enjoying this way too much to rush.

Stay tuned for more as soon as I’m able to get this next Codex entry done. And if you feel like it, leave a comment sharing what games have been eating up your summer!

Share Cartoon Ghost

Programming note: Hi, everyone! My name is Mandi, and you may notice that this is my first full post on Cartoon Ghost and the first post published under the “Not a Giant Robot” branding here. My initial plan was to use Not a Giant Robot to write about manga and anime, and I’m still planning to do that whenever I’m able!

But I really love Steam Next Fest, so I wanted to take this opportunity to make my first contribution to Cartoon Ghost1. Thank you for reading and feel free to leave a comment or email us to share your thoughts!

Tactical Breach Wizards

Tactical Breach Wizards reminds me of Into the Breach, and not just because it has “breach” in its name. Like Into the Breach, it’s a turn-based strategy game that lets you rewind time and correct deadly mistakes. They’re both fast-paced titles with short levels that feel like puzzles, but they’re one key difference: Tactical Breach Wizards swaps out mechs for magic-wielding wizards.

Each of these wizards has a unique set of skills, giving you an assortment of tools you can use as you fight your way through different levels. One wizard can chain lightning and attack multiple enemies at once. Another can turn themselves into a dog. Both the wacky magical arsenal and the rewind ability encourage experimentation, making for a satisfying strategic experience.

Hollowbody

Hollowbody feels like it could be a forgotten PlayStation 2 game, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a moody survival horror game with shades of both Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The camera is fixed, and it uses tank controls. These throwback mechanics might feel dated to some, but for me, it made my experience all the more compelling.

There’s something terrifying about a horror game that requires you to relinquish your control. Hollowbody forced me to walk down corridors without checking to see what was ahead of me, or fight my way through enemies with only a handful of ammo. If you have nostalgia for the clunkiness of old horror games, you owe it to yourself to give Hollowbody a try.

Ova Magica

Ova Magica is Pokémon by way of Harvest Moon 64, with just a pinch of Slime Rancher thrown in. It starts like most farm sims do: you move to a new town to take over the family farm. Once you arrive, you discover that the townsfolk are obsessed with monster battles involving blob-like creatures, and you can breed those creates to create brand-new blobs.

It’s an obvious mishmash of different games and genres, but it still manages to feel unique, even in the crowded farming sim landscape. The bright, saturated colors are a welcome throwback to the N64 era, but if they’re too bright for you, you can tone them down at the start of the game. If you love monster battles, like to chill out and water crops, or draw diagrams to make sense of crossbreeding mechanics, Ova Magica will capture your heart.

Slash Quest

Slash Quest is an action-adventure game where you carry a giant talking sword you can barely handle. The controls are unwieldy by design, and while they definitely took some getting used to, that clunkiness made the game much more fun. Even simple tasks, like swinging my sword at a low-level enemy, took effort, and that made every action feel satisfying.

Your sword gradually grows larger as you kill more enemies. That extra size makes it easy to reach far-away targets, but it also makes the sword even trickier to control. The whole thing is kind of awkward, but it’s also a blast. Slash Quest left me wishing that more games had cumbersome controls, and I was crushed when my clunky adventure game to an end.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a mystery in a house that’s constantly changing. Think House of Leaves, but without all the red text and footnotes. Your task is to explore Mt. Holly, a massive manor with empty blueprints. You have to draft each room you visit and investigate the house as you build it.

At the end each day, the floor plan resets, which means you have to start the building process all over again. The manor is different every time you explore it, and there are always new secrets to discover. It’s an addictive, fascinating puzzle game that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever played.

Creatures of Ava

The announcement trailer for Creatures of Ava reminded me of No Man’s Sky, but now that I’ve played it, I think it’s closer to Pokémon Snap. It’s an exploration-driven adventure game about an expedition to a breathtakingly beautiful alien world. You play as a researcher tasked with documenting the planet Ava, snapping photos of its cute creatures, and protecting them as best you can.

There’s no combat in Creatures of Ava, but it still manages to create a sense of tension. Near the start of the demo, I kneeled down to take a picture of a pack of critters. When I went to zoom my camera in, I was distracted by a ground-shaking roar. Ava’s titular creatures are adorable, but they also feel wild, and that makes encounters with them all the more exciting.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

Flintlock’s Steam page describes it as a “Souls-lite,” which basically means that it uses Souls-esque combat focused on dodging and parrying but isn’t quite so brutal and unforgiving as a FromSoft game. What really sets it apart, though, is the fascinating world that developer A44 Games has created. This demo was a blast, and I’m stoked that the full game is onla month out from launch.

Tiny Glade

Tiny Glade is much closer to a toy than a game, but don’t let that stop you from checking it out. It’s a relaxing building tool in the vein of Townscaper or Summerhouse, but what sets it apart is the way the structures you build come to life. At night, fireflies began to swarm around my carefully placed lamps. During the day, fluffy, pettable sheep wandered through my flowery fields.

Playing Tiny Glade feels like doodling a picture and watching it turn into something real. There are no rules, no grids, and no restrictions. It’s just a cozy little building tool that becomes more magical the longer you play.

Love, Ghostie

Do you believe in life after death? Ghosts are real in Love, Ghostie, and their afterlives revolve around matchmaking. You haunt a shared house, and it’s your job to set up as many of its residents as you can. This might involve stealing items and selling them on the ghost internet2 for cash, editing the activity board to set people up on dates, or spying on residents to learn more about the kind of romantic partner they’re looking for.

I’m a big fan of cozy games—and I can’t get enough of cartoon ghosts—but I was still taken aback by how charming Love, Ghostie is. The core gameplay is pretty simple, but the hilarious writing and adorable animations transform this title into something special. If I could play more of one Next Fest demo, this would be the one I’d pick.

Demonschool

Demonschool is a turn-based tactical RPG about a ragtag team of teenage exorcists. It’s clearly influenced by old-school Persona titles, but it also takes inspiration from newer games in the series. The veil between the human and demon worlds is thin, and you must split your time between demon-slaying and general high school shenanigans.

Combat in Demonschool is a little obtuse—it could definitely use a better tutorial—but once I figured it out, I couldn’t get enough of it. The game requires you to plan out your movements before you execute them, and if you set things up right, you can unleash devastating combos. There’s also scheduling, relationship-building, and everything else you could want out of a Persona-style game. If you don’t mind complex battle systems, this is definitely worth your time.

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Tricky Madness

If you miss the classic SSX games even half as much as I do, you need to download the Tricky Madness demo right now. Tricky Madness is as close to SSX Tricky as a game can possibly get without running into legal issues. It even has an Uber Meter!

Tricky Madness doesn’t do anything new or unexpected, but does it really need to when it’s building off a game as good as SSX Tricky is? Whether I was grinding on rails, pulling off sick flips, or crashing headfirst into a tree, Tricky Madness made me feel like I was playing one of my favorite games all over again.

LOK Digital

LOK Digital is a puzzle game about spelling nonsense words over and over. LOK. LOK. TLAK. TA. Each of those words has its own parameters; spelling LOK allows you to black out a single title, while TLAK lets you black out two tiles side-by-side. Spelling these words in the right order is the key to solving puzzles.

The puzzles in LOK Digital are simple enough to always feel solvable, but challenging enough that I got stuck a few times. It’s the kind of puzzle game I could see myself playing on a daily basis, and I hope to do exactly that when the full game is out.

On Your Tail

There’s been a slew of detective games lately, but as a die-hard fan of mysteries, I’m not complaining. On Your Tail is an investigative life sim set in a picturesque seaside town. You can spend your days relaxing on the beach, playing games at the local arcade, or collecting clues so that you can crack a big case.

In On Your Tail, solving mysteries is about playing your cards right, literally. Clues come in the shape of cards, and you have to play those cards in the correct order to get to the bottom of a big case. The mysteries in the demo are pretty simple, but I still had a ton of fun testing my sleuthing skills.

Super Fantasy Kingdom

Super Fantasy Kingdom feels like a stripped-down version of the real-time strategy games I used to play every day after school. It’s a roguelite city builder where you expand a town, hire defenders, and do your best to fight off the hordes of monsters charging towards your kingdom gates.

My first Super Fantasy Kingdom playthrough ended pretty quickly, but I got better at kingdom-building with each new attempt. Even when my heroes were defeated and my city was in flames, I wanted to try things one more time. Be warned: this is the kind of demo you can easily sink hours into.

Schim

Schim is a very simple game carried by it’s brilliant premise. Players take on the role of a little froglike shadow creature that must leap between shadows cast by people, objects, and animals to make its way through levels. The monotone color design lends the game a memorable, almost picture-book quality, and the scenarios I found myself leaping through in the demo were heartwarming and evocative. This seems like it will be a great cozy exploration game without much focus on challenge.

Keylocker

Keylocker is a turn-based cyberpunk JRPG with rhythm game elements, and that combination is just as amazing as it sounds. Set in a world where music is banned, you play as a rebel songwriter determined to fight her way through every oppressive rule she comes across.

The demo isn’t overly long, but it feels like it’s bursting with possibilities. Early on, I was prompted choose a class and saw a note that each class had its own story path. There are detailed skill trees, and the cyberpunk world feels vibrant and alive. Keylocker hasn’t gotten much attention during the Next Fest, but it’s way too good to get overlooked.

Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus

Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is a gorgeous 2.5D Metroidvania that takes inspiration from Japanese folklore. The hand-drawn world is absolutely stunning, but the movement and combat is the real star of the show. Bō allows you to jump again after striking an enemy or object, and that makes for some incredible aerial battles.

This demo has drawn comparisons to many beloved Metroidvanias, like Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest, but it’s good enough to stand on its own. Whether you’re craving some smooth platforming action or just want to experience a visual treat, you should download this demo while you still can.

Parcel Corps

The gig economy may be a disaster for the working class, but it can be pretty fun in video game form. Parcel Corps is all about taking delivery assignments and then zooming across town on your bike as fast as possible, sliding on rails, avoiding traffic, and doing sick tricks along the way. Think Jet Set Radio minus graffiti and plus a lot of delivery missions and you’re most of the way there.

If the demo is anything to go by, Parcel Corps has tight controls that are easy enough to learn the basics. Anyone should be able to play and enjoy it, but the people who take the time to master it are going to pull off some ridiculous stuff. I look forward to seeing some insane YouTube videos and Twitch clips.

Megaloot

Video game inventory management is genuinely one of my greatest passions in life. I think about ways to organize and arrange items when I drift off to sleep at night, and that means loot management games like Megaloot are basically made for me. That said, even if you’re less intense about inventory management than I am, this roguelike deckbuilder is worth your time.

Megaloot is a game about exploring a tower and fighting monsters, but those battles are really just a way to collect loot. You can equip that loot, combine loot cards to create bigger and better items, or convert items to get power-ups in the heat of battle. It’s an addictive, challenging system that I’ll probably wind up sinking hundreds of hours into.

The Crush House

The year is 1999, and you’ve just been hired to work on the world’s hottest reality series: The Crush House. It’s your job to film the cast, capture the juiciest moments, and keep your demanding audiences happy. Sometimes that means shooting catfights in dutch angles, and sometimes that meets capturing a few butt shots. That’s showbiz, baby!

The Crush House might feel like an ordinary management sim at first, but as you get deeper into filming, you’ll discover that this reality show is hiding a few dark secrets. It’s hilarious, addictive, and packed to the brim with Y2K nostalgia. It also runs perfectly on Steam Deck, which is a huge plus in my book.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Pipistrello is a Game Boy Advance-style action game where your weapon of choice is a yo-yo. That yoyo also happens to be possessed by your beloved auntie, which allows you to pull off all kinds of impossible tricks. You can shoot your yoyo around corners, toss it across platforms and watch it fly back, or do things the easy way and use it to shoot enemies in the face.

Everything about this title captured my heart, from the bright pixelated visuals to the charming dialogue to the inventive gameplay mechanics. I don’t play a ton of retro platforming games, but after playing the demo, I can say that I’ll be buying this title on day one.

Bloomtown: A Different Story

Bloomtown is a turn-based RPG that’s clearly inspired by the Persona series, but there’s a twist: It takes place in a 1960s American city. You and your brother are visiting your grandpa for the summer, which means you have to run errands, water his crops, and battle the demons that are taking over the hearts of the town’s residents.

The script in Bloomtown could use a little polishing, but I still found the story and gameplay to be extremely compelling. I loved seeing my social skills climb as I chatted with the locals, and using those newly-acquired skills to convince demonic creatures to join my team. Persona 6 is presumably still a long ways off, so if you’re looking for something to tide you over, this might be the game for you.

Mind Over Magnet

This puzzle platformer is all about the power of magnetism. You play as a magnet, and you and your equally magnetic friends must use the powers of attraction to solve puzzles and escape a deadly factory. Each puzzle takes place on a single screen and requires you to use your magnetic abilities in unique ways.

Mind Over Magnet feels a little like a flash game, but not in a bad way. Most of the puzzles are short enough to be completed in a few minutes, and each one I tackled in the demo was perfectly designed. I managed to get stuck once or twice, but everything made sense once I figured out how the magnets should work.

Mirthwood

Mirthwood is an idyllic life sim where you can build a cozy life on a farm, but it’s also a fantasy action RPG ala Skyrim. That might sound like a clash of genres, but the combination works together beautifully. Heading out on dangerous adventures made coming back to my farm feel all the more sweet.

The land of Mirthwood is filled with NPCs that you can befriend, romance, influence, or cut down with a few swings of your sword. You can also take on quests and battle dangerous monsters, raise chickens, or visit new towns and sell your wares. It’s a rich, varied fantasy life sim that I can’t wait to see more of.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

Arranger is a unique RPG that takes place on an interconnected grid of sliding tiles. Every time you move forward, the rest of the tiles in the row move with you, dragging items, people, and other things along for the ride. The result is a puzzle-filled gameplay system that requires thinking carefully about every move you make.

The puzzling gameplay system in Arranger can be challenging, but the scenarios the game puts players in can also be hilarious. Sometimes I visited a house and ended up dragging a few appliances along with me as I walked out the door. The mechanics require strategy, but they also invite chaos, and that results in a ton of fun.

While I’m continuing my slow and steady survey of RPG history, I wanted to also have a way to recommend newer releases that I’ve been playing. So to kick that off, let’s take a look at Kingsgrave, an action-adventure with light RPG elements that just launched in April.

In Kingsgrave, players take on the role of—you may have guessed this—a king. Specifically, a king who has been slumbering and presumed dead for an extended period. While the big guy in charge napped, the kingdom has collapsed. The king’s subjects are spread far and wide, monsters now roam the land, and all the buildings, roads, and bridges have fallen into disrepair.

Finally awoken by a mysterious voice, the king must go on a journey to rescue his loyal subjects, restore the land, and reclaim the power necessary to thwart whatever deep evil has taken root. In mechanical terms, that means exploring the world from a top-down perspective akin to the 8- and 16-bit Legend of Zelda games, the clearest inspiration that Kingsgrave showcases.

It’s not all Zelda, though. The game’s dark story and dreary world recalls Dark Souls and other From Software classics, while progress in the game often plays out in way that feels almost like a super stripped-down version of survival games like Minecraft or Valheim.

As the king explores the land and rescues more people, he’s able to reassemble buildings, which in turn give him access to new tools. For example, one of the rescued may be able to operate as a blacksmith, but it’s not enough to simply return him to his smithy and be given a sword. No, you’ll need to provide wood and stone, which require their own tools to harvest. Kingsgrave never goes down the path of a full-on survival game—a fact I’m grateful for, as I often struggle to get into those—but it certainly has a smidgen of that genre’s material-based grindiness to it.

Don’t get too scared off by the word “grind,” though. It never took me too terribly long to find the ingredients I needed for each new upgrade, or to scour the map for the next path to explore after earning a new tool. In fact, one of Kingsgrave’s greatest strengths, in my opinion, is how briskly it moves. I completed the game in just over six hours, with only a smattering of optional stuff to track down.

One caveat, however: Don’t go into Kingsgrave expecting a particularly well-developed RPG system. There are RPG mechanics to the game; specifically, the king can spend some of his materials earned from slaying monsters to power up specific weapons or magic abilities. The skill trees these are unlocked from branch at a few points, forcing the player to make some decisions about what play style they want to prioritize.

That said, the skill upgrade system doesn’t seem particularly well-balanced for how short Kingsgrave is. I felt like I had barely made a dent in the number of unlocks by the time I beat the game, and unlocking everything would have required tons of mindless grinding just for the reward of being even stronger and even harder to kill when I already didn’t have a lot of trouble.

I would also caution that although I brought up the Dark Souls feel to the world, the combat is much more in the 16-bit Legend of Zelda style, by which I mean totally fine and serviceable but absolutely not the reason to play. The joy of Kingsgrave for me was in exploring its world, slowly rebuilding my kingdom’s population, and gaining access to new weapons and abilities that allowed me to explore even more. In that sense, it almost plays out more like a Metroidvania than a traditional RPG or action-RPG.

If you’ve got any nostalgia for old-school Zelda or if anything I’ve described here sounds of interest, though, Kingsgrave is absolutely worth checking out, especially as it’s available for a mere $10. The game comes courtesy of Egg or Chicken Games, a small team of less than ten developers which was established in 2022, and as far as I can tell this is their debut release. I’ve had trouble locating much more information about them, but if this really is their first game, I’ve got a lot of hope for what they might be able to do in the future.

Game: Dungeon
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: 1975

Reader, your eyes are not deceiving you. The first RPG I covered also went by the name Dungeon, and the second was known as Game of Dungeons, and now... We’re back to Dungeon again!

Sadly, like m199h (aka Dungeon), this Dungeon is no longer playable in any form. All we have is the title screen pictured above. It’s quite an impressive title screen too; supposedly the clock in the middle actually functions and accurately tells the current time!

Although I cannot go into as much detail about Dungeon as I’d like to, thankfully there is much more information available about the game’s primary creator, so that’s what this entry will mostly be about. As you can see in the title screen, Dungeon’s design is credited to five people: John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jon Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada. But it’s the first of those names who seemingly led the project, and his history with game development on the PLATO mainframe provides a fascinating glimpse into the very beginnings of this medium.

The first thing to know about John Daleske is that it’s a minor miracle that he was able to create games at all. That’s because in 1972, Daleske was nearly sent off to war in Vietnam, like nearly two million other young men of the time. He attended boot camp but somehow narrowly managed to avoid actually getting shipped out. One wonders how many potential budding game devs we lost—on both sides—to the horrors of that unnecessary conflict.

Thankfully, though, Daleske avoided that fate and instead attended college at Iowa State University, where he quickly became obsessed with the school’s hottest new technology: the PLATO terminal. And I mean seriously obsessed. Daleske would regularly hang out in the education building—where the campus’s sole PLATO terminal was located—all night, playing games or programming his own until 6 a.m., when the system would reset and kick him off. At that point, he’d scamper back to his dorm room and catch a few hours of sleep before class before doing it all over again.

Of course, just because Daleske wanted to spend all of his free time with PLATO doesn’t mean he was supposed to. Technically, he wasn’t allowed to be in the education building past a certain time. In order to do those overnight sessions, he would often hide out in the building with the lights switched off so that campus security wouldn’t kick him out. There were even a few occasions where, upon accidentally finding himself locked out, he picked the lock of the education building in order to get back in.

Eventually the school administration took notice of Daleske’s extracurricular activities, and he was called to a meeting with Trevor G. Howe, then the dean of Iowa State University’s College of Education. Daleske probably expected to get screamed at, banned from the building, or perhaps even suspended. To his surprise, though, the dean offered him a letter giving him permission to enter the education building at any time, alongside a key to the building.

Explaining this event to The Friendly Orange Glow author Brian Dear, Daleske said:

“[The dean] said he didn’t want to have to replace the lock because I was wearing it out.”

Incredible stuff. Bless that dean!

In the spring of 1973, with unrestricted access to the PLATO system, Daleske started working on what would be his most popular game: Empire. Initially this was the final project for an education class he was attending at Iowa State University, but it grew into what would be the first ever networked multiplayer space shooter.

Heavily inspired by Star Trek, Empire is another one of those shockingly complex PLATO games. It may look simple, but it has a surprising amount of depth, from a simulated economy, to dynamic player alliances, to real-time in-game messages that could be sent to individual players or teams. Later versions of Empire introduced developer-run events and tournaments and even a “monitor mode” where PLATO users could just watch rather than play—quite likely the earliest version of a spectator mode ever put into a game.

Empire became an absolute hit among the PLATO community, and it even has some dedicated players to this day. Cyber1 considers it one of the “Main Attractions” of its emulated PLATO service.

While Daleske continued working on new versions of Empire alongside a small team of other student designers, by late 1974 or early 1975 he started working on a new project. His goal was to take the lessons learned from Empire’s popularity and marry them to the similarly beloved early fantasy RPGs, like dnd and pedit5. In other words, he wanted to create something like those early dungeon crawl RPGs but make it multiplayer.

Though it’s no longer playable, Daleske said a functioning version of Dungeon was released at some point. The game was first-person and had multiple players adventuring through a 3D maze full of monsters and treasures together. It was arguably the first multi-user dungeon (MUD) ever made, and Daleske claimed it was a predecessor to Moria, a still-functioning PLATO MUD that I’ll be covering soon.

While it may have been an impressive feat, Dungeon never gained the same level of popularity as Empire. Daleske suggested this could have been due to the game running too slowly or being too complicated. He also stated on his own website that it was “incomplete”—never properly finished despite being playable.

There’s a good reason for that incompleteness, though. In May 1975, half a year or less into his work on Dungeon, Daleske was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Understandably rattled by the news, the young students focused less of his time and attention on making games. Thankfully, he later discovered that he had been misdiagnosed, but not before he had lost a year to planning for the end of his life. By the time he was mentally recovered from that whole scenario, Daleske had more or less moved on from Dungeon, as had most of the students playing games on the PLATO network.

Daleske didn’t give up on PLATO entirely, though. By 1977, he had moved to Minnesota to work at CDC (Control Data Corporation), the manufacturer behind the mainframe computers that PLATO ran on. While working on PLATO, he would often jump into the early versions of forums, message boards, chat rooms, and so on that were available on the network.

It was while partaking in these virtual social functions that John Daleske met Reina Jones, a PLATO enthusiast living in Ohio. The two quickly fell in love, marking if not the first at least one of the earliest examples of a couple meeting online and ending up married. When that marriage happened in October 1977, mere months after first “meeting” on the mainframe, the wedding party included an array of figures from the wider PLATO user community.

In another sharp reminder of how the history of the gaming medium, RPG and otherwise, is quickly vanishing, John Daleske passed away in 2023 at the age of 70. This one hit me particularly hard, both because Daleske was such an interesting figure in the PLATO scene and because, had I started this project just a few years earlier, I could have at least attempted to interview him.

On the plus side, Daleske himself has left behind a ton of writing on his personal website covering the world of PLATO, both gaming and general information. Among other interesting articles, this includes a deep history of the development of Empire across multiple versions. This site provides absolutely essential insight into early game development, and I strongly suggest reading it thoroughly if you’re at all interested in this topic.

While Dungeon may no longer be available, Daleske’s legacy lives on through his website, through the still playable Empire, and through his wife, his two daughters, and his extended family. His contribution to video games is pretty cool and all, but it’s that last one that’s the most important. May he rest in peace.

Programming note: I just wanted to offer quick apologies for the long delay in this article. That’s one reason that none of Cartoon Ghost’s content is paywalled right now, though paid subscriptions are always appreciated.

Researching this entry took me down a few different rabbit holes, and I wanted to make sure to exhaust all my sources before I wrote everything up. I’ve also been preparing for a new day job on top of that. I’m hoping to have a more consistent posting schedule here soon, though! Thank you for your patience!

Sources for this entry

Barton, Matt. Armchair Arcade. “Fun with PLATO.” July 3, 2007. Archived November 20, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171120234946/http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1396.

Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “BRIEF: Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play.” June 30, 2021. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/06/brief-everything-we-know-about-1970s.html.

Computer History Museum. “John Daleske.” Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://computerhistory.org/profile/john-daleske/.

Daleske, John. Daleske Space - History of Computing - PLATO System - Games - Social Media. “PLATO - Also an Excellent Platform to Design Games.” Last modified September 7, 2016. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://www.daleske.com/plato/plato-games.php.

Daleske, John. Daleske Space - History of Computing - PLATO System - Games - Social Media. “PLATO Empire - Game Innovations - Timeline.” Last modified December 5, 2017. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://daleske.com/plato/empire.php.

Dear, Brian. 2017. The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. New York: Vintage Books.

Mahney, Nathan. CRPG Adventures. “Dungeon (1975).” August 19, 2014. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2014/08/dungeon-1975.html.

Moby Games. “Dungeon.” January 19, 2018. Last modified August 2, 2023. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/game/101218/dungeon/.

The RPG Explorer. “Dungeon.” May 1, 2018. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://exploradorrpg.wordpress.com/juegos/dungeon-plato/.

Stumpff Funeral Home. “John David Daleske.” Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://www.stumpfffuneral.com/obituary/john-daleske.

Video Game History Project. YouTube. “Empire [PLATO] (1973).” January 13, 2019. Last accessed May 28, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8mrNPr_3o.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a bit about what a bad time it is for the gaming industry. Well, things haven’t improved. In case you missed the latest bad news, Microsoft made the decision to close three Bethesda studios and absorb a fourth. Most notably among the closed: Tango Gameworks—the Japanese studio behind The Evil Within series of survival horror games and last year’s surprise rhythm action game hit Hi-Fi Rush—and Arkane Austin—creators of 2017’s brilliant first-person shooter/immersive sim Prey and last year’s widely disliked co-op vampire shooter Redfall.

I could list off a million reasons why these studio closures are a bad decision. A lot of these things go without saying and are the same across virtually all layoffs and studio closures. Most obvious of all is the human element—the cold, calculated cruelty of putting people out of work, especially during such difficult economic conditions, just to keep the shareholders happy and maybe squeeze out another undeserved bonus for the slugs that pass for executives in these companies.

That line of thinking—what you might call “the absolute base of what should be expected from anyone with a soul”—still applies here, of course. But we can push it even further. We can stick to the kind of empathy-averse logic that the mega-rich vultures subscribe to, and it still comes across as a poorly timed, ill-considered choice that has all the potential to domino across Microsoft’s future aspirations as one of the biggest publishers in gaming.

Let’s set aside Tango Gameworks for now and focus on Arkane Austin, which is the more reasonable-seeming of the decisions. Initially built in 2006 as a support studio for the main branch of Arkane, which is based on Lyon, France, Arkane Austin shifted into handling its own projects beginning with 2017’s Prey.

Prey was an interesting, strange little thing. Ostensibly, it was a reboot of the original Prey, a fairly by-the-books first-person shooter developed by Human Head Studios and published by 2K Games in 2006. That first Prey game was mostly remembered for featuring a rare Native American protagonist and for some fairly clever, gravity-defying level design later in the game. It’s a solid experience, although I’d guess it’s less impressive in 2024 than it was back when it first released.

After numerous attempts at a sequel didn’t go very far, the rights to Prey somehow ended up with Bethesda, and they tasked Arkane Austin with doing something, anything under that name. The result was Prey 2017, a game that was…basically nothing like the first Prey and, as far as I ever figured out, not connected to it any way1. It was, however, an absolute masterpiece.

Arkane Austin’s Prey told a twisty science fiction tale of shape-shifting aliens aboard a massive space station. Taking on the role of scientist Morgan Yu, players spent the game exploring that space station, slowly gaining access to new areas and uncovering the disastrous alien organism invasion that has wreaked havoc. Like previous Arkane titles—the beloved Dishonored games, for example—the level design of Prey prioritized giving players some degree of agency. Rather than being funneled down a series of linear hallways, each destination in the game usually had multiple methods for reaching it, including the delightful ability to create stairways using the Gelifoam Lattice Organism Obstructor (aka the GLOO Cannon). That’s one of those joyful, game-changing toys that I wish I could pull into any 3D game.

I’m rehashing this history for two reasons: a.) to catch up any readers who are unfamiliar with Arkane Austin’s output and b.) to establish that, whatever went on behind the scenes, Arkane Austin is clearly a studio capable of creating great games. Prey wasn’t the most critically acclaimed game of 2017, but it had generally positive reviews, and I can say for my part that it was one of my favorite things I played that year by far.

Of course, my personal seal of approval doesn’t go very far when it comes to game sales. I can’t find explicit numbers, but most unofficial sources estimate that Prey 2017 sold over a million copies. That’s far from terrible, but it’s surely not what Bethesda was aiming for with a big triple-A budget release. Plus Prey was on sale for $20 less than six months after it launched, so some portion of those sales were likely at a steep discount2.

And that brings us to Redfall. While Arkane Lyon went on to create another immersive sim in its traditional style with Deathloop, Arkane Austin began developing a new IP of its own but with a new genre as well. Redfall would be Arkane’s first full open-world shooter, its first loot-focused RPG, and its first game focused on cooperative multiplayer rather than single-player alone. And although Deathloop technically launched after Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda, Redfall would be the first Arkane game announced to the public from Microsoft during E3 2021. Clearly Microsoft wanted it to be a hit.

What they got was, uh...not a hit. Unlike a lot of people weighing in on the Arkane Austin closure, I actually played Redfall, from beginning to end. When I reviewed the game about a week-and-a-half after its launch,3 I called it “Microsoft’s biggest first-party failure yet.” You could probably make a strong argument for Starfield surpassing it now, at least in case of expectations versus reality, but I stand by my words there.

Redfall was an absolute mess, but a mess with easy-to-recognize potential, which made the messiness all the more frustrating. It’s got a fun Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque setup, and there were moments where the shooting felt great, especially when I could plop down a UV light to turn all the vampires around me into stone.

Those brighter moments were the exception though. Most of the thirty or so hours I sunk into Redfall were spent fighting bugs, slowdown, crashes, and depressingly unambitious mission design. Here’s what I had to say about the game’s low-budget-feeling mission briefings, which take the form of voiced dialogue played over static art:

To be clear, I’m not accusing Arkane or Microsoft or anyone else of cost-cutting. I have no idea what went on during Redfall’s development, and I wouldn’t want to guess. It’s entirely possible that this approach to mission briefings was a very early stylistic choice that they stuck with throughout the game. All I’m saying is that it feel like a very poorly thought out and confusing stylistic choice if so, and it’s far from the only example of this in the game.

As then, I’d like to avoid making any assumptions about what went on during the development of Redfall. What feels clear to most people who played the game, though, is that at minimum, Arkane Austin did not have access to the time or resources necessary to create a game in a genre it had never developed in, with technical necessities it had never implemented before, and using a live-service, continued development model the studio had no experience with. Maybe the amount of time necessary to pull this all off successfully wasn’t realistic for Microsoft, or maybe, somehow, the people who made the final call on Redfall’s release date genuinely believed what was being released was the height of what was possible from the studio.

I can’t say what the solution was to fixing Redfall, but I know one guy who sounds pretty certain about it. That would be Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and head of the Xbox team. Just over a year ago, days after Redfall launched (and still a week or so before my review was written), Spencer made an appearance on the Kinda Funny Xcast. The main topic was, naturally, the negative reviews and generally negative reaction from the wider gaming audience to Redfall.

In this interview, Spencer was adamant that delaying Redfall wasn’t the solution. Instead, he said, the game’s failure was due to Arkane Austin failing to live up to its creative ambitions. Said Spencer (via a write-up of the interview on Video Games Chronicle):

I think it’s maybe a bit simplistic to say, “Hey, maybe if you just delayed it three months, the core creative of the game would’ve delivered on something [sic] than what it was.” So I look at them in different camps. If there’s a production timeline issue, we’ve been open to delaying. If we just have more bugs than we should have at the end of a game, we’re open to delaying. At some point we do need to have a creative vision and put the game out and reviewers and players will tell us what they think.

So the creative vision—or Arkane Austin’s ability to execute on it, at least—was the problem, according to Spencer. Though he slightly contradicts himself a bit later:

There’s clearly quality and execution things that we can do, but one thing I won’t do is push against the creative aspirations of our teams. I know a lot of people will say, “Hey, you’ve got teams, teams know how to do one kind of game, just force them to go do the one kind of game that they have a proven track record.” And I’m just not a believer in that. Maybe that means I’ll underdeliver for some of our fans out there...

So the creative vision was the problem but also the guy who ostensibly runs everything is unwilling to push back on the creative vision. Okay! Despite essentially throwing Arkane Austin under the bus in this interview, Spencer also noted that Microsoft should have done a better job of engaging with the existing projects in development when they acquired Bethesda and deciding whether to keep pursuing them. From what he said, Redfall was already well under way by the time Bethesda was put under the Microsoft umbrella (which makes sense), but Microsoft chose not to “engage” (that’s the term he kept using) with the product as much as they perhaps should have.

So the creative vision was the problem, but also Microsoft should have “engaged” with Arkane Austin on the game, but also whatever “engaging” means, it does not mean “push[ing] against the creative aspirations of our teams.” Got it? Good.

I’m being a dick to Phil Spencer here, so I want to be clear: Yes, I called company execs slugs earlier, but no, I do not actually have anything against Mr. Spencer specifically. In fact, when it comes to video game industry execs, I’ve long felt that he’s one of the few who comes across as not just personable but actively passionate about games. That’s a rarity, and it’s earned him a fair bit of love from the broader gaming audience4. So no, I’m not trying to pick on Phil Spencer specifically.

But there is one very clear, easy-to-grasp statement that Spencer made during that interview with Kinda Funny a year ago:

I’m going to take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great.

So what does “taking full responsibility” mean?

It’s not just Spencer either.

It’s Aaron Greenberg, Xbox Games Marketing’s vice president, who spent 2023 talking about how Tango Gameworks’s Hi-Fi Rush was “a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations.”

It’s Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, who was quoted a month-and-a-half after Redfall’s launch last year as saying he “feel[s] accountable that we could have done a better job with Arkane” and promised that the studio was staying open to work on fixes and new content5.

So what does “feel[ing] accountable” mean?

It’s quite likely that Booty and Greenberg did not make the final call to shut down Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Maybe they even fought against it internally. It’s even possible that Phil Spencer himself didn’t decide to drop the axe. Microsoft is a big company, worth a lot of money, beholden to a lot of shareholders (reportedly more than 80,000 of them).

Whoever made this decision, though, it’s one that’s going to echo throughout Microsoft’s future in gaming. Game developers currently employed at Microsoft-owned studios are sure to be living in fear, knowing that even if their studio has a track record for excellent releases, one flub could be the end. Game developers who might look at jobs at Microsoft-owned studios in the future are sure to second-guess making that jump, knowing that there’s no real promise of stability here. Even a breakout hit that exceeds all expectations doesn’t guarantee a job in a year’s time. If that’s the case, why not just stick to indie development?

And that’s just on the developer side. Gamers—the ones who are plugged into stuff enough to pay attention to layoffs and the like, at least—have no reason to trust Microsoft in the future. Getting a disappointing game like Redfall sucks, but you know what sucks more? Being lied to, directly and repeatedly, by execs who promise the game will get continued support, bug fixes, new content, etc., and then unceremoniously pull the rug out.

Again, the problem’s not just Phil Spencer or Matt Booty or Aaron Greenberg. Obviously, once again, the problem’s not even just Microsoft. The entire game industry has been bleeding for well over a year now. There’s something deeply broken and desperately in need of healing at the heart of gaming (spoilers: it’s capitalism).

All I can say with absolute certainty is that even if Redfall sucked, closing Arkane Austin was not the right choice.

At the end of my Redfall review last year, I spent a little time pondering the game’s possibilities:

Maybe the future will be kind to Redfall; maybe it will be like other notorious Bethesda titles like The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76, which launched in rough shape but were patched into something more playable and built up fan bases over the years. Maybe. I’d love to see Redfall’s obvious potential fulfilled.

Whether salvaging Redfall was possible or not, I’m lamenting that we’ll never have the opportunity to see what Arkane Austin could have made in the future. I hope the sixty-plus developers laid off from Arkane Austin are able to land on their feet and do something they find creatively fulfilling in the future, and I hope the exact same for the two hundred-plus other developers let go by Microsoft yesterday.

Other sources consulted

GamesIndustry.biz, GamesRadar, PC Gamer, Kotaku

As I discussed in the introductory post to The Codex, I’ll be splitting these entries into three distinct parts, covering each game first by plot, then gameplay design, and finally providing some of the historical context behind it. If you have any feedback about this format, suggestions about important elements I may be missing, or questions about this game specifically, please leave a comment or send an email.

On with the show!

Game: dnd (aka Game of Dungeons)
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: 1975

THE STORY

As we’ll discover with most of this era, the story for dnd is about as bare-bones as it comes. The game is set in a world with a handful of maze-like dungeons. Players take on the role of an adventurer who explores said dungeons in search of riches. The goal is to gather whatever gold and other treasures can be found while fighting or avoiding dangerous monsters.

The solo adventurer who stars in dnd is player-created and can be one of four different races: elf, dwarf, gnome, or human.1 There are considerable differences in how each of those races plays, but the game does not provide any real context or backstory about how the races relate to each other in this world or what their differing motivations might be. As far as personality goes, every dnd character has exactly the same single-minded ambition.

The initial version of the game featured only one maze to navigate: the Whisenwood Dungeon, named for the game’s two authors, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. At the bottom of the Whisenwood Dungeon, adventurers could locate an enchanted fountain that served multiple purposes: It would restore the character’s hit points, improve their stats, and load them down with tons of gold.

Later versions of dnd2 would include two new dungeons. The Caverns housed a magical orb guarded by a dragon, the most powerful creature in the game. The Tomb of Doom climaxed in an encounter with a vampire who was guarding the Holy Grail itself.

A single character can attempt to tackle all three of these dungeons. If a hero manages to possess both the magical orb from the Caverns and the Holy Grail from the Tomb of Doom, the character wins the game and is retired to the Elysian Fields. While dnd features plenty of mechanical complexity—more than I expected from one of the earliest RPG video games ever!—there’s not much more to the game’s story.

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THE GAMEPLAY

Gold is more than just a goal in dnd; it’s also the method for achieving said goal. Though clearly heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, dnd splits with the pen-and-paper RPG in some major ways, most notably in the form of character progression.

Dungeons & Dragons popularized the brilliant mechanic of characters gaining experience points after successful encounters, which then fed into leveling up. Leveling up is a concept that was first introduced in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor pen-and-paper campaign before making its way to Dungeons & Dragons.

Leveling exists in dnd, but its form as been modified slightly. In Dungeons & Dragons, experience points were granted both for slaying monsters (what’s most commonly focused on these days) and for collecting treasure. In dnd, the focus is entirely on collecting gold, but it’s not enough to just pick it up. The gold doesn’t get added to a character’s experience points until they safely return their treasure to the surface.

The leveling system in dnd was actually modified across some of the game’s updates. In the earliest versions of the game, leveling was simplified: The amount of gold that a character dragged back to the surface would be applied directly to their maximum hit points. Later, a proper experience point and leveling system was added, with gold returned to the surface being added to experience points. There was one caveat, however: A hero could only gain one level per trip to the surface, a wrinkle that encouraged regular trips back and forth instead of hoarding gold.

The gold-for-experience exchange proved to be a defining feature of dnd’s gameplay loop. One of the most popular methods players discovered to ensure long-term survival was to make frequent short trips in and out of the dungeon upon starting a new character, repeating this process until the hero was built up to a relatively sturdy level. Monsters also grow more aggressive when the player character is carrying more gold, turning longer trips into the dungeon into a taut risk-reward struggle.

Part of the player’s approach to building up a fortune will depend on which race they play. Elves have higher intelligence stats and are considered the best spellcasters in the game. Dwarves have a higher strength stat, making them ideal melee fighters. Dwarves also have navigational bonuses owing to being used to living life underground. For example, if they fall down a trap chute in the dungeon, they’ll generally fall fewer floors than any other race.

Gnomes are both the smallest and quickest race available in dnd, with a higher dexterity stat than other races. They are better able to dodge attacks and also have a bonus to opening locked and trapped chests. And finally, the humans offer a middle-of-the-road experience with one major benefit: They can hold onto more gold at one time than anyone else.3

Humans can carry as much as 1,200x gold at any one time, where x is the character’s strength stat. Dwarves can hold 1,000x gold, elves are limited to 900x, and gnomes can carry a mere 800x. The extra gold storage space gives humans an obvious edge, especially in the later game, allowing human characters to venture deeper into the dungeons without having to return to the surface. Of course, early on, most players will want to head back up to drop off their goal more regularly to help facilitate leveling up.

Beyond race, the only other choice players make during character creation is which order they want to join. The game features twenty possible orders, and each adventurer is required to be part of one. Don’t stress too much, though; the choice apparently has no real effect on how dnd plays out. The orders are purely for flavor, and characters are even allowed to change orders at any time—though why anyone would want to is another question altogether.

Dnd is perhaps most true to Dungeons & Dragons in its approach to stats or, as they’re called in the game’s help text, “characteristics.” Heroes in the game have five familiar stats to draw on that each affect the character in unique ways:

• Strength determines the power of attacks and how much gold a character can carry.

• Intelligence works out how devastating spells are, as well as how many spells the character can know at any one time.

• Wisdom operates similarly to intelligence but for clerical (i.e. generally more defensive) spells.

• Dexterity affects how good a character is at dodging enemy attacks, disarming traps, and opening locked treasure chests.

• Endurance is tied to a character’s number of hit points (called simply “hits” here), as well as how strong the character is against poison.

Once the character is created, the player must select one of dnd’s three dungeons. Then they’re thrust into a maze where they view their character from a top-down perspective. Every dungeon includes everything nerdy young college students would have come to expect from a challenging Dungeons & Dragons session: tons of monsters, weapons and artifacts that can help or harm the character, invisible walls and secret passageways, and traps that can fatally injure the hero or send them plunging deeper into the dungeon, down to floors they are not yet prepared to handle.

Within the dungeon, players will encounter more than sixteen different monster types, each with their own unique appearance. While some of the monster encounters are fairly standard—slimes, wizards, warriors, phantoms, etc.—dnd also shows off some original enemies. The rust monster can eat through equipment, while the balrog has been borrowed shamelessly from The Lord of the Rings.4 Perhaps most intimidating of all, when a character reaches the lower levels of a dungeon, they may find themselves pursued by the Grim Reaper itself, an indestructible enemy that leaves players with the sole tactical option of running away.

The actual process of fighting monsters in dnd is straightforward. Battles are turn-based. After the player character encounters a monster, they can choose between a number of possible actions each turn: fighting, dodging, using an enchanted item, or casting a spell.

In especially dire situations, the player also has the option of running away, but the hero will drop all the gold they’ve gathered so far in the process. If a player has completely given up, they can also surrender and let the monster kill them. Amusingly, sometimes when the surrender option is chosen, the enemy will let the character live but strip them of all their gold and magic items and decrease their experience points by thirty percent. Embarrasing and demoralizing!

Rather than present players with the exact numbers, combat damage in dnd is communicated in a more dramatic way. Monsters have three possible reaction to any attempt to hurt them. If a player receives a message that their opponent was “not amused,” that means they did some damage. On the other hand, if the monster was “amused,” the action caused no damage, and if it was “very amused,” then somehow the hero’s attempt at attacking actually helped the enemy, presumably inadvertently.

While the presentation leans toward being flavorful, dnd is crunching numbers in the background like any good pen-and-paper RPG. Damage done to monsters from melee attacks and damage done to the player character are both based on the hero’s strength stat, plus modifiers from armor and weapons they have equipped. Attempts to evade enemy attacks are checked against the character’s dexterity stat, as well as the layout of the room and the position of the hero and enemies within it. And the effectiveness of spells is, of course, based on the intelligence or wisdom stats, depending on the spell being cast, as well as various resistances that monsters have.

Though they can be difficult to get a handle on, spells are one area where dnd provides surprising depth. The game’s spell book runs the gamut from direct damage classics like fireball to more interesting status effects like sleep and “dispell” [sic]. Players can even use charm spells to win beasts over to their side and let them do the fighting.

Once again, the goal of taking on monsters in dnd is inevitably to find gold. Of course, finding gold in and of itself can be a risky proposition. The player character automatically sucks up any gold that’s lying around on the ground as they explore the dungeon, but bigger hoards are usually found in treasure chests, and said chests are usually guarded by powerful enemies, fitted with devious traps, or both. Players have a number of options for recognizing and disarming traps, including using magic spells, examining the chest carefully, or just trying to open it as cautiously as possible.

What happens if a character tries to pry open a chest without getting rid of traps first? Well, it blows up. When this happens, the player character gets hurt, and any items that were held in the chest are lost, although gold that was contained in the chest will still be available to grab. Some traps will also blind the character for a set amount of time, leaving them more vulnerable than usual to attacks.

In addition to gaining more money, players are urged to open chests in order to find magic items. These items can provide major power boosts far beyond what characters earn from leveling up.

Rather than a wide range of equipable gear, dnd opts for a system where generic pieces of gear provide similar bonuses. For example, swords, shields, and armor all provide protection from melee damage and can be stacked to increase their effectiveness. Helmets provide slightly less melee protection but also give the character a bonus when examining chests and potions.

That’s not to say that all the loot in dnd is generic, though. The game also features a few more specialized items, such as the bag of holding, which allows the character to carry more gold, or the cloak of visions, which lets them see hidden doors. Perhaps most unique and most impactful on gameplay is the amulet of ESP, which provides some guidance on how tough a monster will be for the hero to take down. If the monster stands a good chance of killing the player character, the amulet will offer up a cheeky “Farewell!”

These are just a few examples of the couple dozen magic items that exist in dnd. Between various wands, orbs, rings, and more, any given run through the game should have a fair bit of variety. Each new playthrough is likely to introduce new obstacles—such as a magical book that lowers the player character’s stats—as well as a new source of power—such as a potion that immediately grants the character enough experience points to level up. Extra lucky characters may even stumble across a genie lamp, which will carry extra gold for the hero and allow them to use their wish (and a small fee of all the gold they’re currently carrying) to teleport safely out of the dungeon at a moment’s notice.

All of this is to say, there’s a lot more variety to dnd than one might expect from such an early example of the medium of video games. Going back to older games can be tough with all the conveniences of modern gaming, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover how fully formed a lot of the core RPG ideas already were by the time they were first getting translated into video game form.

Another point of interest in dnd is how its dungeons are laid out and navigated. Rather than stairs, the dungeons have “transporters” that warp characters up and down to different levels. The first floor of each dungeon also houses a special “Excelsior Transporter” that allows the player character to instantly jump multiple levels down in exchange for some hit points. This serves as a sort of fast travel for when a player has run out of the dungeon from far below to bank their gold and wants to return to the floor they were exploring, although bold adventurers can attempt using it to skip ahead.

As mentioned in the story section, the real end goal of dnd, at least in its final updates, was to successfully gather both the Holy Grail and the magical orb. Accomplishing this didn’t just win the game; it granted the player a spot on the “Hall of Fame,” a sort of proto-leaderboard or high score list where other PLATO users checking out dnd could see names displayed. Players could also make it to the Elysian Fields (and thus the Hall of Fame) by reaching level 1,000, a point at which the game acknowledges that this character could easily burn through all three of the dungeons with little effort.

While its depth might be surprising, it’s less shocking that, at this early point in the life of the video game medium, dnd is very much a game of firsts. It is the first game to feature teleporters between levels. It is very likely the first game ever to have boss encounters—the dragon and the vampire, each in their dungeon of choice. And it may very well be the first game ever to encourage grinding in its player base.

See, dnd was difficult. A single flubbed spell or opening the wrong treasure chest could end even the most promising run, and once the player character died, the player had to start over from level 1. The college-age budding gamers who were playing dnd were determined, though, and before long they figure out a means of exploiting the game’s structure to ensure victory.

Basically, instead of bum-rushing as deep into the dungeon as they could as quickly as possible, players would stick around on the first floor, gathering small piles of gold, facing more reasonable monsters, and ripping open the less deadly treasure chests. Players would run back and forth, sweeping across the first floor and then returning to the entrance, hoarding gold and growing their levels. Some players would do this for hours before finally venturing deeper. It was a tedious process, but it worked, and it was destined to become a tried-and-true method for success in many role-playing video games to come.

THE BACKGROUND

Though it’s one of the first role-playing video games ever created, dnd came from surprising origins: two unlikely college buddies who didn’t even share the same fields of study and weren’t necessarily exposed to computer programming through their classes.

As undergrads at Southern Illinois University in 1974, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood were very near the epicenter of the development of the PLATO mainframe computer system. Whisenhunt was pursuing a dual major in psychology and political science, while Wood was studying electrical engineering, but both of them were drawn in by the siren call of PLATO and the seemingly limitless possibilities it presented. In fact, Whisenhunt found himself so enamored of the mainframe that he switches his major to computer science. It was while messing around at Southern Illinois University’s PLATO terminal in the basement of the campus library that the two met and became fast friends.

Wood described Whisenhunt in one interview as “more normal than the rest of the people” who were excited about PLATO. On any given evening at Southern Illinois University, one person would be hunched over the PLATO terminal’s monitor while as many as ten others gathered around them, eyes glued to the screen. Though PLATO was intended as a device for teaching lessons, these diehards were more interested in using it to play games that had been secretly programmed by other students.

Some favorites for Whisenhunt and Wood included Moon War, Dogfight, Star Trek, Airwar, Spasim, and the most popular of them all, Empire. Almost all of these were sci-fi strategy or space shooter games, many inspired by the popular Star Trek TV show from the ’60s. Each game had its own quirks, though, and PLATO players would often swap between them at rapid speed.

Wood described this heady experience in an interview with RPG Fanatic: “In 1974-75, you could play every video game in the world in about sixty minutes (and I think I did on several occasions).”

But the absolute favorite for Wood and Whisenhunt was pedit5. Instead of sci-fi, this game was a fantasy dungeon crawler (which I’ll be covering in great detail in an upcoming entry). The duo and other PLATO-using friends would regularly get together to play pedit5 as a group. However, sometimes their plans would be foiled, as they’d discover the pedit5 “lesson” had been deleted by a system administrator marking it as an “inappropriate” program. Thankfully—and unlike the previously covered m199h—pedit5 was always backed up and would inevitably return. Sometimes the game would get loaded back onto the mainframe within hours, but at other times, it could be gone for weeks at a time.

Finally sick of the annoyance of their favorite game disappearing, and having taken an increased interest in authoring their own “lessons,” Wood and Whisenhunt started working on their own game in late 1974. And by this point, both of them had become system admins for PLATO themselves, which meant they could ensure that the game they created would not be deleted over and over again.

While building dnd together, Whisenhunt and Wood focused on fun above all else. At this point, there were no best practices for game development; rather, they would put in things that they thought sounded cool and see if they worked. They had a regular rotation of PLATO users who could test each new addition and give feedback, and then the duo would tweak things as needed.

This loose approach to game design led to some of the most impressive inclusions in dnd, such as the game’s “boss.”

“There was no term for [a boss monster] since there wasn’t anything remotely like that at the time,” Whisenhunt said. “We just wanted a final challenge against a very powerful opponent before you could ‘win’ the game and have your character retired to the Elysian Fields.”

Another amazing addition to dnd was Whisenhunt’s creation of a maze editor. Essentially serving as a development tool, the maze editor let the duo add levels to the dungeon much faster than they had previously. Initially, they would draw out a level on graph paper, and then they would have to use a tedious process to translate that physical map into the game’s code. That’s why the initial version of dnd’s dungeon—released in 1975—contained a mere two floors.

Once Whisenhunt created the visual maze editor, though, that all changed. Wood proclaimed that “anyone could design a level of the dungeon in ten to fifteen minutes... In fact, my wife designed a couple of levels.” Before long, dnd’s initial dungeon had expanded to twelve floors, and then twenty.

Despite the dnd name, which was obviously meant to evoke Dungeons & Dragons, Wood and Whisenhunt were actually more inspired by pedit5. They were aware of dnd’s namesake, but most of their dungeon-crawling experience was from that other PLATO RPG that they loved.

That wasn’t the only inspiration, though. Sometimes dnd’s mechanical additions came from surprising places. For example, one night Whisenhunt and Wood decided to take a break from working on dnd and grab dinner out. During their dinner, they took turns playing pinball on a machine at the restaurant. Overjoyed at the high scores they achieved, they had a revelation: They could add a high score system into dnd. Thus the Hall of Fame was born.

Not that the game’s creators would ever see it. Whisenhunt and Wood were notoriously not very good at their own game. They would regularly cheat in order to test new mechanics or new floors of their dungeon. In fact, the developers were largely convinced that the game was unbeatable—until they were proven wrong by devoted players. Eventually Whisenhunt took a trip to the University of Illinois to try to figure out how some players there were managing to beat one of dnd’s most devious challenges. What he found astonished him.

“Once I saw one person who would walk into the dungeon, grab the first valuable item (which at that level was not much), and then leave,” Whisenhunt recalls. “Then to proceed to do this for hours on end. We never thought anyone would have the patience and would spend the time to do such a simple thing over and over again to gain large amounts of wealth.”

While Wood and Whisenhunt couldn’t hope to stop the practice of grinding altogether, they did end up implementing a system to stop this particularly cheap version of it. In a later version of dnd, if players repeatedly went in and out of the dungeon in a short stretch of time, the game would teleport them to the bottom floor of the dungeon, effectively ending that run.

Whisenhunt and Wood continued working on dnd, releasing new versions and updating it throughout 1975 and 1976. By May 1976, they released what Whisenhunt considered the “complete” 1.0 version of the game, with all the features and ocntent that the duo had intended. However, they continued to add new things into the game, putting out a 2.0 update around August 1976.

This is where two other enterprising game developers enter the picture. Dirk and Flint Pellett were brothers, the former attending Iowa State University and the latter at the University of Illinois. As they were at different schools, the Pelletts never actually met Wood or Whisenhunt in person, but they all knew each other very well. Dirk Pellett, especially, would constantly send Wood and Whisenhunt messages through PLATO with suggestions for how to improve dnd, or things he felt should be added to the game.

The Pelletts were also interested in programming themselves. In fact, they were basically early hackers. According to one story, they had hacked a Pong terminal to make the ball move slower and to give them a paddle that ran the full width of the screen. Clearly they had some skill.

Around August 1976, just as version 2.0 of dnd was completed, Whisenhunt and Wood started to get overwhelmed. Between their schooling, their increasing responsibilities as PLATO system admins, and the growing number of dnd players, they began to feel that they wouldn’t have time to continue adding more and more content to the game. In a surprising decision, they eventually handed over access to dnd to the Pelletts so that they could keep it going.

When they first took over, the Pelletts focused on expanding the number of items in the game while keeping a similarly whimsical tone. Dirk said that the only real equipable items in dnd when he took over were a sword and a shield; he saw this as the most obvious space to expand on what the game could offer.

In an interview describing his contributions to dnd, Dirk Pellett offered the following: “You could say the roof and walls and foundation of dnd are all [Wood’s and Whisenhunt’s], and the window dressing and furniture are mostly mine.”

The Pelletts had a very different approach to game development than Wood and Whisenhunt. For one thing, they would discuss and test each balance change and addition a ton before releasing it rather than allowing the wider PLATO player base to test things for them. The Pellets created a note file in PLATO where players could leave suggestions for additions or tweaks they wanted to see, not unlike the messages that Dirk used to bombard the game’s original creators with.

The Pelletts were also much more blatant in borrowing from pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons—at least at first. Many of the items Dirk first added to dnd were taken verbatim from that source material. It wasn’t until later that he started focusing more on adding totally unique items and monsters.

The Pelletts ended up massively expanding from what Wood and Whisenhunt had ended with as the base game of dnd. Most notably, in addition to all the new items, enemies, and so on, they added two full new dungeons on top of the original Whisenwood Dungeon. These new areas—the Tomb of Doom and the Caverns—offered many new challenges and gave players a little bit of freedom to shape their playthrough by choosing which to enter first.

Other Pellett additions to dnd include player character races, shops, the ability to stash gold, an inventory weight limit and fatigue system, the ability for players to save themselves from death with a potion of revival, and a completely rewritten maze plotter that helped the game run twice as fast.

The Pelletts released many updates to dnd through the years, but two of the major versions remain playable on the Cyber1 PLATO emulator today. Dnd version 5.4 represents the full Pellett vision for the game, and version 8.0 is the final major update the game received. Dirk Pellett has stated that version 8.0 of dnd was accessed at least a million times, though there is no clear record of total playtime or total number of unique users.

A version 9.0 was planned to introduce a major outdoor area that would be hex-based, but it was never finished. Dirk and Flint Pellett worked on dnd for a decade—from 1976 until 1986, right around the time when the PLATO mainframe system started slowly but surely vanishing from companies and college campuses around the Midwest.

Though it was essentially just a hobbyist project from a bunch of college kids, a commercial version of dnd was eventually released for CDC PLATO, a Minneapolis-based service where users could pay for time on a cloned PLATO mainframe system. However, royalties from this version were minuscule, especially when split between the four creators.

Flint Pellett did some work on other PLATO-based games, and for a time, Whisenhunt programmed flight simulators for the US Navy. None of dnd’s creators became full-time game developers, though. They did, however, stay involved in the blossoming world of computers and computer programming, including Whisenhunt becoming a microprocessors architect, Whisenhunt and Wood reuniting to work together at Motorola, and Flint Pellett joining the developer tools team at Intel.

Asked about the legacy of dnd, Wood shared the following thoughts:

“When [the Pelletts] finished with it, dnd was really the prototype for all the RPGs that came along... Bethesda5 created a very sophisticated version of dnd. But there really isn’t much original as far as gameplay, i.e. get sword, map dungeon, find boss, kill boss, get treasure, use treasure to buy a better sword, rinse, and repeat.”

One could argue that this description deeply downplays the complexity of future RPGs. But one could also build a strong case that when it comes to that core style of combat-heavy, dungeon-crawling RPG inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Wood is essentially correct. Dnd and other similar PLATO RPGs nailed down the formula almost fifty years ago; everything since then has just been adding new flourishes.6

(Note: This article was updated on May 28, 2024, when it came to my attention that I had incorrectly used a screenshot of a DOS turn-based strategy game called Empire rather than the PLATO space strategy shooter called Empire. I’ve placed a screenshot of the proper game in here, and other than the old screenshot’s caption, no other text has been modified.)

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Sources for this entry

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Like much of the global economy, the video game industry is in a precarious spot right now. Layoffs are everywhere. According to one tracker, we’re nearing an astounding twenty thousand layoffs in the game industry from the beginning of 2023 to April 2024. I’m very familiar with the challenges facing gaming right now; Mandi and I were also laid off from our game industry jobs just before we started Cartoon Ghost.

There are a lot of reasons for the state of things, and a lot of analysis still being done. Some of those reasons are tied to the greater state of the world and, as such, are entirely out of the hands of the industry. But there are also some choices made by studio heads and publishers that have exacerbated these problems—choices like acquisition spending sprees without an eye toward long-term sustainability.

Another problem that a lot of analysts have understandably pointed to is the way that video game budgets and production cycles have ballooned to ridiculous degrees. The technology powering triple-A games has improved so that graphics can be mind-blowingly realistic, simulations can be incredibly deep, and motion capture can be lifelike, but all of that progress comes with a hefty price tag. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 reportedly had a budget over $300 million, while Ubisoft has pushed the team working on its Assassin’s Creed franchise to nearly three thousand developers.

So what’s the solution? How does gaming move forward in a way that’s healthy and sustainable? Some developers believe the key is changing the scope of game development. They are seeking to create, to quote the brilliant Jordan Mallory, shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. That’s an honorable goal, and I would never argue against it. 

That said, I’m here to argue against it.

Okay, not really, but even as the gaming industry has started falling apart around us, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the largest projects the industry has to offer. I don’t mean stand-alone triple-A games like Cyberpunk 2077 or even Final Fantasy XVI (though both of those are certainly fun enough). What I’m talking about are the truly ambitious projects, the kind that cannot be contained to a single game. I’m speaking of video game epics—epics in the classic literary sense, not the goofy, overused modern sense.

The most obvious example, notable for its recently launched second volume, is Square Enix’s ongoing Final Fantasy VII Remake project. I was skeptical about this whole endeavor from the moment it was announced, and that skepticism only increased when it was revealed that Square Enix would be taking a single game and exploding it out across multiple parts; the publisher eventually landed on planning for three parts to retell the same story I had played through in a single game as a teenager.

That skepticism still feels understandable, but I was pleased to discover it was misplaced when I played through Final Fantasy VII Remake (the first part of the trilogy) in 2020, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth only drove the truth home even harder. I had worried this project would be some weird, unnecessarily bloated cash grab. Instead, it’s been a thoughtful, loving exploration of the characters and world of one of the most beloved Japanese RPGs of all time, with the extra game length used to flesh things out even more and provide surprising twists for returning players. It’s brilliant stuff.

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You know what’s especially brilliant, though? The way that this remake effort wisely alleviates some of the problems with big-budget game development. I’m not even talking about how it relies on nostalgia for an already adored game (though obviously that helps), but I mean in a broader sense. Remake and Rebirth aren’t identical games, and I’m sure the third entry won’t match up one-to-one with either of them, but they are built on the same foundational technology—the same graphics and physics engines, the same core battle system, lots of shared character models and elements of the world, and so on.

All three games will also share the same core dev team, and that has a massive impact on the speed with which the games can be developed and thus the budget. Just look at the production time. 

Many major triple-A games take anywhere from six to eight to even ten years from entering full production to being published. Final Fantasy VII Remake reportedly entered full production in 2015, the same year it was announced during Sony’s E3 press conference, which means it took around five years to develop. More or less standard. But then Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was turned around in just four years, and that’s including the time it took to develop and release the Intermission DLC for Remake. With no DLC planned for Rebirth, producer Yoshinori Kitase is hopeful that the third part will only take three years to develop. Even if it ends up taking four years, that’s still a speedy turnaround for a massive, high-fidelity RPG that’s sure to take sixty-plus hours to play through. And presumably a lot of that time can avoid one of the most expensive and frustrating parts of game development1 in prepping a new engine or making sure that a licensed engine can actually accomplish everything that’s needed.

Now of course not every game idea needs to be a multi-part series. Many games are fully standalone, and others might be made significantly worse if they’re spread thin over two or three or more releases just for the sake of economic concerns. It’s something that needs to be decided on a game-by-game basis. But when I look at stuff like The Last of Us or Marvel’s Spider-Man, I have to wonder if the development processes behind them couldn’t be smoothed out by making a plan for subsequent entries from the start and sticking with as much of the team and technology as possible.

That’s my caveman-brain business pitch for why multi-part video game epics are worth pursuing, but I have a much more selfish reason for pitching this, which is simply that...I really enjoy witnessing a game’s characters and locations slowly built upon over the course of numerous games. I grew up reading long-running book series like Animorphs, The Wheel of Time, and the Dragonlance franchise—not to mention superhero comics. I’ve always loved casts and settings that linger and grow over the course of many years and hundreds or thousands of pages.

But even more than books or comics or movies, I feel like video games are especially suited for this kind of sprawl. We’re already generally spending more time in a video game world than we do in other media, especially in RPGs, and even in the most linear of games we’re usually given some degree of freedom over what we do with that time. Multi-game series allow players, if they so choose, to devote some of their time to getting to know even minor characters, or figuring out how the ecology of one region in a vast fictional world operates. It offers chances are further immersion, which can be profoundly rewarding.

I’m not just talking about triple-A games either. Over the last couple months, I’ve been slowly replaying The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, a classic Japanese RPG originally released way back in 2004 but which didn’t make its way to North America until 2011. Though the Legend of Heroes series dates back to the late ’80s, initially starting as a spinoff of the Dragon Slayer games, Trails in the Sky was the launch of an ambitious new epic that would see developer Nihon Falcom exploring the nations, people, and history of a single world. 

Since 2004, Nihon Falcom has slowly built up this world, releasing a new game every year or two. Aside from a few big tech upgrades at specific moments, many of these games have shared the same engine or combat systems. As of today, there are a whopping eleven Legend of Heroes games in the Trails series available in English, with the twelfth, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, launching this summer. Nihon Falcom has not said how many Trails games there will be in total, but the developer has stated that Trails through Daybreak represents the beginning of the “second half” of the series, so...there’s probably a fair bit left to go.

I’m nowhere near caught up on this series. In fact, Trails in the Sky is the only game I’ve played in it so far. I played it when it first launched in North America on PSP, reviewing it for Game Informer2. I never found the time the follow-up, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, when it finally made its way West in 2015, and I knew that I needed to experience this series in the proper order, so I haven’t checked out later entries like much-loved The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel tetralogy.

I wouldn’t fault anyone for being intimidated by the idea of needing to catch up on eleven games, with even more in the pipeline. For me, though, I absolutely love it. I’ve been relishing my playthrough of the first game, not rushing it, and I’m so excited to see how these character progress and grow up, and what it’s like to finally visit parts of this fantasy world that I’ve been hearing about up to this point.

Another great example (and another one I’m woefully behind on) is the Yakuza series (or as it’s now known, Like a Dragon). Originally a janky but intriguing brawler/RPG hybrid crime thriller on the PlayStation 2, Sega and its Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio have steadily pumped out new entries at a similar rate to the Legend of Heroes games—one every year or two, often building on the same technology or combat systems.

Some Yakuza entries have been better received than others, certainly, but the fast iteration, shared dev teams and resources, and continued building of a recognizable cast has helped build up an enthusiastic fan base that eagerly jump into each new entry. And like Nihon Falcom, Sega has wisely made entry points for new players, such as 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which saw a new protagonist take the lead, or 2018’s Judgment, a spin-off focusing on a slightly more law-abiding side of the same world. Fans who are pulled into these entries can then discover a long list of around a dozen games (including spinoffs) that they can then take their time catching up on. And if you’ve already been with the series for that long, what’s the likelihood that you’re just going to drop it and stop caring?

Video game studios are facing a lot of tough problems right now in figuring out how to move forward in an increasingly tumultuous world. Frankly, there are people much smarter than me working on overcoming those challenges, which I’m grateful for. But I hope some of the folks at major studios are looking at examples like Final Fantasy Remake and The Legend of Heroes and at least considering whether there are lessons that could be applied to their future plans. Again, I don’t think multi-game epics are right for every video game...but I do believe there’s a lot more interesting game design to be mined from this concept.

Anyway, I’m off to hopefully wrap up The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky once more. I’m 55 hours in and just about to hit the final dungeon. And after that? Well, one game down, ten more to go until I’m caught up. How long could it possibly take?

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m working on the second main entry for The Codex and hoping to have it ready to go by this weekend. It’s a doozy, all about one of the first dungeon crawlers ever made, except this one’s actually still playable. Beyond that, I’m also going to be checking out Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the just-launched spiritual successor to Konami’s long-abandoned Suikoden series. I’ll hopefully have some thoughts to share on that soon as well. Thank you for reading!

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Game: m199h (aka Dungeon)
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: Mid-1970s

The PLATO was one of the earliest mainframe computers available at colleges and universities across the United States—particularly in the Midwest. Though this system’s giant, touch-screen-enabled monitors were designed with education in mind, it didn’t take long for the teenage and twenty-something students on these campuses to discover that they could use the powerful machine for recreation as well.

The earliest games developed for PLATO in the 1970s mostly fell into two categories: spaceship shooters inspired by Star Trek and dungeon crawls inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. These were some of the first video games ever created and, as far as we know, absolutely the first role-playing video games ever. Unfortunately, they were also created in an atmosphere that didn’t recognize or appreciate how groundbreaking they were—and indeed, pushed back against their very existence.

Early game developers on PLATO—mostly college students and a handful of high-school-age kids—often found themselves in a constant back-and-forth struggle with system administrators. One or two students would code and publish a game, hiding it within a lesson directory. Then word of the game would spread around to other students, and it would grow in popularity until, inevitably, an admin discovered and deleted the rogue “lesson.” In the best cases, students had a backup and were able to get the program up and running again. In nightmare scenarios, they had nothing, and these early video games were lost forever.

Such is the case with m199h, possibly the earliest known video game incarnation of the RPG. The program was coded by someone accessing the PLATO IV hardware located on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. If the title sounds strange, it’s because it was formatted in the style of lessons on the PLATO system. By making it sound like any other utility that students could access on PLATO, m199h was essentially able to hide in plain sight, masquerading as a lesson while providing hours of illicit gaming to those in the know.

Some sources report that m199h also went under the generic (and regularly reused, as we’ll discover in later entries) name of Dungeon. It’s possible that m199h was the program title in PLATO and thus used by one-time students reminiscing about it, while Dungeon was what players were presented with on the title screen.

That’s not to say that it hid particularly well, however. According to the accounts of some students and budding game developers there at the time, m199h first popped into existence on PLATO in 1974, not long after the release of the original version of Dungeons & Dragons. That pen-and-paper role-playing game was a massive success amongst the PLATO-savvy crowd at the university, so when word spread of a computer game fulfilling a similar fantasy niche, students flocked to it. It was only a matter of time before an ornery administrator noticed and deleted the program for not being an actual academic tool.

No solid record exists of who created m199h, nor how the game worked exactly. It’s possible that the game was developed (and subsequently destroyed) before game programmers realized that they need to keep backups of their code. Or maybe the mind(s) behind m199h just decided to devote their time to something else entirely. Maybe they flunked out of college after spending too much time basking in the eerie orange glow of the PLATO monitors; that wasn’t an unheard-of fate among students discovering the future of technology at that time.

It’s worth noting, as well, that there is some debate over whether pedit5—a game we’ll discuss in an upcoming entry—actually came out before m199h. It was broadly accepted in the limited historical data available for the past twenty years that m199h was first, but more recent online discussion has called that into question. Some sources recall m199h releasing as late as 1976 and being a remake of pedit5.

Since the game itself no longer exists, and the records and recollections of the time are limited at best, this debate isn’t likely to be settled any time soon, if ever.

That said, I must give a special shout-out to Chester Bolingbroke (aka CRPG Addict), who has done some of the most impressive and thorough digging into this lost game. Most recently, he was sent photos related to m199h from someone who claimed to have played it. You can read about this compelling new information on CRPG Addict.

Here is what little I’ve been able to discern about m199h: It was a single-player dungeon crawl type game. It represented monsters in the game using special character sets, some of which were fairly advanced for the time. Mechanically, it was reportedly very similar to dnd, another PLATO RPG that we will discuss in the next entry.

And...that’s it. That is the full extent of general knowledge still available about what was quite possibly the first role-playing video game ever created. While the program itself was almost certainly primitive, the lack of information about it—never mind the inability to actually play it—is a frustrating blow to our historical understanding of the genre and how it has evolved. Luckily, most of the RPGs that followed on the PLATO were preserved, with several of them remaining playable via emulation to this day.

If you’d like to check out what the PLATO mainframe was like for yourself and possibly check out some of the ancient games I’ll be writing about soon, take a look at the Cyber1 website. It’s got a bit of a sign-up process, but I’m so grateful that there are people dedicated to keeping this historical resource available. I’ll be making a lot of use of it in the weeks and months to come.

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Sources for this entry

Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “BRIEF: Everything We Know about 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play.” June 30, 2021. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/06/brief-everything-we-know-about-1970s.html.

Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “m199h: New Findings Both Solve and Deepen Mysteries.” October 11, 2023. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2023/10/m199h-new-findings-both-solve-and.html.

Dear, Brian. 2017. The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. New York: Vintage Books.

Moby Games. “m199h (Terminal).” Last modified October 27, 2023. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/game/m199h.

(Programming note: The Codex Sidequest is how I’ll be branding posts that are not main entries of The Codex. These posts will not follow the more strict structure of the primary entries. Sidequests could be about new releases, classic games I’ve been thinking about lately, or more general themes related to RPGs as a whole. I’m hoping to do Sidequest posts semi-regularly, especially since the main entries require a lot of research and thus can take a while to prepare. So if you have any topics you’d like me to cover in a Sidequest, leave a comment and let me know!)

I haven’t had nearly enough time to play Dragon’s Dogma 2 for myself yet—I’m only around five hours in—but I’ve been reading an awful lot about it and watching tons of clips on YouTube and TikTok and such. While my own experiences might change how I feel in the future, I believe I’ve already got a pretty good sense of what the game is and why I’m already in love with it.

And what makes it special is that it’s a game that aggressively does not care if it puts some players through miserable experiences.

Before I dig into the nitty-gritty of this phenomenon, I want to share some of my favorite examples. First, enjoy this short clip from the Dropped Frames podcast, where they’re watching a clip from streamer DansGaming.

If that doesn’t have you laughing out loud, then we clearly have very different senses of humor. That said, watching someone experience that pain and having to endure it ourselves while playing a game are two different things, right?

Let’s look at an even more outrageous example. Spoiler warning in effect here, not for the plot but for a deeply hidden mechanic.

One of the core elements of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the ability to summon pawns, AI-controlled companions who are created by players and can be shared to different players. In the lore of the game, these pawns are actually hopping between different versions of this fantasy world, which is why I’m able to hire a Willem Dafoe pawn and a Peter Griffin pawn while sending my Tifa pawn off to journey with other players.

@gamespotdotcom🤪 Players are having too much fun with #DragonsDogma2’s character creator #dragonsdogma #game #games #gaming #videogames #gamespot #funny #character #charactercreator

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While that system carries over from 2012’s Dragon’s Dogma, the sequel adds a new twist: Sometimes the pawns you’ve summoned can contract a disease known as Dragonsplague. The game warns players the first time this happens via a text tutorial pop-up, and pawns who have come down with a bout of plague may show other signs, such as complaining of headaches and suddenly sporting ominously glowing red eyes. Seems bad!

Why does the game warn players? Well, for one thing, pawns who have contracted Dragonsplague are likely to grow more disobedient, which can make ordering them around and making progress more difficult. Plus it can spread from pawn to pawn and reportedly even get carried back into other player’s games.

That’s just the start, though. If you continue ignoring the Dragonsplague, then eventually one of your sickly pawns can, well...transform into a massive dragon and kill off every NPC in one of the game’s major cities. And I mean every NPC. Shopkeepers, barkeeps, the dude who runs the inn, children, royalty. Even main quest-related NPCs are not immune!

It’s an insane, audacious mechanic, and one that has understandably split the player base. Some players hate it. Some even argue that it completely ruins the game. Some actually enjoy it, while others are convinced it’s all just a hoax. Plandemic, anyone?1

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There are two big reasons why Dragonsplague inspires such a passionate response. The first is that neither getting rid of it nor fixing its end results are exactly easy. If a pawn you’ve summoned from someone else has the plague, you can simply dismiss them and summon a different one. But if your pawn contracts Dragonsplague, the only way to cure it is to toss them into the nearest body of water and watch them painfully drown. Given, you can resummon them after that and they should be fine, but it’s still pretty brutal, especially if you’ve formed a bond with your pawn after your time spent questing.

The other reason some players struggle with Dragonsplague is even bigger, though, and it’s also where some players begin to find fault with the system as a whole.

See, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is not a game that encourages save scumming, i.e. the act of constantly saving and reloading your game, usually paired with keeping a huge list of save files spread across the entirety of your time playing. In Dragon’s Dogma 2, players only have access to a single manual save file, plus one autosave. The game is so serious about not letting players mess around with multiple saves that it even includes at least one major super-special item that the UI warns will automatically save your game as soon as you use it.

Since the Dragonsplague massacre is incited by resting at an inn, that means—you guessed it!—your game is saved when it happens. No jumping back to a previous save point to fix things. And you can fix things. One item can be earned through a lengthy chain of sidequests to help reset things, and some players have reported that main quest-critical NPCs will actually respawn on their own after some time has passed. You can live and continue playing in a post-Dragonsplague apocalypse version of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s just not going to be easy.

And this is where the friction comes in. When I say that elements like Dragonsplague or getting air-dropped into the river by an eagle aren’t “easy,” I’m not talking about traditional video game difficulty. This game is not dealing in the Soulslike discourse of “get good.”

Dragon’s Dogma 2 has some degree of mechanical difficulty in the sense of needing to have strong hand-eye coordination and react quickly with the right button presses. But the greater part of its mechanical difficulty is more about the developers at Capcom embracing the world they’ve created and applying the rules of that world evenly and without concern for smoothing out the play experience.2

My Cartoon Ghost colleague Mandi and I talk about friction in games all the time. From the mid 2000s up through the mid-to-late 2010s—essentially the late PlayStation 2 era through the PlayStation 4 era—it felt like virtually all game developers embraced the drive to reduce friction in games. It was as though once developers had conquered the shift from 2D to 3D games, the next frontier was seen as removing any and all barriers that might get in the way of players have fun with their games at all times.

It’s only in the last five to ten years that more and more developers seem willing to experiment with purposefully keeping friction-generating systems and mechanics in their games. Notably, the original Dragon’s Dogma was one of the earliest games that felt like it was pushing back in this direction (alongside stuff like the Dark Souls series, of course). Maybe that’s why it took so long for Capcom to actually greenlight a sequel.

Compare the Dragon’s Dogma 2 approach to something like, say, Starfield.3 While they’re very different games, they also provide a good point of comparison for each other. They’re both open-world RPGs, released within six months of each other, and both games that share some of the more widely accepted points of user friction. For example, both Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Starfield have weight limits that restrict how much your characters can carry and thus require some degree of inventory management that sometimes gets in the way of the action.

Starfield does feature plenty of random encounters that can lend the game a certain degree of surprise, if not outright chaos. But I’m not so sure Bethesda would ever be willing to embrace a mechanic as utterly destructive to the game world as Dragonsplague. Even if it did, Bethesda comes from a very traditional PC game background; if they were to only allow players to have a single save, fans would almost certainly riot.

While I’m personally a huge fan of games that have friction, I hope that example illustrates that it’s not a simple good or bad thing. The much more smoothed-out style of game design is undoubtedly a better fit for Bethesda for many reasons. It makes their games approachable to a much wider audience, and there are plenty of times when that’s the type of gaming experience I want at the moment. It’s just that the less friction a game has, the less interesting it tends to be for me in the long term.

I’m also fascinated by how much friction can help transcend other issues with a game. In terms of aesthetics, I actually find Starfield to be the much more unique title. That game employs a more grounded approach to science fiction that Bethesda calls “NASA-punk.” The muted colors and more realistic look that makes up that style isn’t the most exciting, but it’s definitely something I haven’t seen much in games before.

Meanwhile, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just about the most generic fantasy setting possible. As with the first game, almost every element is borrowed wholesale from Dungeons & Dragons, albeit with some cool twists here and there. And yet Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the one that I can’t stop looking for new takes on. I want to hear everyone’s stories, laugh at the ridiculous situations players find themselves in, or wonder at what I might do if Dragonsplague ravaged my save file after I had already sunk forty or fifty hours into it.

Like I said near the start of this post, watching someone experience pain and having to endure it myself are two different things. If I make it that deep into Dragon’s Dogma 2 only to run up against a wall this imposing, it’s totally possible that I might just quit the game and not go back to it. But that’s a risk I’m happy to take for a game that actually takes risks.

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Let’s start with the truth: This was never meant to be a Substack. In all my wildest dreams and imaginings, my goal was for The Codex to be a series of books. I’d still like that someday! But first—

I have a lot to say in this post, but the quick pitch is this: The Codex is intended to be an obsessively comprehensive historical survey of role-playing video games. I plan to start at the beginning—and I mean the very beginning—and to have entries on every game possible, including some that are no longer even playable. I’ll get into more specifics below, but my goal is for each of these entries to be deeply researched and provide everything you would need to know to understand what the game is, how it plays, its historical context, and so on.

Since I’m now launching this project on Substack rather than as a book, I’m also going to use that opportunity to write about current RPG releases as well. So alongside my historical entries, I’ll provide my thoughts on some of the most interesting new releases. For example, I just started up Dragon’s Dogma 2 earlier tonight, and I’m looking forward to writing about it next week.

So why the shift from book to Substack? The main reason is simply logistical. This is an idea that I believe in and have wanted to do for, uh, most of my life at this point. But it’s not exactly a slam-dunk pitch to book publishers. Barring the likelihood of any sort of advance, The Codex became a project that was far too easy for me to keep pushing off, putting it on the back burner. Sure, it’s the thing I most wanted to spend my time on, but I had to focus on the work that would actually bring in money first. I don’t like it, but that’s the system we live in.

As one of the growing horde of recent layoffs in the tech, video game, and media spaces, I suddenly find myself with a lot more free time, and I’ve decided to finally take the leap with The Codex. Creating it as an online project rather than a book provides the gentle nudge I need to actually force myself to devote time to it, as well as perhaps a little bit of cash to keep me going. I’m not particularly expecting The Codex (or Cartoon Ghost as a wider Substack publication) to bring in enough money for me to live off of—though I’d be delighted to be proven wrong!—but I’m hoping it will be enough to at least give me some breathing room, to allow me to take a little less freelance or contract work and spend a little more time researching and writing about the stuff I’m most passionate about. And that stuff is RPGs.

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Welcome to The Codex

For all the imagination and variety available in video games, role-playing games (aka RPGs) inhabit a unique space in the medium’s long list of genres. RPGs serve simultaneously as a solid form for video games and an empty shell that the components of a game can be poured into. RPGs can pull from a huge range of fictional categories, from high fantasy to horror to romance. They can also build on other gaming genres; it’s not unusual to run into, say, a first-person shooter, a platform, or even a sports game with an RPG backbone.

The argument could be made—and certainly the very existence of a project such as this supports it—that no other genre of video game has had as massive a reach as role-playing games. No other single style of game has so thoroughly enmeshed itself in the fabric of the medium as a whole.

If you accept that thesis—and if you care enough about RPGs to be reading this, I suspect you’re at least open to it—then it begs some questions. What is it about RPGs? Why has this genre lasted so long, spread so far, and proven so flexible, open to altering its own form to fit the needs of any individual game?

There are no easy answers to these questions. To some degree, searching for those answers is a lifelong process, the very reason for this project’s existence. Nevertheless, I’m going to offer a theory here, based on the ideas I’ve mulled over for the first thirty-odd years of my RPG-obsessing life. In all likelihood, this theory will change over the next thirty-plus years (allowing that I live that long), as this project continues and as the RPG genre ever evolves. But this is my starting point.

The Journey Begins

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact origins of the RPG as a concept. Role-playing games existed long before the creation of video game consoles or computer hardware that was used to develop and play games. Centuries ago, for example, battle and historical reenactments, while not technically games in the traditional sense, introduced many people to the idea of stepping into different identities.

The proper roots of the RPG stretch all the way back to at least the 18th century, to some of the earliest examples of pen-and-paper and board games. Building off of ancient board games, a Prussian scientist named Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig invented the first known wargame. Hellwig’s “wargame” (aka Das Kriegsspiel) expanded on the strategic elements of chess by dumping its simplicity. In what some may argue is the first ever example of inelegant bloat in game design, Hellwig juiced the complexity of his board game by increasing the size of the board, the types of pieces available, and the realism of the scenarios players would find themselves navigating.

Though far from what most people would consider a role-playing game in any modern sense, Hellwig’s wargame was literally meant to put players into a role—that of the commander of a large army. In fact, many contemporaries believed that Hellwig’s wargame, with its intricate mechanics laid out in a rule book of over one hundred pages, could serve as a legitimate learning tool for nobles with military service in their future.

Wargaming’s popularity grew around the world through the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1913, beloved sci-fi author H.G. Wells got in on this booming source of recreation, publishing a book titled Little Wars, which operated as a rule set for children playing wargames with their toy soldiers. This was arguably the first expansion of classic wargaming into the realm that is now known as “miniature wargaming”—that is, wargaming centered around the use of miniatures, tiny toys that are often hand-painted by the players.

(Sidenote: The original full title for Wells’s book was Little Wars: A Game for Boys From Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books. Though condescending and laughable in a modern context, this was an early nod to the growing recognition that both games generally and role-playing specifically hold interest for all people, regardless of gender, age, race, and culture.)

By the mid-20th century, the nerdy niche interest of wargaming collided with the nerdy niche interests of fantasy and science fiction. Wargame creators and players alike started implementing more and more elements from the fantasy novels they loved, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s absurdly popular The Lord of the Rings series.

Many different board games, wargames, and even prototype versions of live-action role-playing (LARP) were developed at this time. None have more historical importance, however, than Chainmail, a miniature wargame based around medieval combat that was developed by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren and published in 1971. Future iterations of Chainmail added increasingly more fantasy elements to the game, as well as mechanics that would become RPG standbys, such as hit points—a numerical measurement of a character’s health—and experience points—a numerical measurement of a character’s growth and progress toward becoming stronger.

In 1974, three years after Chainmail’s launch, Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons. If everything else I’ve mentioned thus far is a primitive ancestor of role-playing video games, Dungeons & Dragons is a more directly related antecedent—a parent or grandparent, or perhaps a beloved aunt and uncle that have constantly pushed the next generation in specific directions.

In Dungeons & Dragons (often shorted to simply D&D), we witnessed all the staples of the role-playing video game: storytelling, character progression, strategic combat scenarios, dungeon crawling, and pages full of nitty-gritty stats and math to balance in your head. Not every RPG has every one of these elements, but virtually every RPG has at least one or more of them at its core. And as we will see throughout the first entries in The Codex, Dungeons & Dragons was a direct source of inspiration for the majority of the earliest role-playing video games, many of which were programmed by college students who were obsessed with the new pen-and-paper sensation.

The early history of RPGs that I’ve presented here is a brisk beginner’s course at best. There are dozens of games and hundreds of creators who were pioneers in developing new and engaging ways for everyone to while away the hours and explore new worlds. Thousands of pages have already been written on this subject, and there are many fascinating chronicles that I recommend checking out. Please take a look at the official The Codex Recommended Reading List for a continuously updated list of some of the best and most interesting sources I’ve consulted.

But on the same note, and as you will soon find out, many of these earliest examples of the RPG video game genre are either already impossible to play or at risk of disappearing soon. Many of the developers who created these first experiments with role-playing video games are reaching old age and, in some sad cases, death. Dungeons & Dragons cocreator Gary Gygax, for example, passed away in 2008.

As a culture, we have already crossed the point at which documenting this history is significantly harder than at any time previous to now. Whether that is meaningful to you or not depends on how much you care about role-playing video games; once again, if you’re reading this Substack and have read this deep into this post, I will choose to believe that, like me, you do care. RPGs changed my life, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I want to understand where all these incredible, compelling, powerful adventures came from, how they evolved, and even those cases where they went horribly wrong.

Once More: What Is The Codex?

This project is not about the history of RPGs broadly, but rather the history of role-playing video games specifically. While the former has been covered extensively by fans, historians, and enthusiasts, depressingly little work has been done to lay out, honor, and archive the history of role-playing video games. The Codex Recommended Reading List includes some excellent work, but it’s still a fraction of what I feel this subject deserves.

For my part, I became obsessed with RPGs from a young age. When I was around ten years old, a friend lent me a dirty Super Nintendo cartridge. The title was splashed across the dingy case’s label in ornate letters: Final Fantasy III. It was a game unlike anything I had ever played. Where most games I had played up to this point primarily drew me in via controller-clenching mechanical challenge, Final Fantasy III hooked me on a more cerebral level. Its combat required critical thought rather than tight reflexes, and its emotional story tugged on my heart in a way that I hadn’t realized was possible in video games.

Here was a whole cast of tragic characters who grew and changed and beckoned me to fall in love with them. Here was an adventure that took me months to complete, and that was without even digging into its many secrets and subplots. And by the time I reached the end, I felt as though I had made new friends. I felt as though I, too, had grown and changed.

Final Fantasy III marked the moment that I understood that I would be playing video games for the rest of my life. From that powerful opening scene forward, RPGs became a particular obsession. I was always looking for more games in that style, chasing the high of discovering a new world that could suck me in and make me feel entirely transported.

In dozens of hours of research on my small-town library’s single internet-connected computer, I slowly began to piece together the puzzle of this strange new world of RPGs. I came to understand that Final Fantasy III was, inexplicably, actually Final Fantasy VI, and that there were five previous entries in the series waiting for me to play them, although not all of them had been translated into English at that point. I gained knowledge of other Super Nintendo RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Illusion of Gaia, as well as Western, mostly computer-based RPGs like the Might & Magic and Ultima games. I came to understand the subtle but meaningful distinctions that separated Western RPGs and Japanese RPGs, and the things that I loved about both. I made lists of games I would spend the next years asking for at Christmas and searching for on the shelves of used game shops. And I played everything I could get my hands on.

As I moved into my teenage years, then adulthood, and now staring down middle age, my passion for role-playing video games has never faded. Having played many of the classics and continued major releases in the genre, I’ve turned toward unearthing its history. I’ve spent years learning about Dungeons & Dragons, about the earliest RPGs developed for mainframe computers, and so on. But even as I’ve become more knowledgeable personally, I’ve hit walls in what is available; frustrations at having to dig through multiple sources to find even basic info; and recognition that older and more obscure games are at risk of completely disappearing from public awareness.

The Codex is my attempt to tackle these problems. It is intended to be an ongoing, essentially never-ending project dedicated to exploring the history of role-playing video games on a game-by-game basis. Some games are inescapably more important or more interesting than others. Inevitably I will have more to say about, for example, Baldur’s Gate than the third game in a line of handheld RPGs based on a long-running anime series.

But sometimes those forgotten games feature surprisingly meaningful content. They shouldn’t be ignored. My goal and my intention is not to neglect any games, to devote as much rigor as I can into researching the history of each title, as well as each game’s mechanical, ludic, and dramatic contributions to the genre.

In keeping with that goal, I will be taking the broadest possible approach to the definition of “RPG” in The Codex.

OK, Smart Guy, So What Is an RPG Then?

As with any genre in any medium, RPGs are simultaneously a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Some fans have a very hard-line view of what counts as a role-playing game based on actual gameplay systems. For these players, a game may require one or two specific mechanics to be considered an RPG—such as gaining experience points or leveling your character up.

For others, player-centered storytelling is the key component to an RPG; if the storyline progresses down a narrow path with little or no input from the player, as in most traditional Japanese RPGs, it just doesn’t capture the role-playing experience.

Still others embrace a looser interpretation of the genre. Fantasy-themed games with limited stats and character progression but some dungeon crawling—such as the Legend of Zelda series—or story-heavy games with extremely minimal gameplay mechanics—such as some visual novels—might still fit into their characterization of RPGs.

What counts as a role-playing game for the purposes of this project? Well...all of it! In keeping with the amateur historical and archivist goals of The Codex, I will be taking the broadest possible approach to cataloging RPG video games. Inevitably, I will include some games that certain subsets of RPG players don’t agree with or don’t personally consider as RPGs. That’s okay. On my end, the goal is to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible. In some cases, I’ll even be covering games that don’t necessarily fit my definition of the genre.

While I’ll be maintaining a very open approach to what games are included in The Codex, I’ll still be approaching each of them from within a similar structure that emphasizes three key elements of the RPG genre:

1. Story - For some role-playing games, the story is little more than a bare-bones excuse for the player to delve into a dungeon. For others, it’s a hundreds-of-thousands-of-words epic full of plot twists and character development. Wherever a game falls on that scale, each entry in The Codex will lay out the plot of the game with full spoilers. If you’d like to learn about a game you haven’t yet played without compromising your own experience, you can skip this section entirely. In the other two sections, I will avoid spoilers as much as possible and give ample warning when I feel like a story spoiler must be given in order to fully explore a topic.

2. Gameplay - Whether it’s through combat, relationships with other characters, equipment management, or other systems, RPGs generally have some degree of mechanical complexity underlying everything else that’s going on. In each entry, I will look at the various systems of play in each game with an eye toward digging deep into how each title works rather than just providing a cursory glance.

3. Artistry/Craftsmanship - This is a little more vague than the other two elements, but what I meant to point to here is the level of detail and care that goes into developing even the least successful RPG. By the nature of how the genre operates, there is a certain thoughtfulness that one must employ to put together a game of this type, even an unsuccessful one. In this section of entries, I will dig into historical details about the development of each game, who worked on it, and the context in which it was created.

My open-ended approach to what fits the definition of an RPG is inspired by the work of Jimmy Maher, author of the fantastic gaming blog The Digital Antiquarian. When Maher sought to determine which games fit into the category of “ludic narrative,” he was himself inspired by the cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who once wrote that although robins and emus are both birds, the former is broadly seen as more representative of birds. Maher came up with four elements that show how representative a game feels of the ludic narrative style, but he was careful not to be held back by these elements.

“There may be edge cases which fail one of the tests, but which still have the ‘feel’ of ludic narrative,” Maher wrote. “As long as we’re reasonable about these things, it seems pointless to exclude them from discussion because of some arbitrary checklist.”

This, too, is my feeling regarding figuring out what counts as an RPG in The Codex. As this project progresses, there will be some games that heavily favor story over mechanics, and others that have virtually no plot but hours of combat or puzzles. The tension between story and gameplay—between narrative and mechanics—has been part of role-playing from its very inception. For my purposes, there is no strong argument to exclude any of these games from this documentation; rather, I’ll work to provide enough context and information on each title that you can decide for yourself if it is “RPG-y” enough in the direction that you prefer for your own interests.

Though my aim is to be thorough, there’s nothing precise or scientific about the process that I have in mind here. In all likelihood, the approach I take will evolve over time. Whatever forms it may morph into, I consider this a lifelong project. I’ve already spent years preparing for and putting together the entries I’ll be sharing soon, and in that time, my approach has already changed significantly from what I initially had in mind. I would not pretend to guess what this might look like in ten or twenty or thiry years.

I’d also like to give some special credit to those who inspired this project. As previously mentioned, there has not been a great amount of work done in the space of chronicling RPG video game history—but there has been some. In addition to the many sources that I’ll cite in each post and those tracked in The Codex Recommended Reading List, I owe a debt to several people.

The CRPG Addict (aka Chester Bolingbroke) has run an extremely thoughtful and entertaining blog for over a decade now where he plays through every computer role-playing game ever made. Though his approach is different from my own, his blog is utterly engaging reading and includes more in-depth research than almost anything else that’s out there. Discovering these posts was very much the genesis of my own interest in doing a similar project, and I cannot give a stronger recommendation: Please read The CRPG Addict if my work here has caught your interest at all.

Likewise, Dungeons and Desktops by Matt Barton has been and will almost certainly continue to be a crucial volume in my preparation for writing The Codex. It’s similarly focused only on computer role-playing games and provides a much less granular overview of the genre, but it is written with a careful, academic eye. It also helped me realize that there may actually be an audience for a project like this.

If you’re part of that audience, thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope that I can help you relive and discover a greater appreciation for the RPG video games that you already love, and I hope that I can also introduce you to new games you’ve never heard of or never realized you might want to play.

Researching RPG history isn’t particularly easy. Both video games and pen-and-paper role-playing have largely received coverage from a purely hobbyist perspective. Whether looking online or in print, sources that dig into these topics from a more historical or academic perspective, or even with a more critical eye than the average gaming blog, are few and far between.

Thankfully I have managed to find quite a few great outlets for information for this project. Below is the official The Codex Recommended Reading List, split into specific topics. I will continue adding to this list as I work on The Codex, so feel free to bookmark this page and check back in to see what else I’ve uncovered.

Please note: I will also be including a citations list in each individual entry. Not every source cited in individual entries will be included on the Recommended Reading List, and not everything featured on the Recommended Reading List is guaranteed to show up as a citation in individual entries. This list is for more broadly recommended reading related to the topics I’m covering, the kind of things that I suspect readers of this Substack would enjoy reading as much as I have.

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Recommended Reading

Recommended reading on wargaming and the origins of role-playing games before Dungeons & Dragons:

Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games by Jon Peterson

The Complete Wargames Handbook: How to Play, Design, and Find Them by James F. Dunnigan

Recommended reading on the history of Dungeons & Dragons:

Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt

Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer

30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons published by Wizards of the Coast

Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games by Jon Peterson

Recommended reading on the history of pen-and-paper role-playing games beyond Dungeons & Dragons:

Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games by Lawrence Schick

Recommended reading on the history of role-playing video games:

Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard A. Bartle

Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games by Matt Barton

The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games (Expanded Edition) published by Bitmap Books

A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games published by Bitmap Books

The CRPG Addict by Chester Bolingbroke

Recommended reading on video game history in general:

The writing of Jeremy Parish, including the NES Works and Super NES Works books, the GameSpite collections, and more

Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 by Van Burnham, as well as its sequel, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1985-2001

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

The entire collection of gorgeous hardcover volumes from Bitmap Books, including The Secret History of Mac Gaming, SNES/Super Famicom: A Visual Compendium, Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat-’Em-Ups, and many more

The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher

Hardcore Gaming 101, both the website and the many books it has published, such as Hardcoregaming101.net Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures, Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: The Unofficial Guide to Shin Megami Tensei and Persona, and many more

Welcome to the world of Cartoon Ghost, a small publication started by two dorks who love video games, anime, comic books, and basically all sorts of media.

As a company, Cartoon Ghost works with a wide range of clients on writing, editing, proofreading, consulting, and more. As the publication you’re now reading, Cartoon Ghost is the home for our writing, podcasts, videos, and other ideas that don’t fit with our traditional day-to-day work.

What can you expect to find on Cartoon Ghost?

We intend for Cartoon Ghost to be a place for us to experiment with a lot of different ideas, so who knows what to expect in the future! For now, though, the content on Cartoon Ghost will be split into three distinct sections:

NOT A GIANT ROBOT

Meet Mandi. Mandi adores anime and manga, and she wants to show you why. Not a Giant Robot will house essays and videos related to anime and manga. She’ll be exploring a broad range of series, creators, and topics, but a lot of the focus will be on helping newcomers find stories that will help them fall in love with these mediums.

THE CODEX

Meet Philip. Philip is obsessed with RPGs, particularly of the video game variety. Now he’s putting his two decades of experience writing about and reviewing games (and nearly four decades of experience playing them!) to use in creating The Codex. He’ll be sharing his thoughts on the latest RPG releases, like Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. But he’ll also dig into the history of RPGs starting from the very beginning. When we said “obsessed,” we weren’t kidding.

CARTOON GHOST: THE PODCAST

The Cartoon Ghost podcast will finally bring about the team-up you’ve been waiting for: Mandi and Philip! Together at last! In each episode, one member of this dynamic duo will take the lead, describing either a manga (Mandi) or comic book (Philip) story arc that is amazing, impactful, awful, or just plain weird. Join in as we celebrate the best and worst of visual storytelling.

What if I’m only interested in anime or RPGs or the podcast?

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Do I need to pay to subscribe to the newsletter?

Nope! In the future, some articles may be locked behind paid subscriptions, but for now, we’re offering all of our content without a paywall. And we intend to always provide a strong mix of free content, including our podcast and videos. So even if you can’t afford to financially support us or find the idea of cartoon ghosts distasteful, you’ll still be able to check out our thoughts!

What do I get for becoming a paid subscriber then?

The deep and abiding satisfaction of supporting two dorks who are extremely passionate and well-informed about these dorky topics. As mentioned above, in the future, some articles may be locked behind paid subscriptions, so at that point you’ll receive access to all of our writing, including archives.

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