It was either Ultima VI or Bard's Tale II, leaning heavily towards the latter.

If we're talking CRPGs, I'm pretty sure it was one of the Ultimas, probably Ultima IV, on my Atari 1200XL. I think I had seen the game before that, on my best friend's Apple IIe, but I don't think I got my own copy until later (c. 1986-ish).

Whichever one of the Ultimas I actually played first, I soon played all of Ultima I-IV in quick succession, finishing them all (with some help from my other friend who had an Atari computer of his own!).

I then spent *years* looking for someway to play these, or similar games, on my Mac, but I guess I didn't know any of the right people back then, as I never played any of the other 1990s era games that people around here mention. (I did take a glance at Realmz and Exile, but neither of those caught my fancy...)

Basically, I was out of luck on CRPGs until I stumbled across the Lairware's Ultima III Mac OS port in the late 1990s.

Then I was out of luck again until I stumbled across the XU4 Ultima IV porting project a couple of years ago.
I then stumbled upon Eschalon not too long after that.

It amazes me how few good games there are in the 'old-school' CRPG genre...

I've been playing RPGs only for about a year now. Before that, I really only played FPSes and action-adventures. (Whatever those are! "Action-adventure" is incredibly generic, don't you think?)

See, before this, my vision of RPGs was incredibly skewed. The only RPGs I knew were Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, all sorts of JRPGs that I absolutely detested. What really got me on my still-growing RPG binge was NetHack. After playing and loving that, I got into numerous roguelikes and other "old-school" RPGs like The Bard's Tale and more recent ones like The Dark Spire. Somewhere along the line I discovered Eschalon, and fell in love with that.

I had a somewhat similar experience - I don't remember what my first RPGs were, but the first one I liked was the first Fallout. I was quickly consumed by a passion for such games and have played most of the RPGs of its sort that flourished for a short while in the late 90's and early 2000's.



I also found myself developing a taste for roguelikes after I stopped playing RPGs for a few years. I think I would not call them RPGs though - they are kind of a related but separate genre of themselves.

I make that distinction because for me the draws of "real" RPGs (Eschalon style games) are exploration, the story & developing a character. In roguelikes the draws are in the strategic and tactical challenges - roguelikes are hard and tend to be far less forgiving than other types of games.

The story is almost a non-issue for me in a roguelike, it's all about beating the game against the odds.

For me a lot of commercial dungeon crawlers ("Diablo-clones", like Sacred for example) fall into an unfortunate valley of having all of the story & setting disadvantages of roguelikes with the lack of strategic & tactical challenge of classic RPGs.

Diablo itself was so well made as a game that it somehow managed to still be fun for a while, but generally I really don't who they're making most of these games for (obviously not for me!).

Hrm, that turned into quite a rant- sorry about that...

-Ido.

The first RPG I ever played was The Bards Tale. Now I have to admit that it bored me to tears, and I probably would never have ended up here ordering Eschalon if, a few days later, I hadn't stumbled upon Ultima 4. This game totally changed my mind and hooked me on RPG's.

I found the Bards Tale games to have too little depth to them. I don't mind the concept, as I really love Dragon Wars, but this is mainly because it uses the handy Bards Tale engine, and adds in Wasteland depth with skills. This made all the difference.

Hmm, that's a good question.

Planet's Edge, by New World Computing.

It may not have been the absolute first I ever played, my memory that far back is rather hazy, and most of the games I played were more adventure than RPG until Planet's Edge.

I still play it once in a while, and have hacked it with a hex editor to fix the Cygnus Canon so you don't shoot your partners instead of the enemy (It was supposed to be the most powerful weapon in the game, and originally you were supposed to find the parts and put it together, but if you read on, you'll find out why you just find it whole instead). I used to have a whole bunch of info on the files and hacking them that I had discovered, but during a move I lost all of those files. Perhaps some day I'll become ambitious enough to go back and figure out all that info again and post it somewhere for the Abandonware community.

Pity they never finished it before releasing it (I had been following the clues to find the Janixatrix, who supposedly was behind the explosion that started my quest, and was stumped, so I called NWC, and was told that they had thought the game was getting too big, so they just quit development and put it on the market unfinished. I was told just to take my parts back to the moon and enjoy the ending scenes.) Some day I'd like to redo it, in isometric, and finish the story line.

I do remember the first Adventure (now called Interactive Fiction) game I ever played: Scott Adams' "Adventure" ("Mud is good for some things, but for others ..."), on a friend's TRS-80 Model I.

PK

I played RPGs long before there were video games. D&D and Gamma World - great stuff!

As for computer RPGs, probably Interplay's "Lord of the Rings" was the first one I played. Awesome game! I still play it once in awhile through DOSBox.

first game ever was a Las Vegas Pong machine.

first on a computer (C64) was Pyramid of Doom.

first CRPG was Might and Magic II on C64.

The Faery Tale Adventure. The Mac rewrite. Updated graphics and actual music rather than just a bunch of sonic blips (and the only ongoing soundtrack I've ever liked).

I can't play it any longer; it won't work on Leopard. (Plus, I can't find a copy of it anyhow, only the crappy DOS original. Actually, I have no idea when the original DOS game originally came out... I suppose I could check.)

Wasteland I think, but it may have been Bard's Tale. The former was awesome the latter was a bit tedious.

The first RPG was Final Fantasy 7.That was the RPG that opened my eyes to the genre. I got it because I was hearing all this talk about it months before it launched, and I was curious what all the fuss was about.

On Personal Computer: Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, developed by Valkyrie Studios and published by Monolith Productions.

On Console\PSone: Final Fantasy VIII

Me and my friend played Pool Of Radiance on his C64. That game came on eight floppy diskettes. That was... well... freaking huge back then. Loved and played most of the "gold box" games from SSI. I still own most of those games, great series both the one beginning with PoR and the Krynn series.

Anyone remember the game Autoduel? Think I played that game very early on the C64.

The Eye of the Beholder games on the Amiga sucked up much of my time. Great memories. EoB 1 was sneaky, I remember making maps on graph paper. Entered a new seemingly empty room that I started to map out. "Hmmm, the map of this room kinda looks like a skull" and there was no way to exit the room. Funny... bastards. Lands of Lore was another Amiga game that was similar to EoB-series. And Yeah, bloody Dungeon Master. Me ans my friend played that alot on his Amiga (I got an Amiga laate), never figured it out much though. Mostly we got lost and eaten by mummies Great game anyways.

On PC there were The Elder Scrolls: The Arena. Probably the first RPG I played on that platform. I remember having that game on... well... many, many diskettes. And always some of them were broken... And never enough money to upgrade the damn computer. Ah, those were the days... hehe.

First Role Playing video game I played was Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. It was on a Tandy 1000 I loved the heck out of that game right down to the big journal you got with the game that included a whole bunch of bogus entries in case you went ahead and read the whole thing instead of just reading the entries you were supposed to when you got to that part of the game. The game had space flight and fighting, stations, ground vehicle sections, and sections you did on foot. You could even board enemy vessels after you disabled their engines.

Oddly enough I never got into Hard Nova which was made by the same person and is considered a semi-sequel. I'll have to see if I can find a copy of it somewhere (or it may be freeware, abandonware by now) and try to get it to run in Dosbox.

Moria and The Bard's Tale were also among the first CRPGs I played but Sentinel Worlds I was most likely the first.

The very first RPG game I played was Secret of Mana on the SNES. The first western RPG game was Baldur's Gate, of course.