The Entire History of RPGs
Video Overview & Insights
RPGs have come a long way... and people still can't even seem to agree on a definition.
I feel this trend to release games for both PC and mobile or console is just bad for the quality of the games. Games are freaking dumbed down to fit the mobile/console format. It may be more viable from an economic perspective but it degrades the quality of games,.
0:00 - introduction
1:38 - origins and definitions
Those primitive graphics of trees and forests and whatever else were someone's whole world. I remember age of empires 2 captivating me by its tiny sprites
12:21 - but what was the first RPG?
28:53 - the golden 80's
No mention of Eldenring?
49:25 - the JRPG
57:57 - the turbulent 90's
Excellent video!! Its only congratulations from me to all the people who worked for this amazing almost 3 hours journey..Thank you. Respect.
1:35:17 - the C stands for console now 00's
2:04:29 - 2010's A-side
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and The Witcher 3 are just perfect in gameplay, story and worldbuilding. I finished both, Witcher 3 even two times 100 %.
2:20:48 - 2010's B-side
2:33:07 - RPGs today
Thank you for pointing out one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard in my life 2:04
https://www.patreon.com/NeverKnowsBestYoutube
Dungeons and Desktops - https://shorturl.at/szACM
The first hour should have been called "I've a hard-on for ultima". Nothing wrong with ultima, it's just that in my world it was never as dominant as the video seem to present. Maybe I'm too far north. :)
Matt Chat - https://www.youtube.com/c/@MattBarton
CRPG Book - https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/
Calling Pool of radiance "quite time consuming" is the understatement of the decade. :) I must have spent work months playing those gold box games, and I recently bought them for the umpteenth time through steam, and I intend to do a nostalgic trip through as many of them as I can take. :) I first beat PoR through an anger fit!! I got angry with the poisonous labyrinth at the end, so I just smashed "walk straight ahead to the target" through all the poison bushes in anger. And I got through!!! No poisoning, no random encounters..nothing. Just Tyranthraxus! And that went surprisingly well too. So don't underestimate a fit. :)
CRPG Addict - https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
sources and gameplay footage - https://pastebin.com/1CdvsNCx
Dafuq, he included Diablo 1 but not 2? 2 made 1 look like a footnote.
-
I miss when Obsidian made good games.
More User Perspectives
2:02:00 Console before PC
@xtzyshuadogGot no patience for rpgs these days. Too bloated. Only shmups for me.
@henrikpihl8042After a bit it starts to drag, ngl
@orlando8608agAnyone remember Todd Howard's firstborn Redguard? Such an amazing game 🥹
@deaddead698Fascinating deep dive into CRPGs that felt like a biography of my gaming life. I spent much of the video nodding along - "yep, played that," "yeah, that one was awesome," "helped CREATE that one," and so on. I agree on the book references - good stuff there. Love the callout to CRPG Addict at the end - he deserves an even bigger fanbase!
@tahnarWhat is the game at 3:35?
@shimadamada9646I purchased Pool Of Radiance when it came out on the Commodore 64 when it was new. I distinctly remember saving up for it. The fact that was almost 40 years ago, blows my mind.
@davidb1412Nearly 3 hours video and 2 minutes for Fallout(?!) Haahhahahahaha
@davor981Crazy to think that Bethesda wont be relevant from 2013-2026 in any future videos like this
Also, the Souls series started in 2009 with a game from Fromsoftware themselves
how you gong to skip POE2?
@peterromano3846It's not an RPG, but thinking about how early on things still were for 3D first person combat in the early 90s makes me really appreciate the interior sections of Jurassic Park for SNES (1993) - this was the same year as Doom and just after Castle Wolfenstein 3D, so seeing anything like it was still a pretty new experience, and this game managed to use not only a top-down view for the outside world but transform into an entirely different game basically anytime you went into a building - suddenly you were in first person moving around shooting dinosaurs and booting up computers. I didn't think much of it as a kid back then but maybe because those indoor sections scared the crap out of me. I kind of assumed back then that lots of other games had that sort of thing, but turns out in 1993 it was still pretty rare and to have TWO completely different KINDS of gameplay in the same game depending on if you were inside or outside was rarer still. Ocean Software gets a lot of crap for being a supposedly bad developer but that game was actually fantastic - great soundtrack, atmosphere, most book accurate JP game to date if you know what to look for, and needlessly got suddenly inventive with the indoor sections when it could have just kept it top-down like the NES version of the game. They didn't HAVE to do that. They CHOSE to do that. The one glaring flaw in that one was no save battery was put in the cartridge which meant you could not save at all and had to leave the system on to finish it. A problem fixed in the Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection a few years ago.
@kalevipoeg6916WE DO KNOW WHAT PING AND CHONG MEANS U SNOB!!
@soydavilaI said "holy moly, it's almost three hours long." Then the first two hours zipped by because I was completely absorbed. My first RPG was The Bard's Tale. I really liked Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back, and Legend of Grimrock I and II. Now I'm on Diablo 2 Res RotW.
@fiddleronthecube7835Diablo, Fallout, Baldurs Gate, Final Fantasy, Kotor, Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins, Skyrim, The Witcher, played them all, best of times!
@bartzed4305Does it mention Lunar? If not this is 3 hours of irrelevance.
@jbailey690@neverknowsbest will you do an addendum or second part with the rise of 3d otome games like love and deepspace which have opened up a new market?
@astrothsknotToo few game histories mention Colossal Cave
@drewolds721i just think it missed diablo 2 impact, but amazing video
@gcintraoJUSTICE FOR COLONY SHIP!
I'm rewatching the video, doing my annual replays of older cRPGs, and I really love the vid, it's magnificent! But, but, fuuk, JUSTICE FOR COLONY SHIP, JUSTICE TO IRON TOWER STUDIOS, ALL HAIL VINCE D. WELLER!1!1!1!1!1!!!1!2!3828$;_+2!!;!;?!!!!1 Why didn't you include it? It's such a good if niche cRPG, from such a good, wholesome indie dev who needs every mention and every sell he can get. Age of Decadence and its spin-off Dungeon Rats gathered a small, but tight and very active cult following community, so did Colony Ship, but it's too small and almost no RPG youtuber ever showcased it and now the guys have too few coins to create another full, oldschool, deep, hardcore cRPG. It's so sad, because they're really great, they still talk with their fans in all threads they find, they work on their games in real accordance to player feedback (they added whole new questlines, dialogues, choices, and such, just because their fans suggested it would be cool to do so, and both devs and players would brainstorm ideas on the forums), and have generally the greatest dev-gamer engagement I've ever seen, and if only a few more RPG-tubers had talked about Colony Ship near its premiere, they might've survived 😢😢😢😢
Still love you, but I'm a sadboi now
Why would people not know where RPGs came from? I was there when it did! Computers came into homes around the early 80s, plenty of us who were born in the 60s and 70s are still very much alive!
@HackMinstrelTodays humor is lame
@luisito6314How is this free? The amount of work that went into this must be insane... You're an absolute legend, that was amazing, thank you!!!
(watched with youtube premium)
Planescape Torment had a number of interactions with the companions prior to BG2 and romances and the like where, if intelligence/wisdom was high enough, one could discuss and learn spells/items from people like Dakkon, then point out things in his belief/faith and unlocking new spells for him. It was ahead of the pack by miles, but had a ton of reading and especially thinking instead of clicking and smashing like Diablo and others, which made it fail (The box art didn't help, IIRC the actor didn't show up for the artwork so they used someone of the team with some makeup). The few that did play it to the end and understood it still regard it as a milestone that was never surpassed insofar as story/philosophy goes. Some company bouht the IP name and did a 'relaunch' a few years ago but it was abysmally bad.
@jemenfish5408Middle Earth was not a complete, fleshed out, "living" world, it was a series of disconnected locations which the characters moved, from the first to the next.
@looneyburgmusicBeing born in 1990 I always feel like growing up with NES and SNES, I was there when gaming really began. But seeing these reminde me that games existed decades before the old snes and nes - love these videos!
@lliixzllii1794RPG were first used by the US military to assess certain outcomes of conflicts during the cold war. The military RPGs were quite similar to the later "real" RPGs.
@nickadams1051Wow man! THis brings me back
@DoubledDownedI remember waking up early to take my turn playing L.O.R.D. on different BBS's each day with about 20-30 other players from each board.
I also ran a 70's version of D&D on my 286 PC with an 11MB HD and 2400BPS modem. We only had a B&W monitor, but I think we eventually had the memory upgraded to 2MB! If I remember correctly, on the PC, the warrior D&D character was a "] " or "[" and would move through rooms with the arrow keys as shown @ 29:33.
I think the only other game we had with graphics that would run was "Where In The Word Is Carmen Sandiego" which I played with my daughter when she was growing up. Shh was never interested in LORD or D&D though...
Wait, didn’t fantasy RPGs begin with Dungeons & Dragons? …or Blackmoor? …which was developed from Braunstein? 😯
@chriswaltner7028The Idea of a world that can be explored and lived in is called: Secondary Creation by a secondary creator tocreate secondary believe - ask tolkien in "on fairy story" 🙂
@DarthFlauschiGesehen: 2026-03-30
@Skrym_137"world-building," the development of the universe, is part of writing.
@zeitok8So consoles killed rpgs and now both consoles and rpgs are dead wow thanks halo and gamer bros
@g_y.rtz420The idea of role play game came from rolling dice , but recently been changed by people that just like the way it sounds , role now is stat based gaming , so some kind of creation process is needed for it to be a role , and it is changing in to character based gaming ,
@darringregory196God, Wizardry was brutal. We beat the NES one after figuring out you can reset it and start after the previous battle.
There was a pit you could fall into after taking the last elevator level, and Werdna was on that level. We would level up there and teleport back to town, although one time I teleported into rock and lost my fucking party :(
50:01 old footage proving that touch screens existed in the 80's
@The_One_CosmosFor me it was Zelda 2, Dragon Quest, Faxanadu and Final Fantasy that were my first and most impactful RPGs.
I later discovered a nice little gem on PlayStation 1 called Arc The Lad. Another impactful favorite
Is Horizon Zero Down considered an RPG? Wikipedia says yes, but many say it's not
@alice-vh1iwI believe the first RPG was Dungeons and Dragons.
@ajpendHonestly, I don't think the old-school backlash against dumbed down RPGs was ever that impactful. A lot of people have taken up the cry this decade but it always felt like people disappointed that Bethesda, Bioware, etc. were making worse new-school RPGs (with worse stories, characters & worlds, more time wasters and terrible launch states) looking for reasons and parroting what they found online.
Even if they come to believe it, most of these people haven't played Fallout 1-2, BG1-2 or even things like New Vegas. They enjoyed games like Skyrim, the Mass Effect trilogy & Witcher 3 and were disappointed by games like Fallout 4, Inquisition, Andromeda, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk & Starfield. What they're actually looking for is an engaging story, characters and world, an epic adventure, and gameplay they can get through. It doesn't matter if that's easy & shallow (Skyrim, Witcher 3), easy & deep (BG3) or hard but easy to cheese with a guide (Elden Ring).
As Never said in his TES and Cyberpunk videos, these "shallow RPG" criticisms are never loudest when the RPG systems are actually simplified (Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Witcher 2), they're loudest when it disappoints for unrelated reasons (Fallout 76, Andromeda, Cyberpunk).