The History of RPGs: From Tabletop to JRPGs, Western RPGs and MMOs
How RPGs evolved from Dungeons & Dragons through Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Diablo and World of Warcraft, plus the genre's core design traits.
RPGs (role-playing games) are one of the oldest and broadest genres in video games. Tabletop games played with paper and dice moved onto university computers, and from there grew into distinct branches by way of Japanese home consoles, American PCs, and the internet.
In this article, we start with what an RPG is and then go through the eras in order: tabletop RPGs and mainframe games in the 1970s, Ultima and Wizardry in the 1980s, the JRPG born in Japan, the revival of Western RPGs in the late 1990s, and the MMORPG, where huge numbers of people gather in a single world. At the end, we sum up the design elements that make up the genre and what it looks like today.
What Is an RPG and Where Did It Come From?
An RPG is a game in which the player takes on the role of a character or party and grows stronger while exploring a world with a story. Most include elements such as experience points and levels, stats, equipment, and quests, and what sets them apart from other genres is that the outcome of combat depends more on a character's numbers than on the player's dexterity.
The genre's roots lie in tabletop role-playing games. With the publication of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, a style of play spread widely in which a game master (the Dungeon Master) tells the story, participants act out their characters, and dice determine whether actions succeed. Fantasy novels such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings also had a big influence on the settings of early RPGs.
This pastime soon moved to computers. In the mid-1970s, games such as pedit5 and dnd (1975) were created on mainframes and the PLATO system at American universities, and Don Daglow made Dungeon in 1975. In 1980, students at Berkeley created Rogue for Unix, and its text-drawn maps and freshly generated dungeons would later give their name to the subgenre known as the "roguelike."
The 1980s: The Framework Built by Ultima and Wizardry
As home computers spread, RPGs became commercial products. The two pillars of this era were Richard Garriott's Ultima series and Sir-Tech's Wizardry series. Both began on the Apple II in 1981.
- Wizardry: Showed a structure of exploring dungeons from a first-person perspective, with a multi-member party taking turns to act in battle. It was also famous for a difficulty level that had players drawing their own maps on graph paper.
- Ultima: Featured top-down tile graphics, wide overworlds, and party combat. Ultima III (1983) influenced many later RPGs, and Ultima IV (1985) drew attention by introducing a moral system that judged players on upholding "virtues" such as honesty and compassion rather than on slaying monsters.
The late 1980s brought titles such as The Bard's Tale (1985), Might and Magic (1986), and SSI's Pool of Radiance (1988), which adapted the official D&D rules. Games that attempted real-time play also appeared, such as Dungeon Master (1987), in which you manipulated objects directly with the mouse.
The Birth of the JRPG: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy
In Japan, computers were expensive, so the PC RPG market wasn't large. There were PC titles such as The Black Onyx (1984), but it was home consoles that popularized the genre.
Dragon Quest, published by Enix in 1986 and developed by Chunsoft, was conceived by Yuji Horii and inspired by Ultima and Wizardry. To fit the Famicom's limited memory and simple controller, its controls and systems were greatly simplified, and this turned out to suit people encountering RPGs for the first time. Dragon Quest went on to become the basic template for Japanese RPGs.
In 1987, Square released Final Fantasy, led by Hironobu Sakaguchi. Its side-view battle screen, with allies on the right and enemies on the left, became the standard for many console RPGs that followed. The 1990s brought titles such as Chrono Trigger (1995) and Pokémon Red and Green (1996), and in 1997, Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation introduced JRPGs to the global market in a big way with its 3D graphics and cinematic presentation.
JRPGs are often characterized by narratives that follow a fixed protagonist and storyline, turn-based combat, distinctive characters, and anime-style art. However, as Hironobu Sakaguchi himself pointed out, many games don't fit a regional classification, so it's best to treat this distinction as a general tendency.
The Revival of Western RPGs and the Action RPG
In the mid-1990s, Western PC RPGs went through a slump. CD-ROMs and advances in graphics increased development costs and time, and players' interest shifted to FPS and real-time strategy games.
What changed the mood was Diablo, released by Blizzard on December 31, 1996. It added fast real-time combat to randomly generated dungeons like those of roguelikes, and supported online co-op play through Battle.net. Afterward, many action RPGs were made around the repeating loop of "fight, pick up loot, level up."
Around the same time, games that emphasized story and choice also appeared. Interplay's Fallout (1997), BioWare's Baldur's Gate (1998), and Ion Storm's Deus Ex (2000), led by Warren Spector, showcased multiple solutions and dialogue choices. Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series, continuing through Morrowind (2002), Oblivion (2006), and Skyrim (2011), came to represent the free-roaming open-world RPG, and BioWare's Mass Effect (2007) and CD Projekt Red's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) are also counted among the genre's landmark titles.
MMORPGs: Countless People in One World
Another branch of the RPG is online play. In the 1970s and '80s, there were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), in which multiple people adventured together in text over university networks, and as the internet spread, these evolved into graphical MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games).
| Year | Game | Developer | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | The Kingdom of the Winds | Nexon | Early Korean graphical online RPG |
| 1997 | Ultima Online | Origin Systems | Expanded the Ultima world online |
| 1998 | Lineage | NCSoft | Large-scale player competition such as castle sieges |
| 1999 | EverQuest | Verant Interactive | Popularized the 3D MMORPG |
| 2004 | World of Warcraft | Blizzard | Quest-driven design that set the genre standard |
Korea holds an important place in this history. The Kingdom of the Winds and Lineage grew alongside PC bang culture and laid the foundation for the Korean game industry's later growth centered on online games. Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima, also later worked with NCSoft.
Landmark Games by Era at a Glance
| Year | Game | Developer | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1974 | Dungeons & Dragons | TSR | The starting point of tabletop RPGs |
| 1980 | Rogue | University student developers | Random dungeons, the prototype roguelike |
| 1981 | Wizardry | Sir-Tech | First-person dungeon crawling and party combat |
| 1985 | Ultima IV | Origin Systems | Design that judges morality and virtues |
| 1986 | Dragon Quest | Chunsoft (published by Enix) | The basic template for console RPGs |
| 1987 | Final Fantasy | Square | Established the side-view battle screen |
| 1996 | Diablo | Blizzard | Action RPG and online co-op |
| 1997 | Final Fantasy VII | Square | Took JRPGs global with 3D presentation |
| 1998 | Baldur's Gate | BioWare | Revival of the Western CRPG |
| 2004 | World of Warcraft | Blizzard | The MMORPG standard |
| 2011 | The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | Bethesda Game Studios | Popularized the open-world RPG |
| 2023 | Baldur's Gate 3 | Larian Studios | Renewed spotlight on CRPGs built on tabletop rules |
Core Elements of RPG Design
There are five broad elements that RPG designers commonly work with.
- Progression systems: Structures such as experience, levels, and skill trees that make characters stronger over time. This is the most fundamental motivation for keeping players engaged for the long haul.
- Combat systems: Turn-based, real-time, real-time with pause (RTwP), and time-gauge systems, among others. Turn-based combat gives you time to think, while real-time combat offers tension and the fun of direct control.
- Party and characters: Whether you control one character or manage several changes the texture of strategy. Classes and role division are a tradition carried over from tabletop games.
- Narrative and choice: Designers must decide whether to have players follow a set story or offer dialogue choices and branching outcomes. Western RPGs have tended to emphasize the consequences of choices, while JRPGs have emphasized presentation and character narratives.
- Exploration and rewards: Maps, hidden places, and equipment and items drive exploration. In action RPGs, random loot becomes the key motivation for replaying.
Ultimately, the fun of an RPG comes from the sense that "my choices and my time leave their mark on my character and the world."
RPGs Today
Today the line between East and West is blurrier than before. As many games borrow RPG progression elements, levels and skill trees now appear in action games, shooters, and strategy games as well.
Within the genre, too, trends are diverse. FromSoftware's Elden Ring (2022) combined demanding action combat with a vast open world, and Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) showed that a turn-based CRPG built on D&D rules still resonates with a wide audience. Live-service RPGs that support mobile, PC, and console together and receive ongoing updates also make up a large share. Meanwhile, roguelikes and their variant, roguelites, have become a structure frequently used in indie games made by small teams.
Having started with paper and dice, the RPG has changed shape over 50 years according to technology and region, but its core of taking on a role, growing stronger, and exploring a world remains unchanged.