Trigger Happy
Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (the latter is now head of videogame publishers Eidos) in the 1980s.
Modern, complex RPGs owe their shared paradigms to one game series in particular: Final Fantasy, the first game of which was released in 1987. It had detailed, colorful two-dimensional graphics, and a traditional story line involving an ancient evil once again on the loose, with rapacious pirates on the oceans and demons in the bowels of the earth; the player was required to choose four people to make up a team of Light Warriors to save the world. The systems of magic and fighting grew more and more complex with each sequel, until Final Fantasy VII (1997) not only offered sumptuous movieistic scenes to advance the plot, but updated the milieu to one of magic futurism. Yet it is still based on a remarkably old-hat “turn-based” system of combat, with roots clearly in the dice-throwing game played by unsocialized boys.
In essence, however, an RPG need not inhabit exclusively such puerile, sub-Tolkien milieus. The basis of any RPG is that the player “becomes” a character in the fictional world. On a basic level, nearly every videogame ever made is a role-playing game. You play the role of a missile turret defending Earth from the space invaders; you play the role of a
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