Yet even before that happened, in December of 1985, the CRPG genre had already made the same leap thanks to still another creation from Kesmai: Island of Kesmai. As we’ve already seen in my previous article, MUD washed up from British shores in the spring of 1986 under the name of British Legends, bringing with it the idea of the multiplayer text adventure as virtual world. A few years later after these first single-player online CRPGs debuted, CompuServe made the leap to multiplayer virtual worlds. Like so many of CompuServe’s staple games, Dungeons of Kesmai would remain on the service for an absurdly long time, until well into the 1990s.īut more ambitious games as well would come down the pipe well before then. Known as Dungeons of Kesmai, it was, as the name would imply, another work of the indefatigable John Taylor and Kelton Flinn - i.e., Kesmai, the programmers also responsible for CompuServe’s MegaWars III and, a bit later, for GEnie’s Air Warrior. The success of Black Dragon led him to launch a somewhat more sophisticated single-player CRPG in 1982. Sadly lost to history now, it has been described by some of its old players as far more cleverly designed than its bare-bones presentation and its willingness to unabashedly ride Wizardry‘s coattails might lead one to believe.īill Louden, the “games guy” over at CompuServe, naturally followed developments on The Source closely. Certainly Black Dragon proved quite popular as the first game of its kind. But the fact is that not every Source subscriber’s computer could run Wizardry in those early days. Those bragging rights aside, Black Dragon had no multiplayer aspect at all, which might lead one to ask why its players didn’t just pick up a copy of Wizardry instead doing so would certainly have been cheaper in the long run. Any player who managed to accomplish that feat and escape back to the surface was rewarded by seeing her name along with her character’s immortalized on the game’s public wall of fame. The ultimate goal, guaranteed to consume many hours - not to mention a small fortune in connection charges - was to kill Asmodeus, the black dragon of the title, who lurked down on the tenth level. Only the character’s immediate surroundings were described on the scrolling, text-only display, so careful mapping became every bit as critical as it was in Wizardry.
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The player created a character - just one, not a full party as in Wizardry - and then began a series of expeditions into the game’s ten-level labyrinth, fighting monsters, collecting equipment and experience, and hopefully penetrating a little deeper with each outing. Black Dragon, written by a programmer of telephone switching systems named Bob Maples, was at bottom a simplified version of Wizardry - not a hugely surprising state of affairs, given that it made its debut in 1981, at the height of the Wizardry craze. The first CRPG to go online appeared on The Source, CompuServe’s most prominent early competitor.
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