Eye of the Beholder (1991): Westwood’s D&D Dungeon Crawl Debut
Before Command & Conquer made Westwood a household name, the studio cut its teeth on something very different: a first-person […]
RPG
Betrayal at Krondor (1993): The RPG That Out-Wrote Its Own Novels
In the early 1990s, tie-in games were routinely worse than the books or franchises they borrowed from. Betrayal at Krondor
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985): The Free RPG That Asked You to Be Good, Not Just Win
What if the point of a role-playing game wasn’t to kill the evil wizard, but to become a better person
Shadowcaster (1993): Raven’s Shape-Shifting RPG Before Heretic and Hexen
Long before Raven Software became known for Heretic and Hexen, the studio spent 1993 building something stranger: a first-person RPG
Strife (1996): The Doom Engine’s Strangest, Best Detour
What do you get when you bolt a quest log and a reputation system onto Doom’s combat engine? Rogue Entertainment
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996): Bethesda’s Impossibly Huge Gamble
Try to describe Daggerfall’s scale to someone who hasn’t played it and the numbers just sound made up: a procedurally
The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994): The Free RPG That Started It All
Before Morrowind, before Oblivion, before Skyrim, there was a game that almost wasn’t an open-world RPG at all. The Elder
Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991): The Turn-Based Game That Ate Millions of Evenings
Sid Meier’s Civilization is one of the most important games ever made. Released in 1991 by MicroProse, it turned the
Hexen: Beyond Heretic (1995) — When a Shooter Studio Decided Puzzles Mattered Too
What happens when a shooter developer decides that backtracking and puzzle-solving matter as much as ammo counts? Raven Software answered