Welcome to the first Digital Hands, a new regular column in Other Hands. Now, you may wonder, what is this, and who am I writing it? I will begin by answering the second part of that question. My name is Fredrik Ekman, and I am a Computer Science student from Sweden. More important, in this context at least, is that two of my main interests are literature (with Tolkien as one of my favorite authors) and games (especially computer games). I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 1985 and played the game The Hobbit shortly after that. I was immediately fascinated by the concept of being able to walk the lands of Middle-earth, and have since tried to find as many other computer games set in Middle-earth as possible. During the past two years, I have created and maintained a list of Tolkien computer games, which is published on the Internet. (For those with Internet access, the list can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.math.uni-hamburg.de/pub/misc/tolkien/games.list.)
What, then, does this have to do with role-playing games? Allow me for a moment to bring you back in time. Let us go back to 1974, when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created the first role-playing game: Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). As I suppose you all know, Gygax was obviously, directly and indirectly, very influenced by Tolkien, even though he has later denied this. The popularity of D&D quickly spread, and one group of people where it was particularly popular was computer programmers. As a result, several programmers tried to adapt role-playing to the computer.
One of these was Don Woods, who wrote a program called Adventure. In it, he tried to simulate a role-playing session in that the computer was game master, giving descriptions of the player's surroundings and accepting simplified English sentences, such as light lamp or open grate. The game was further developed by Willie Crowther and in 1977 it was distributed through the ARPAnet, the forerunner of today's Internet. It quickly became extremely popular and programmers spent so much time playing it that most computer departments in America lost about one or two weeks of effective work.
Adventure, the first text adventure, was mostly problem based (unlike the then more common hack-and-slash variety of role-playing), but another game would soon come to those who preferred killing everyone in sight. It was called Akalabeth (1979). Another early game was Rogue, originally conceived by Glen Wichman and Michael Toy, later further developed by Toy and Kenneth Arnold. Unlike Adventure, Rogue presented the player's surroundings in the form of a map of the dungeons he was traveling and commands were in the form of single keystrokes. Rogue was of a kind now referred to as computer role-playing games or, simply, RPGs.
Both Adventure and Rogue were set in a fantasy world based on that of D&D. They were thus indirectly inspired by Tolkien and so were most of their early successors. It was only natural that the majority of the Tolkien computer games that were eventually developed came to be either text adventures or RPGs. There you have it: the pre-history of the Tolkien computer games.
Today, text adventures have unfortunately gone out of fashion, while RPGs are still very popular. The crude text-only maps of the early games have been replaced by graphics and the single keystrokes by mouse. Today they also tend to be more based on problem-solving than they used to.
Finally, I would like to say a few words about what Digital Hands will contain. The next column will bring you up-to-date on what is happening on the front today. What new games are out there? What is currently being developed? In future columns, I hope to have reviews of popular games, information and rumors about publishers and authors, more about the history of the games, their raison d'être, and much more. If there is an interest, I could also give hints and solutions to problems in the games, but then I need to get specific questions from you, the reader. Unless there is a strong demand for such, I will not include maps or complete solutions to games.
This column deals with a borderland of traditional role-playing. I still hope that both you and I will benefit from it.