Advent Calendar 03: 2 Fire Buttons, 101 Keys

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

I am about the right age to have toyed with an 8-bit micro, but it's something I never got into. My father was in networking, then avionics design, when I was little, and did a lot of telework before "telework" was a word, so we always had at least one computer in the house bright enough to run CAD software. By the time I cared about how computers worked, we'd already graduated from the VIC-20 that took cartridges and plugged into a TV, to an Intel 8088 with dedicated amber monitor and peripherals. I skipped the whole Atari/Commodore thing and went straight to PC -- never learned much BASIC, but still remember an embarrassing amount about writing batch files in MS-DOS, which will actually be relevant later.

While early console RPGs were taking over our personal living room, a very different kind of RPG was taking shape on microcomputers. The two major differences were storage space and input style. A Nintendo controller (officially a "game pad") is basically a mutated joystick. It has four directions, two fire buttons, and two other dedicated buttons that usually handle system functions like pause or bringing up the menu. A computer has an entire keyboard full of things to bang on when you want to tell the game something. Not all microcomputers had dedicated arrow keys, and the WASD style of movement hadn't taken shape yet, but on the up side, you didn't have to A/B your way through a million menus to access your inventory.

The earliest licensed Dungeons & Dragons game I can find is Akalabeth (1979), which is actually slightly earlier than I expected. Kudos to the Apple ][ programmer that bashed that together. Observant viewers might have caught the name Lord British in the credits and gone, "The Ultima guy?" Yes! And the much more recognizable Ultima (1981) was not far behind. 

Now, if you watch that video, you'll note that it starts with a very long and boring segment of someone pressing some numbers, thinking it over, pressing some more numbers, etc, and only after that does it loop back to the title screen and let you start an actual game. You'll be familiar with this tedious mathematical process if you've ever actually played tabletop D&D. After that you get dropped into what actually looks like an intricately detailed top-down world by the standards of 1981 (compare to the cartoony visuals of the contemporaneous COLECOVision Donkey Kong a couple days ago)... with a cluttered list of command hotkeys down at the bottom of the screen. Vive le clavier. If you want to know more about how Lord British achived these stunning graphics, I recommend this article over at The Digital Antiquarian. And if you'd like to see the much prettier 1986 re-release, take a look at it here.

The other thing of note is how often Ultima asks the player to insert a new disk. The size and storage requirements of a computer game was limited only by the number of diskettes you could convince your publisher to copy and your player to keep on hand. Cartridge games -- which did exist as an option for computers, but were universal for consoles -- were limited to however much ROM was physically in the cart, and if you were willing to let it drive up the price, a chunk of battery-backed save RAM. 

For a long time, the Ultima series was to computer RPGs what Final Fantasy was to consoles. The main line ended with the 1999 release of Ultima IX: Ascension, which going by the leaked details of the plot they didn't use, was really meant to be THE END. Electronic Arts, who'd owned the IP since 1992, thought otherwise, and continued trying to capitalize on it until 2014, when its last unimpressive free-to-play effort full of microtransactions shut down.