Early history of video games
That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set. The inventor, Ralph H. Baer, had initially had the idea in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. Unable to do so with the technological constraints at the time, he began work on a device that would attach to a television set and display games in 1966, and the "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was licensed to Magnavox to adapt and produce. They announced the console in May 1972, and it went on sale that September. The console and its games featured numerous innovations beyond being the first video game device for home consumers: it was the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal; it was also the first video gaming device to be displayed in a television commercial. It sold for US$100 and shipped with several games, including "Table tennis", which Bushnell had seen a demo of and which "Pong" had been based on. The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of "Pong". "Pong" and the Odyssey kicked off a new era of video gaming, with numerous other competitors starting up in the video game industry as it grew in popularity.
Role-playing video game
One of the earliest role-playing video game on a microcomputer was "Dungeon n Dragons", written by Peter Trefonas and published by CLOAD (1980). This early game, published for a TRS-80 Model 1, was just 16K long and included a limited word parser command line, character generation, a store to purchase equipment, combat, traps to solve, and a dungeon to explore. Other contemporaneous CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games) were "Temple of Apshai", "" and "", the precursor to "Ultima". Some early microcomputer RPGs (such as "Telengard" (1982) or "Sword of Fargoal") were based on their mainframe counterparts, while others (such as "Ultima" or "Wizardry", the most successful of the early CRPGs) were loose adaptations of "D&D". They also included both first-person displays and overhead views, sometimes in the same game ("Akalabeth", for example, used both perspectives). Most of the key features of RPGs were developed in this early period, prior to the release of "", one of the prime influences on both computer and console RPG development. For example, Wizardry featured menu-driven combat, "Tunnels of Doom" featured tactical combat on a special "combat screen", and "Dungeons of Daggorath" featured real-time combat which took place on the main dungeon map.