Video game development
The history of game making begins with the development of the first video games, although which video game is the first depends on the definition of "video game". The first games created had little entertainment value, and their development focus was separate from user experience—in fact, these games required mainframe computers to play them. "OXO", written by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952, was the first computer game to use a digital display. In 1958, a game called "Tennis for Two", which displayed its output on an oscilloscope, was made by Willy Higinbotham, a physicist working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1961, a mainframe computer game called "Spacewar!" was developed by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students led by Steve Russell.
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.