Open world
There is no consensus on what the earliest open world game is, due to differing definitions of how large or open a world needs to be. Ars Technica traces the concept back to the free-roaming exploration of 1976 text adventure game "Colossal Cave Adventure", which inspired the free-roaming exploration of "Adventure" (1980), but notes that it wasn't until 1984 that what "we now know as open-world gaming" took on a "definite shape" with 1984 space simulator "Elite", considered a pioneer of the open world; Gamasutra argues that its open-ended sandbox style is rooted in flight simulators, such as SubLOGIC's "Flight Simulator" (1979/1980), noting most flight sims "offer a 'free flight' mode that allows players to simply pilot the aircraft and explore the virtual world". Others trace the concept back to 1981 CRPG "", which had a free-roaming overworld map inspired by tabletop RPG "Dungeons & Dragons". The overworld maps of the first five "Ultima" games, released up to 1988, lacked a single, unified scale, with towns and other places represented as icons; this style was adopted by the first three "Dragon Quest" games, released from 1986 to 1988 in Japan.
Castlevania
Many "Castlevania" titles have been released for markets in Japan, North America, Europe and Australia on various video game consoles, personal computers (PC) and mobile phones, with additional remakes and re-releases. The first console title, "Castlevania", was released on the Famicom Disk System in 1986 and then in North America in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). A 2D sidescrolling action game where the player progresses through six stages, many principal features of the "Castlevania" series originated with it. It has since been ported to many platforms, such as the NES Classic Edition. Also released in 1986 was "Vampire Killer" for the MSX home computer, which played significantly different from the original "Castlevania", where players now had to search for the exit before they could proceed to the next stage. Following that year, in 1987, "" further departed from the standard platforming genre of the first "Castlevania" for a game more similar to the nonlinear gameplay of "Metroid", with several RPG elements such as a world map which the player is free to explore and revisit. "Castlevania"'s first arcade game, "Haunted Castle" (1988), returned to the linear platforming gameplay of the original. This continued with the first handheld Game Boy entry, "" and the NES sequel, "", both released in 1989. "Dracula's Curse" added new features to the original gameplay, including alternate stages and multiple playable characters. "The Adventure" later saw a GameBoy sequel, "", in 1992 and also a developed by M2 for the WiiWare service in 2009.