Everything in the archive on one continuous line, oldest first. Narrow it by period, platform, company,
region or category, or search for a word that appears anywhere in an entry.
Ultima and Wizardry arrived in the same year, each translating pen-and-paper role-playing into code in a different way, and together they fixed the conventions of the computer role-playing game.
Before these two, computer versions of tabletop adventuring were mostly campus curiosities. Afterward there was a commercial genre with recognizable parts: characters who improve, dungeons to map, equipment to manage and a world larger than one screen. Nearly every later role-playing game descends from one lineage or the other.
Apple opened a curated subscription library of games with no advertising and no in-app purchases, playable across its devices for a flat monthly fee. Developers gained an alternative to free-to-play economics.
Subscription became a credible funding route on phones, where free-to-play had been effectively the only viable model for a decade. It also gave designers permission to build finite, complete games for mobile devices again, without engineering hooks to keep players spending.
