The CRPG Addict

I have this book. Can absolutely recommend it.

Somewhat. He does note when what's offered is significantly above or below the status quo of the year he's working through. I think what he trys to do is make sure it's viewed in the context of how it was originally received and played.

Sometimes things get points or credit for originality or doing something well or first or before common, but also some titles will get criticized for omitting something to it's detriment which was pretty standard by that time.

Also worth checking out:

Jason Dyer's blog, https://bluerenga.blog/, where he's playing through all adventure games. So far he's made it to 1982.

Jeremy Parish's youtube channel, where he's going through the game libraries of the post-1984 consoles in chronological order.

I'm waiting for the 95~99 years, guess it's going to take a while...

Thanks for the link. The author has articles about "game theory" such as monster scaling, randomness, or game economy. It is not as advanced as what an actual game designer would write, but it's definitely food for thoughts.

You may be interested in Tobold's MMORPG blog, which has all sorts of interesting insights and has been going since 2003

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/

So the history is actually really well described in crpgaddicts blog. First there was wizardry (basically all rpgs both in the us and japan are descendents of wizardry, some with the mixture of ultima). bard's tale is a wizardry clone (its wizardry in a city). Dungeon master is an attempt to make a better wizardry, taking advantage of the mouse and the amiga's graphics (its basically wizardry in real time). EotB is a dungeon master clone.

Angband is a fork of Moria. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Angband_(game)

I think about this a fair amount. Either games these days are completely different or I am; now that I've played streamlined modern games I don't have the time or patience to deal with games that are incredibly fiddly or have rough edges all over the place.

I have been trying Kerbal Space Program recently for the first time. I put it off many times because I opened it up and looked at the controls settings and saw ~100 key bindings to remember (depending on the build/launch/orbital situation) and bounced right off. Now that I'm in the career mode I see that the bindings that you actually have to know get introduced slowly, but if the game came out today I think it would benefit from more polish and hiding the complexity before you're required to think about it.