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Comment by mikeklaas | Hacker News Reader

What? DnD was the dominant force in 90's computer rpgs (BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2/Planescape Torment), and continued into the aughts with NWN/KOTOR/KOTOR2. There are several candidates for greatest rpg of all time on that list.

Star Wars has had its share of filler games, but also produced many truly great games. X-Wing/Tie Fighter were huge, and Dark Forces/Jedi Knight were pretty important in the early fps days. I've already mentioned KOTOR.

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I guess that statement was a bit of a stretch, probably I could have worded slightly differently, but I'm not sure its too far from reality. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g... the only games which are up there are BG/BG2, NWN, and Star Wars Galaxies. Which is pitifully few for such previously dominant companies which had huge fan bases.... Also probably reflects that WoTC did a better job after buying the D&D trademarks (1997 - just before for 3/4 of these games) after TSR completely failed to capitalise for 15 years or so...

Lists like that are dominated by recent releases because of how rapidly the industry has expanded over the last 30 years.

This is true, but through the 80s and 90s (excluding the last few years discussed above) there were very few big games from these franchises either. Battletech had its most successful game in Mechwarrior 2, but this wasnt really huge. Star Wars fared a the best with a few reasonable hits - Tie Fighter, X wing vs., Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, but none of these were really anything approaching the scale of Warcraft 2. D&D released games all the time but few of them were better than mediocre (Eye of the Beholder was probably the biggest). Warhammer had nothing either.

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