Written in 2020
When I asked about what's a role-playing game, my old friend Zargkhon immediately posted an image of a Dungeons & Dragons players handbook. And indeed, the term "role playing game" implies that someone has to play a role in a game.
Among the first games that were indeed called role playing games is the already mentioned "Dungeons & Dragons" which originated in some way in the wargame "chainmail", which itself is a game played on a table with smaller figurines.
Players in tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons are guided by an (almost) almighty game master and play their role as the designed characters just as they are told the story of their adventure and given their tasks by said master.
Since the late 1970s and 1980s, these games grew in popularity, and so were the first fantasy role playing games released for the still new medium of video and computer games. Ah yes, and speaking of fantasy, there are a lot of influences from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian universe in early games.
The first computer games that were inspired by those games were Aklabeth (a direct predecessor to Ultima) and Wizardry. Those games had turn based combat, a world in a fantasy setting to explore and dungeons presented in a three-dimensional first-person view.
So, the genre of the table top RPGs now had a digital offspring.
Photo of tabletop playing people (CC BY-SA by Sargoth, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
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