What does D&D have to do with an eccentric billionaire, a beloved series of Japanese novels, and the video games you love today? More than you'd think...
D&D and video games seem to go hand in hand--terms like hit points/health and AC help illustrate this, but even more elementary parts of video games come from D&D's influence. Things like Boss Fights and NPC allies/pets all have their origins in D&D's influence over the early days of video games. As we learned in our last article, looking at the early early days, when video games were illicitly programmed and shared over the mainframe computers of universities throughout the world, like something you'd expect to read in the background of a cyberpunk hero, D&D was a huge influence. Games like pedit5 and dnd took the ideas presented in D&D and adapted them into games where they took on a life of their own.
pedit5 laid out randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure in a fixed-map dungeon which players would tackle with a single character they created using many of the same statistics of D&D. This game had a great deal of influence on other games like dnd, which famously introduced many of the features we pretty much take for granted in video games today. If you've ever repeatedly died at the hands of Father Gascoigne, or permanently fused your hand into a claw trying to play Throu...
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