RPG market's short death in the mid 90's

[Bester]

I'm only interested in the take of people who fulfill all 3 criteria:
- were there
- were at least teen agers
- were RPG players.

Please mention if you fulfill all 3, when you post.

There's a few takes on why the RPG market almost died. Let's list them:

1. The oversaturation of the market.
Between 1983 and 1998, a grand total of 44 D&D titles came out. And that's just D&D.

My question to you: Did you really feel like there were too many RPGs and you couldn't play them all, hence skipping many of them knowingly?

2. The lower quality of the games that were being churned out.

My question to you: Did you feel at the time that a lot of the RPGs were just mass produced for a quick cash grab?

3. The market simply stopped growing.

I don't have a question here. Other genres were finding new audiences, DOOM made random office people install it at work, while RPGs had the same audience they always had. And since it's a growth market, the RPG market offered no growth and as such hit the wall, which was a disappointment for a lot of the investors. I don't think any of you were into investing at the time, so I don't think it can be constructively discussed, but feel free to share what you think.

What I'm interested in, is how much each reason contributed to the death according to the old timers.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

never really understood the claim, there was basically one year without a bunch of releases('96)

1995: bunch of AD&D games, Exile, Anvil of Dawn
1996 - probably the weakest cRPG year of the 90s. Still had Daggerfall tho. Probably others I can't remember off the top of my head.
1997: Fallout, Diablo

 

[octavius]

I fulfill all three criteria, except was I really there?

I wasn't really conscious about the situation back then, but what I remember was that I never got tired of the Gold Box games, and that the next gen AD&D seemed rather boring to me, and being more of a casual back then I didn't give Dark Sun much of a chance.
So I didn't feel that the market was oversaturated with AD&D titles, or that they were mass produced for a quick cash grab, but rather that I didn't like the design direction of the new titles.

To me a concern was that I still had an Amiga, but the development of the PC was so quick that any machine I bought would either be very expensive, or obsolete within a month. So I ended up spending most of my gaming time in 94-95 with Play-by-Mail games instead.

When I eventually got a PC in 1996 I remember my gaming buddy and me playing Doom quite a bit, but not nearly exclusively. It was just one of many games we enjoyed. But I don't remember us going out and beating up little kids to vent our frustration for there not being any good new CRPGs on the market.
What I do remember was that one time I actually considered buying Final Fantasy 7. I guess that was the closest I ever got to losing my nerd.

 

[lukaszek]

does it count if at a time I was poor potato and one was playing what was available in the hood? From my memory there were only rpgs and fps in circulation. Can one judge quality when games where either in english(that I didnt know) or in weird potato russian translation?

 

[Trojan_generic]

I'm only interested in the take of people who fulfill all 3 criteria:
- were there
- were at least teen agers
- were RPG players.

Please mention if you fulfill all 3, when you post.

1. The oversaturation of the market.
Between 1983 and 1998, a grand total of 44 D&D titles came out. And that's just D&D.

My question to you: Did you really feel like there were too many RPGs and you couldn't play them all, hence skipping many of them knowingly?

2. The lower quality of the games that were being churned out.

My question to you: Did you feel at the time that a lot of the RPGs were just mass produced for a quick cash grab?

I fulfill all three. But RPG's never were the only genre I have been playing. It was the time when first C64 emulators came out. I could start playing games I had missed out on before.

On question 1: no, it was a bit of a lack of quality for all genres. Even Ultima 9 had not come out yet and people kind of were waiting for it (Ultima 8 came out in 1994, causing a lot of yelling and cursing).
Also, 3D graphics cards started coming out around 1996, and everything looked ugly, miserable and shitty from a traditional point of view.

On question 2: I was poor enough that I was following reviews and safely ignored all non-5-star games regardless of the genre. Note that there was not much on the internet, it was all magazine reviews then.
I have never thought that there have somehow been too many games on the market. If you compare with C64/Amiga/Atari ST era, you got hundreds of games coming out per year that were at least worth mentioning in a short review in those magazines.

I can only say that I wasn't following the market situation, but it surely wasn't a huge industry at the time. There was Activision that was large and bought companies, and EA had started to gain ground with their sports series and to buy companies. Westwood Studios were alive.
Disclaimer: Now that I think of it, I was such a poor student that I did not even have my own PC from 1993 until 1996, so these feelings are rather from the end half of the decade. I did follow the gaming press though and used school/university PC's for everything they were not meant for. Good times.

And no, Japanese RPG's I hadn't even heard of, as I never had or played the Nintendo-era consoles.

 

[Erebus]

I was a teen in the 90s, I'm a CRPG player since Champions of Krynn, and I remember playing extremely few CRPGs released between 1994 and 1997.


1/ The oversaturation

At the beginning of the 90s, there were indeed plenty of recent CRPGs. It was nice because you had plenty of choice. But it's true that I didn't have the time to play even half of those games. Also, as a young teenager, I simply didn't have the money to buy as many games as I'd like.

There were plenty of games released during that time period that I would only play fifteen years later (or more), including Pool of Radiance, Death Knights of Krynn, Might & Magic 3 and Dark Sun : Shattered Lands.


2/ The quality

It's hard to judge things like that when you're a teen and haven't yet played a high number of games. Some CRPGs were clearly better than others, but that's only normal. I didn't get the feeling that the average quality was diminishing.

Everything felt fine until 1994. At that point, the CRPGs that had been so abundant before just seemed to disappear into thin air. 1993 ? Darkside of Xeen, Betrayal at Krondor, Lands of Lore... 1994 ? Fucking nothing. Well, except for Strahd's Possession, I guess, but I didn't hear about it until much later. And Ultima 8, but it was so boring that I gave up on it almost immediately.

Later, I would play a bit of Diablo, Battlespire, Lands of Lore 2, but they weren't really CRPGs from my point of view, just action games with stats. And I wanted to be able to control an entire party, not just a single character. In short, they weren't the kind of games I wanted.

Betrayal in Antara was perhaps the only game released during that time period that I genuinely considered to be a CRPG. But though I rather liked it, it had some flaws and was very buggy.

(Obviously, I should have played Fallout. But I was a huge fan of heroic fantasy back then, and didn't find other settings nearly as interesting. I would only play the game a few years later.)



I don't know enough to offer an opinion about the RPG market in itself.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I was in my late twenties and already an avid (C)RPG player in the mid nineties and I never felt like there was a drought of CRPG back then. I remember when MM6 and BG came out, magazines going apeshit over the rebirth of CRPG but I never felt like they had died in the first place. They probably meant rebirth in the sense of sales increase, by also selling to casuals and not only to the niche CRPG players, who, as far as I can tell, were pretty satisfied with the market as it was. For me it's that rebirth and its success that actually killed good CRPG (so CRPG period). Success got consoles and their hordes of mongoloïd occasional CRPG players interested. They felt that the genre needed a facelift, we didn't. They won, we lost. End of story.

 

[mondblut]

I'm only interested in the take of people who fulfill all 3 criteria:
- were there
- were at least teen agers
- were RPG players.

Please mention if you fulfill all 3, when you post.

Yes, yes and yes.

1. The oversaturation of the market.
Between 1983 and 1998, a grand total of 44 D&D titles came out. And that's just D&D.

My question to you: Did you really feel like there were too many RPGs and you couldn't play them all, hence skipping many of them knowingly?

To an extent. The golden age of ~1989-1993 has produced several dozens of legendary RPGs to last a true conossieur for a number of years, that much is true. But for an average buyer, anything more than a year old is "too old" even today, and considering the technological leaps the gaming has made every year during the nineties, I can't imagine too many people have refused to buy Arena or Ultima 8 because they still had a backlog full of Wizardry 6 and early goldboxes to finish first.

There was absolutely no oversaturation of current titles from 1994 onwards.

2. The lower quality of the games that were being churned out.

My question to you: Did you feel at the time that a lot of the RPGs were just mass produced for a quick cash grab?

Again, during the golden age almost every RPG was truly special. When developers tried to latch on modern trends (i.e. post--Doom), quality did suffer - but so did quantity. Then again, those who thought turn-based is boring and passe probably found little to complain over when RT blobbers and other action-tainted RPGs became prevalent.

3. The market simply stopped growing.

I don't have a question here. Other genres were finding new audiences, DOOM made random office people install it at work, while RPGs had the same audience they always had. And since it's a growth market, the RPG market offered no growth and as such hit the wall, which was a disappointment for a lot of the investors. I don't think any of you were into investing at the time, so I don't think it can be constructively discussed, but feel free to share what you think.

That's true. Until diablow made RPGs moron-friendly, the niche has barely changed as compared to late 80s, while other genres had massive explosion of popularity as computers spread further among peasants.

 

[mondblut]

3d tomb raider 1 looked "looked ugly, miserable and shitty" back in 1996

Yes, it did. So did quake. After the pretty pixels of Duke Nukem I couldn't fathom how people hold their vomit when they see this abomination.

 

[mondblut]

I was in my late twenties and already an avid (C)RPG player in the mid nineties

the niche CRPG players, who, as far as I can tell, were pretty satisfied with the market as it was.

One of these statements is untrue.

 

[mondblut]

1995: bunch of AD&D games, Exile, Anvil of Dawn

By 1995 the "AD&D games" were piles of shit like Deathkeep. Anvil of Dawn was a third rate Dungeon Master clone, and there would be no need in amateur productions like Exile if the professional industry was healthy and satisfied the demand of RPG players.

 

[octavius]

In hindsight this period was a good one for indies, with games like Nahlakh and Aethra Chronicles.

 

[luj1]

never really understood the claim, there was basically one year without a bunch of releases('96)

1995: bunch of AD&D games, Exile, Anvil of Dawn
1996 - probably the weakest cRPG year of the 90s. Still had Daggerfall tho. Probably others I can't remember off the top of my head.
1997: Fallout, Diablo

96 still had Diablo and HoMM 3

Diablo revolutionized system design, HoMM still unmatched in TBS

 

[Infinitron]

We had some good discussions about this topic back in the day. This 2012 article by gamejourno Rowan Kaiser isn't the greatest but it's a decent enough starting point: https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-12-the-year-role-playing-games-broke.html

There's also a short segment about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_role-playing_video_games#Decline_(mid-1990s)

 

[octavius]

96 still had Diablo and HoMM 3

HoMM 2.

 

[Roguey]

never really understood the claim, there was basically one year without a bunch of releases('96)

1995: bunch of AD&D games, Exile, Anvil of Dawn
1996 - probably the weakest cRPG year of the 90s. Still had Daggerfall tho. Probably others I can't remember off the top of my head.
1997: Fallout, Diablo

You have to compare it to what came before.

1992: Ultima 7, Wizardry 7, Darklands, Ultima Underworld, Clouds of Xeen
1993: Betrayal at Krondor, Serpent Isle, Darkside of Xeen, Dark Sun Shattered Lands, Ultima Underworld 2
1994: Star Trail, TES I guess, a disappointing Ultima 8, a disappointing Wake of the Ravager
1995: Absolutely nothing noteworthy except Jeff Vogel's Exile which only became a hit because there was pretty much nothing to get excited about

The death is that they went from year after year of getting nearly half a dozen well-done iterative or innovative titles each year to zilch, disappointments, and Dungeon Master clones, with maybe one or two good games at best. Diablo, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate had only just started development when the string of disappointments started, and some journos just assumed that RPGs were going to be never-ending mediocrity-at-best forever.

 

[mondblut]

In hindsight this period was a good one for indies, with games like Nahlakh and Aethra Chronicles.

Yeah, the name for it is "free market"

 

[mondblut]

Diablo revolutionized system design

Another great revolutionary in the line of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

HoMM still unmatched in TBS

As far as 10 years old girl's first TBS go, yeah, unmatched it is.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I fulfill all three criteria, but my perspective is probably skewed. I grew up in a very rural area, and the only place to reliably buy games was a Software ETC. about an hour’s drive away. They rarely had anything on the shelves that hadn’t been released within six months, and as the 90s wore on they had an increasing focus on stocking console titles over PC Software. The PC titles they did stock tended to focus on FPS and RTS titles so it was rare that I could actually get my hands on major RPG releases; I remember trying to get my hands on Star Trail for years at that place, but it just never got shelf space. Turns out the most reliable way for me to get ahold of RPGs was to go to a Costco 5 hours away in my godparents’ city and browse through the big bargain bin of old software. It’s how I found Wiz7, MM6, and all the gold box games.

So, in response to the initial question, at least for me the local market consensus was that there just wasn’t a market for RPGs. Whether or not that’s true I’m not sure, but anecdotally I can say that I was the only one of my friend group who was interested in RPGs until BG hit shelves, and we all played a lot of games.

 

[Pink Eye]

Diablo revolutionized system design

My ass. All it did was spawn a whole shitty action subgenre. Of where you right click enemies then they implode into pinatas of loot. Such revolution!

 

[Comte]

Rpg's died in the mid 90s? Thats news to me you Zoomer retard. I lived through the 90s and I fondly remember playing rpgs throughout.

 

[Parsifarka]

Diablo revolutionized system design

My ass. All it did was spawn a whole shitty action subgenre. Of where you right click enemies then they implode into pinatas of loot. Such revolution!

Left click, unless you are casting a spell.
Also, Diablo did nothing wrong except spawning a brain damaging sequel that is the true father of the subhuman subgenre of the piñata loot loop.

 

[JarlFrank]

3d tomb raider 1 looked "looked ugly, miserable and shitty" back in 1996

Yes, it did. So did quake. After the pretty pixels of Duke Nukem I couldn't fathom how people hold their vomit when they see this abomination.

I love the looks of oldschool Tomb Raider and Quake. Beautiful games.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dungeon Master clones

The Diablo clones of their time.

Overdone, never changing the formula, always the same, often tedious.

 

[Stoned Ape]

Collected the Gold Box games for my C64 with 5 1/4" floppy drive. Even bought the crappy Hillsfar (which was only worth playing as you could glitch Curse of the Azure Bonds characters with Ion stones equipped to boost their attributes permanently). Think I must have played PoR after school and over the weekend for about a year.

When I upgraded to the Amiga, EotB 1 & 2 were both disappointing. Very pretty graphics for the time but nothing I enjoyed in the gameplay department. I never really liked blobber combat, so that soured my opinion of them. The lack of individual character movement really annoys me. (I preferred Dungeon Hack to them as that was a single character game which fits first person perspective better for me. Still wasn't as much fun as the Gold Box games, though).

Didn't enjoy Might and Magic or Wizardry either because of my anti-blobber party prejudice.

I was at college (UK highschool) when Dark Sun: Shattered Lands came out and it was awesome, I'd just bought my first PC (486dx50 with 4mb ram). I was playing a Darksun tabletop game at the time it was out and was reading the Prism Pentad, so I was pretty much the target audience for it. Wake of the Ravager was also good although I remember the graphics being ugly compared to Shattered Lands and it annoying me a bit because of that. Nothing wrong with the gameplay, that I can remember though.

Blade of Destiny was great fun, but I don't remember ever seeing Star Trail appear on the shelf of a game store so I didn't get to play it.

Apart from that, I also enjoyed Ultima 6, Worlds of Ultima, Ultima 7. Underworld 1 & 2 were pretty good, too. Arena was OK but I could never really get very far in it.

I always remember going into game stores looking for more RPGs to buy after Wake of the Ravager, but could never find one that fit my specific likes (full party control combat with tactical movement and isometric or top-down 3rd person perspective). Missed out on Jagged Alliance because I didn't really understand the sort of game it was or I'd have bought it. Didn't buy Fallout at the time as I read there was no full party control and that put me off. Shame, really both are great games I'd have enjoyed if I'd bought them on release instead of years later. Ended up playing a lot more PS1 console games around that time such as Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, and Final Fantasy Tactics as they were the only games I could find that supported party control and individual tactical movement (most of those I had to get on import and chip my console to play as they never had official UK releases).

There was some D&D games around that time that I didn't check out, like Menzoberranzan and Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession, because they looked too similar in design to EtoB.