Rampant Games - Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away

Jay Barnson follows up on the recent Joystiq article about the transitioning of the CRPG market with Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away: The Heyday of the CRPG. Jay muses on the reasons CRPGs surged in the years leading up to 1995:

1. The AD&D License. The release of ‘official’ Dungeons & Dragons RPGs (besides some ancient handheld and Intellivision attempts) ignited the enthusiasm of hordes of dice-and-paper gamers who were not already major CRPG enthusiasts, and it had a spillover effect into other games.

2. Technology. PCs were upping the quality of the gaming experience, and technology was finally catching up with the vision. Monsters began to look like monsters, disk drives and on-board RAM were finally large enough to display decent images of monsters, and so forth. And lets not forget the impact of the more visceral experiences of Dungeon Master and Ultima Underworld, which were able to use more powerful modern machines to provide new twists on a familiar experience.