[woman] I have always liked the idea of adventure.
Hiking...
exploring...
I just have this really deep curiosity.
It just doesn't seem to quit.
My imagination was always taking me to all these places.
I would dream about it, and I'd make up worlds.
With the games I designed,
the whole idea is to make you feel like you're there,
that you could explore.
I just wanted to be swept away.
[upbeat electronic music playing]
[man] I met Roberta when we were in high school.
I was very interested in girls at the time.
And I liked her.
It was kind of love at first sight.
We got married four days after I turned 18...
and have been together ever since.
[Roberta] We are very different. Ken is more serious.
He's a little bit more methodical.
[Ken] When there's an adventure to be had, Roberta hears about it.
Then all of a sudden, that's something we just have to do.
[narrator] This is Roberta Williams.
And starting in the late '70s,
she and her husband Ken
would take video games into a new dimension.
[Roberta] He is Mr. Computer.
When we first went out, he had just enrolled in a computer science class.
So that year, a lot of our dates were in computer rooms.
That gave me my introduction into computers.
[narrator] In the early 1970s, computers weren't gaming machines.
They ran calculations, contained databases...
Not exactly pillow talk material.
Unless you're Ken and Roberta.
[Ken] One day when I brought home a computer,
she took an interest in a game that I was playing
and all of a sudden a whole different Roberta emerged.
[Roberta] The game that was on it was called Colossal Cave
which was the beginnings of the adventure games
where you are actively involved with the story.
[narrator] Colossal Cave Adventure was written by a computer programmer
named Will Crowther in 1976,
well before there was such a thing as computer graphics.
And for most, a mouse was still just a rodent.
So the game was played through words.
The player typed in basic commands and the screen would respond back.
It was a new genre of gaming: the text adventure.
It was always, "What do you want to do?" Okay, you're in a clearing,
and the well, it's really deep
but you see a rope going down into the well.
So you would go, "Get rope."
And then as you're standing there, suddenly up on the text it would say,
"You see a little dwarf coming your direction."
[narrator] The game offered something that was truly unique at the time: choice.
But if you didn't do anything, he could bring out an arrow
and shoot you dead and you're dead. That's it, end of story.
You have to start all over again.
[narrator] And that choice was just the thing for an adventurous spirit.
I would go to bed and think about it.
How am I going to get past this dragon?
'Cause there's a cavern behind this dragon
and I must go there.
How do I get past the dragon?
I got very taken with this game.
To the point was that's all I was doing.
And, in about a month...
I finished it.
And I remember thinking, "You know what? I think I can do this.
I think I can write a game. I really want to write a game.
I'm going to write a game."
[narrator] It took a novice like Roberta to ask the big questions:
Could games be more than blasting aliens out of the sky
and an endless back-and-forth of a pong ball?
Could they invite players into new worlds to tell an interactive story?
It would take some true storytellers
with a taste for the theatrical, shall we say,
to figure it out.
Ah, there you are. Welcome to Britannia Manor.
You're probably wondering who I am.
Would you like to hear a few tales?
[chuckles] Very good.
Well, it all began with a pair of polyhedral dice.
As you open the door, you see a large darkened room
with a vast iron chest sitting right in the middle.
What do you do?
[narrator] This is Richard Garriott.
I lead the party in and I open the chest.
[narrator] This is also Richard Garriott.
This is him again.
And one more time.
As you can see, Richard likes to wear many different hats... literally.
He's a deep-sea diver who has visited the Titanic...
an explorer of the Amazon...
and he's even been to space.
He's also an iconic game developer and something called a dungeon master.
As you open the chest,
a bounty of treasures pour out around you onto the floor.
[narrator] What you're watching right now is a game of Dungeons & Dragons,
a board game that took basements by storm in the mid-70s
and inspired a generation of future game designers.
It's exactly how computer games like Colossal Cave Adventure were conceived.
Not in a computer, but on a table top.
The four doors around the room open and in stream masses of goblins.
You have a free form dialogue between a game master,
who is describing what you might see in a fantasy setting,
and the players, who have decision-making skills,
react to the story that is being told.
[narrator] The game is complicated.
There are rule books hundreds of pages long,
crazy-looking dice, and the same game can last for years.
What's important to know is that it's a role-playing game.
And one that became quite popular.
It began as a cult phenomenon. Then it caught on.
Now a new game is sweeping the country.
[narrator] While herds of nerds adored the game...
[man] But there's nothing there or anything?
[narrator] ...vanquishing hell spawn and conjuring black magic...
yeah, that had parents freaking out.
[reporter] Dungeons & Dragons has been called
the most effective introduction to the occult in the history of man.
[man] I do not think that many parents are aware of what's inside the game.
I mean, the gruesomeness of this game and the occult link to it…
[narrator] And then Hollywood tried to cash in on the controversy
with a TV movie about an eerily similar game...
Mazes and Monsters is a far-out game...
swords, poison, spells.
...starring future Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks.
JJ, what am I doing here?
[narrator] To be clear, Dungeons & Dragons was never about satanic worship.
It was about storytelling.
And, at the time, a 16-year-old Richard
was eager to combine that love of storytelling
with a new piece of technology.
It was the forerunner of what would become the modern computer
and it was called the teletype.
There was no video display.
It was a spool of paper where you could continue to print
the output from whatever my interaction might be.
Teletypes were used for boring stuff like data processing,
but some people were trying to make games with them
and Richard wanted to give it a shot.
[Richard] The high school I attended actually had two teletypes
and there was no class in the entire school that used it.
No teacher that knew how to use it.
So I convinced the school to let me have that classroom to myself
for one full period every day.
The number of options you had were quite limited.
Asterisks for walls, spaces for corridors, dollar signs for treasure,
the capital letter A for a giant ant.
You could move north or south or east or west or maybe pick up that treasure.
Uh, but that was about it.
Every time you would make a move, you'd have to wait ten seconds
to see how the monsters had moved and where you had moved inside the space.
But it worked. The computer could do this work.
It could actually create an experience that, instead of being the game master,
I could actually be a participant in, myself.
I began to sit down and go, like,
"Well, I'm going to write a fantasy game like I'm enjoying playing."
I would create these notebooks of each game as I was writing it.
[narrator] It was a great idea,
but come on, is it really that fun beating up the letter A?
If any computer was going to be a serious gaming machine
for high adventure and fantasy,
then it needed something special that no one had figured out…
yet.
[Roberta] I had no idea how to start to write a game.
But I think I need some big pieces of paper.
And I remember sitting there, pen in hand.
I had never done this before.
So what am I writing?
What is this? What am I doing?
And the first thought that came to my head was,
"What games have I played?"
I came up with the game of Clue.
But it has to be a story, too.
It can't just be just a board game.
I sort of started developing the idea of creating this world to explore
with a flow chart.
Things to do, things to run into.
Characters that come along, and some are good, some are bad.
You have to open up the world so you could feel like you're there.
The way you do that is to give people the decisions
of where they can go.
I was drawing it,
and building it, little by little,
and I could see it develop, and I could add more...
obstacles,
secret passages,
trapdoors, and murders.
When I had written my game,
and it was on this big piece of paper
and I have no place else to go,
because I can't program this.
It's a design document.
I need a programmer.
I need Ken.
Now, meantime, while I'm doing this,
Ken had the idea that he would start this company.
I wanted to build a company that would be kind of a, um,
Microsoft style of background and was hard at work on that.
So, I did a little scheme.
I made reservations for him and I to go to dinner.
Ken always loves to go out to eat.
And he was pleasantly surprised.
And I was in high, high salesman mode.
[Ken] She was talking loudly and people at other tables
were looking at us like we were crazy.
[Roberta] First he was kind of like...
[Ken] 'Cause she was talking about murder
and who was going to die and how they were going to die.
It was just kind of a weird conversation.
[Roberta] Finally, he said,
"Everybody else has already done text interactive stories
or adventure games.
You know what we need to do?"
And I said, "What?"
"We need to go beyond that.
We need to add graphics to it."
And I was like... [gasps]
..."Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
He's gonna do it. He's gonna do it"
[narrator] There was just one problem.
What Ken proposed had never been done.
[Ken] I love a good technical challenge,
and since computers were new, everything was new and cool.
[narrator] Games back then came on a floppy disk,
the USB drives of their time.
But they only had about 360K of storage.
That's just a few seconds of a streaming song.
Forget about pictures.
These days it would be easy.
I mean, it's-- But it was a different world then.
So rather than just digitizing the pictures,
I had the idea of using the end points of lines as graphics.
That allowed me to fit all the pictures,
the whole game, on one floppy.
Mystery House was the very, very first computer game that had graphics.
It was a huge leap technologically.
[narrator] The images were simple... straightforward,
nothing fancy.
But to see this on a personal computer was a revelation.
This is the beginning of something big.
[narrator] Up until Mystery House was released,
most gamers got their fix at the arcades
or in front of an Atari.
Now, a new player had entered the industry.
My Apple is my manager.
[announcer] There are more people in more places
doing more things with Apples
than with any other personal computer in the world.
[narrator] A machine once relegated to word processing and simple spreadsheets
suddenly became a portal into a whole new magical realm.
The Apple II would go on to sell over five million units around the world
and set the stage for a new term...
[announcer] The most personal computer.
[narrator] ...the home computer.
[Richard] The Apple II ran a lot faster.
It had a real time video display. There were huge advantages to it.
Immediately I realized instead of just doing a top-down map
like on the teletype,
I could do, in theory, a perspective view into the world.
I actually cleared out the closet of my bedroom,
because I wanted to have a dark, 24-hour-a-day place to sit there
in front of my glowing monitor.
Day and night, continuing to evolve, step-by-step, this game.
[narrator] When it was finally done, Richard named the game Akalabeth
and earned $150,000 in royalties.
Not bad for six weeks of work in high school.
But he still wasn't satisfied.
Akalabeth was a widget, a toy, a piece of self expression
and an exploration.
It was just, what can I do? What is possible?
And Ultima was the first time I sat back and tried to craft
an entire role-playing experience on a computer.
[narrator] Let's pause there for a second and dive into some gaming lingo.
Role playing.
Here to explain role playing games, RPGs for short,
is renowned developer Becky Heineman.
Role playing games are very attractive
because it allows you to play a character of your own creation.
The biggest appeal to this game is that it doesn't create characters for you.
You create the characters.
You play as somebody you would aspire to be, good or bad,
but you can't become in real life.
[narrator] Before RPGs, most popular games followed a formula.
Players control a ship in space, blowing up asteroids.
A ship in space, blowing up space invaders.
No story arc. No exploration.
Just shoot stuff and make it go boom.
But Richard wanted to do something different.
Enter his new game, Ultima,
which was more than just mindless explosions.
[Richard] Some of the ways that Ultima was quite unique back in the 1980s
was that you would start through creating a character.
Your character would have attributes, like strength and dexterity and stamina.
Whatever it might be.
It had characters and story.
It had places where, once you had gone out on a battle and fought,
that you could return to a city or a town, where you could replenish your supplies,
rest up, heal up, those sorts of things.
And so I sort of saw it as a world,
a living, breathing fantasy universe to play as a player.
[narrator] In an industry that had always assigned players a character to play,
a game like Ultima allowed you to build one.
It created an open world
where you could then venture forth on epic quests
and equip different weapons and armor to aid you on your adventure.
[Richard] With Ultima...
in a very real way, you know, I was finally beginning to flex
a little bit of those game master roots.
You're now being involved in a narrative
where I have laid out the fundamentals of the narrative,
but a lot of the details are filled in by you, the player.
[narrator] To be brutally honest, the game hasn't aged gracefully.
But without this...
you wouldn't have these...
[dramatic music playing]
In a short period of time, creators like Richard and Roberta
had taken computer games from simple text on screen
to crude graphics to character creation.
The genre was evolving, trying to perfect itself
within the limits of technology, and building upon each innovation.
And the next big breakthrough would be found in Japan.
Not at a keyboard...
but at the tip of a paintbrush.
[Amano in Japanese] I'm always imagining things.
I feel like I'm always deep in imagination.
I feel like I'm in that realm,
not in reality.
[narrator in English] Yoshitaka Amano is an artist known for his unique characters.
Early in his career,
he brought them to life in popular anime series
and illustrated manga.
But his style evolved past the cutesy, wide-eyed anime look
and into something otherworldly.
[Amano in Japanese] I thought it would be interesting to draw a fantasy world.
I think it's better to create new characters
based entirely on your own imagination.
There's really no end once you get started.
I think of each character as its own color.
I'll add things when a picture needs a little extra panache.
I'd draw an extra little animal.
You want their defining features to stand out.
The next step is to breathe life into them, so to speak.
[narrator in English] In 1987, Amano would be challenged with an entirely new medium:
video games.
[Amano in Japanese] People didn't really understand what video games entailed.
It had a niche, outsider vibe.
[narrator in English] At the time, the process of designing games
wasn't exactly seen as high art.
But a new project in development piqued Amano's interest.
[Amano in Japanese] Final Fantasy was the first video game I worked on.
It's an imaginary world,
so someone has to create visuals based on their imagination.
[narrator in English] The company behind Final Fantasy
wanted to make an RPG inspired by Ultima,
but they needed an artist's touch to make it stand out.
In stepped Amano.
[Amano in Japanese] And my job was to create characters.
We wanted to create an entirely new world...
with characters that don't exist in the real world.
[narrator in English] There were heroes and monsters,
dark evils and faraway lands
promising adventure and wonder,
but it had to be shrunk down to size.
[Amano in Japanese] My job ends once I've drawn the character on paper.
Then I pass the baton off to someone else.
Someone else drops the characters into the game.
[narrator in English] Amano's fantastical drawings ended up looking like...
this.
[Amano in Japanese] Even if they have short, stubby proportions...
I thought they turned out cute.
Anything becomes cute like this.
[narrator in English] In the beginning, that was okay.
Players could look at a stubby character and, using their imagination,
remember Amano's masterpieces.
These creatures and characters are what gave the original Final Fantasy
its incredible longevity.
Now, there are dozens of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs of the game.
[Amano in Japanese] In the case of a game like Final Fantasy...
the characters evolve with each new game released.
They take on a life of their own.
[narrator in English] They may take on a life of their own, but with each version
of the game, the characters look more and more like Amano's originals.
It was becoming easier to lose yourself in the world of the game.
To feel sympathy for a character when things went wrong,
and suspense and fear when facing down a challenging final boss.
Or, in some cases,
the exhilaration of uncovering some lost treasure.
[man] I've always liked searching things.
When I was a kid I would go to cemeteries,
I would go to old abandoned buildings and find treasure.
[narrator] Like a character from an RPG, Ryan Best is on a mission.
But his quest is unfolding in the real world.
It started 40 years ago, when he taught himself to code
and created a computer role playing game.
But the game has since disappeared.
[Ryan] I've searched all of my hard drives from every source that I knew.
The game's lost to history at this point and...
I'm afraid it's never to be seen again.
[narrator] Ryan's game wasn't a commercial success.
In fact, most people probably have never heard of it,
much less played it.
But for those who did, the RPG was an outlet
both for Ryan and those in his community.
[Ryan] I moved to San Francisco probably in 1988,
and I wanted to get more close to the gay and lesbian center
of San Francisco, which was really big.
You'd see guys walking down the street holding hands
and women doing the same.
It was freeing.
But this was during the AIDS crisis.
And so gay men stared dying.
[narrator] It was the late 1980s
and Ryan watched helplessly
as the US government failed to act on the crisis.
I think that abstinence has been lacking in much of the education.
[narrator] And some blamed the victims.
The right wing conservatives really latched onto this
and said that it was God's retribution for being gay.
At the time, we had all of these preachers going on TV
filled with hatred towards the gay and lesbian community.
The gay people are giving their blood knowing that it is contaminating people
and, to me, that is irresponsible and immoral.
Pat Buchanan, he was like enemy number one of the gay and lesbian community,
just for all of the hatred he was spewing.
The homosexuals have declared war on human nature,
or declared war on human nature, nature's exacting an awful retribution.
And if there's any good that came out of all this hatred, is...
it helped the rest of the community come together and fight.
[chanting]
[Ryan] We had groups protesting.
I really thought of trying to do something else
to really fulfill me internally.
I decided I'm going to do a gay and lesbian role playing spoof.
[narrator] For Ryan, coding was his form of protest.
He called the game GayBlade.
And wow.
[Ryan] The monsters in the dungeon were things like preachers
with bags of money,
rednecks,
giant crabs.
Basically the people and the creatures that in my mind had picked on me.
'Cause yes, it's true. I had crabs once in high school. [chuckles]
So crabs went into the game.
But giant ones.
Weapons became press on nails.
Until the final scene,
where it's really difficult to win against...
Pat Buchanan.
It was hilarious. It was wacky and funny.
And when I was finished with the game, it was like therapy for me.
A lot of the anger that I'd carried with me for years was gone.
And it was very freeing.
[narrator] GayBlade was a big, fabulous snub to the man,
a catharsis.
It cloaked social issues and morality in the disguise of a fantasy game.
RPGs were allowing players to be their most altruistic self,
but they also allowed inner demons to escape.
[Richard] While I was creating these games,
I assumed and planned that you are the great hero,
who is here to save the world from the great evil.
But when I would watch
what people would be doing to actually play the game,
they were anything but heroic.
The surest path through all the games was not to be the virtuous person,
but was rather to steal from all the shops,
kill all the characters,
and basically be morally ambiguous at best
to defeat the big, evil bad guy.
But along the way, you were actually being a pretty bad guy yourself.
And that to me was a real shock.
I was somewhat horrified
that I was creating this little band of rogues
that were not living the aspirational virtuous fantasy
I had imagined they were playing.
And so I set out to fix that.
Ultima IV was a radical departure in how I rethought gaming,
frankly from the ground up.
I wanted to write this game that says, you know,
you have to be a person of virtue or you couldn't win the game.
Not only do you have to be a person of virtue,
it's important that it's you, not your alter ego.
If I'm going to judge you harshly,
based upon you deciding to steal from that shop,
I want you to feel like you personally have stolen from that shop.
[narrator] What Richard is talking about is giving the player a conscience
in the game.
And that moral inspiration came from an unlikely place.
No, not there.
No, not there either.
Ah, yes, here.
-[woman] Shh! -[narrator] Oh!
[whispers] Here, in the library.
[Richard] In my research, I had come across this interesting word.
And that word was "avatar."
If you look up in the encyclopedia the word "avatar,"
it's the incarnation on Earth of a deity in human form.
And I thought, "Oh, this is perfect."
It transports you, the perhaps skinny little computer nerd from Earth,
who arrive in my magical world of Britannia,
now as the buff adventurer that you might aspire to be.
But it's still you. This is your avatar.
And that way, you are now responsible for the actions
and deeds of your character.
[narrator] With Ultima IV, Quest of the Avatar,
Richard had discovered a way
for players to bring their sense of right and wrong from the real world
into the game world.
If you steal from a shop,
you're not going to be able to buy that demon slayer sword
that will be so important later on.
Kill indiscriminately?
Nobody will help you on your quest, and you won't be able to beat the game.
While primitive, the code of conduct the game laid out
would have a huge impact on today's open world games.
In titles like Pillars of Eternity and Skyrim,
the behavior you bring to the game impacts how the experience unfolds.
I really think this was me trying to say, "How can I make Ultima IV important?"
Not just a place to happily waste some time,
but how can I actually make something that is relevant to the individual player?
[Ryan] GayBlade was the first role playing game
that's focused on the LGBTQ community.
The mainstream computer games,
if they have any gay and lesbian characters,
they are always playing a minor part.
It kind of represents how we've all been marginalized.
Almost like we're an afterthought.
I was getting people writing me notes.
In a time of great unhappiness,
they got a little bit of relief, humor and chuckles from playing GayBlade.
And it was amazing how many people
wanted to play it...
...and wanted more.
[narrator] And then, the craziest thing never happened.
Pat Buchanan heard about GayBlade,
got into his presidential tour bus,
drove across country to San Francisco,
stopped in the Castro to buy some souvenirs,
then showed up at Ryan's door.
and stole the game, telling Ryan to “pray the gay away” as he left.
But funnily enough, the game made Pat Buchanan realize that he was gay!
And now he's living in Paris with his partner, François,
and their two Bichons, Coco and Chanel.
Actually, that didn't happen at all.
The truth of how Ryan lost the game is far less colorful.
[Ryan] I lost all my copies of GayBlade in a move from Honolulu to San Francisco.
A shipping company never showed up to pick up the items at my apartment
that I was moving out of,
and I was not going to be able to fly back to Honolulu.
Everything, my master copies, my installation, my source code,
it was all gone.
So I've been searching for it ever since the shipping incident,
and that was 15 years ago.
If it's out there, it would be momentous.
It would be so important and so meaningful to me.
But I recently got some help in my search.
Out of the blue, a woman contacted me
and she was building an archive of computer games
that featured gay and lesbian characters.
And she had sent out the word to all of these different forums.
And it's only been four to six months, but I've noticed websites, Twitter,
different news groups all trying to find GayBlade.
Word began to spread on social media
and a committed online community formed on a joint mission:
the search to find Ryan's lost game.
It blew me away
to have all of these people sending feelers out.
I really feel that if it's out there,
it's going to be found.
[narrator] This outpouring of support shows the power that RPGs have on players
and how far the games have come
from asterisks as walls,
to a fully connected community.
[Richard] I think that role playing games play an incredibly positive role
in society.
It's people from all over the world
who know each other through their avatars
and now have found reason to seek each other out in the real world
and deepen those personal bonds.
[narrator] But before we finish, there's one last detail to wrap up.
A whole new genre and way to play games had emerged.
Choice in what you did, and how you did it,
could actually have consequence.
And, as technology improved,
so did the complexity of the stories they told.
But back on home consoles, a war was brewing.
And a company that had struggled to take on an industry behemoth
started to develop their own secret weapon,
one that was too fast for the naked eye.
[man] Sega!