![]() (SSI), Pool of Radiance was the first official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game. ![]() ![]() It was through one of them that, in the Fall of 1988, I was first laid eyes on Pool of Radiance. By this time, I was away at college and, while I didn't have a desktop computer of my own, many of my friends did so. This largely remained the state of affairs until the late 1980s, when advances in both computer technology and program design saw the rise of increasingly sophisticated offerings. Wizardry was a solid step in this direction, which is why I loved it, but it was still sufficiently primitive in the scope of its rules that it couldn't hold a candle to Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop roleplaying game. Another reason was that none of the computer or video games at the time made use of a rules system as complex as that of most pen-and-paper RPGs, which had a negative impact on their depth of play. There were many reasons why we felt this way, most of them related to the technical limitations of computers in the early to mid-1980s. That's why we greedily snapped up Wizardryand Telengardand Adventureand many more, all of which we enjoyed but none of which fulfilled our dreams of an electronic entertainment that truly brought the fun of a fantasy RPG to a console or desktop. By the time I first encountered roleplaying games, there were already serious efforts to combine these two hobbies – and my friends and I were very interested in seeing what they had to offer. My late childhood and early teen years coincided not just with the ascent of fantasy and science fiction in popular media but with the (likely related) ascents of RPGs and video/computer games.
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