Last month, Amazon Prime’s Secret Level adapted fifteen video games to short, animated films. Some of these could fairly be described as retro video games, though the bulk of them dated to the twenty-first century. But one of the odder ones of the full set, in this regard, was the very first episode. A Dungeons and Dragons story. This begs an interesting question. Is Dungeons and Dragons a retro video game?
In the sense that Dungeons and Dragons is not, by necessity, played by video, well no, of course not. But the tabletop game occupies a curious place in gaming history. First published in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons coexisted with the earliest video games. There wasn’t any particular reason why Dungeons and Dragons had to show up so late in gaming history, and just to be clear, Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t even the first game to be played with dice and the like, just the earliest well-known one.
What did Dungeons and Dragons have that other tabletop games didn’t? Well, the imagery for one thing. Dungeons and Dragons is a game that implicitly features both dungeons and dragons in prominent roles, though only the latter appears in the Secret Level adaptation. But on the more explicit level, Dungeons and Dragons allows for the crafting of individual stories. This distinguished it from its larger scale war game predecessors, which were more about the exact mechanics of combat than asking why the characters were even fighting each other at all.
These mechanics, incidentally, are what makes video games what they are. Retro games, due to their simplicity, hide most of the math necessary to play those games. But the math isn’t especially complicated. It’s just tedious to do again and again for every individual encounter. Even the simple computers of the eighties could handle such calculations with no real trouble though.
Dungeons and Dragons, and the subcultures behind, it still persists in tabletop form. But the brand has had a long history in video games for pretty much all these reasons. It actually means something to describe a game, tabletop or video, as being Dungeons and Dragons influenced, even though most of the characters and worldbuilding in such games tend to be recognized as generic, Tolkien-inspired ideas outside of that context. Amusingly enough, the Dungeons and Dragons episode of Secret Level contains nothing that could be said to require a stamp of approval from Wizards of the Coast.
I might have missed the name of a specific dragon somewhere. And maybe the guy on the bridge was using counterspells…? Yeah, I don’t really know. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. Because to whatever extent that Dungeons and Dragons can be called a retro video game, it’s mainly because the whole franchise serves as an easily identifiable brand. Stern’s even coming out with a Dungeons and Dragons pinball table soon. Really, if we’re going to call pinball tables a form of old school retro video gaming, Dungeons and Dragons isn’t really that big a leap.
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