Dungeons & Desktops

The folks over at Armchair Arcade have written up an article entitled "Dungeons & Desktops", in which they provide a history of RPGs over the past 20+ years. Several major titles are mentioned, including the Ultima series, the Might & Magic series, Baldur's Gate, and more. Check it out:
It is worth noting that no CRPGs or VRPGs would exist without Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) tabletop RPG (1974). It offered a social gameplay experience. One player was the Dungeon Master, responsible for creating maps, planning out scenarios, and acting out the parts of the various monsters and NPCs the players would encounter. The other players spent a long time generating player characters before starting their campaigns and combat was decided via dice-rolling and the cleverness of the players' tactics. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of dice-rolling necessary for most actions, not to mention the various statistics to keep track of, caused much of the gameplay to be bogged down in mathematical minutiae.