On a subsection of the Discovery Channel Canada website, there’s a new video segment on the 30th anniversary of D&D. The segment features WotC Special Projects Manager Ed Stark, and Brad King, author of Dungeons & Dreamers. Make no mistake, you won’t be surprised by the content; the video is definitely aimed toward the uninformed neophyte. There’s still some interesting discussion, though. The most evocative quote came from Mr King: “I think it’s fair to say, without Dungeons & Dragons there would be no videogame industry today.”
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I wonder what the Japanese would have to say about that?
I dunno if there would be no videogame industry today, but there likely would not have been one in the 80’s, as a lot of the original Wizardry game was lifted directly from D&D. Venerable games such as Nethack and Moria also borrowed from D&D.
D&D is something of a hack, nowadays, a shadow of its former glory. The Japanese innovations were not necessarily in the early days, because Atari focused on things such as Space Invaders, and Nintendo focused on similar arcade offerings.
I believe that if D&D hadn’t influenced the early game industry, someone else would have thought of it eventually.