[MUD-Dev] Re:)

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 07:02 PM 9/1/97 PST8PDT, Travis wrote:
>Hmm... could be, though I never heard about it.  Where are you getting
>your information from?  I was one of the people working with WotC on

Story aroud the industry is that frist release of Primal order had AD&D
conversion stats, later did not.  Thsi came up a numerb fo eyars ago when
we were tryign to fight TSR's closing down all fan ftp sites.  Its possible
its just a nasty rumor, but ist what i heard mutliple times.

>As I remember things, the overwhelming success of MTG killed the CAP
>products... they could make a lot more money by making new MTG cards
>than by making more CAP products, so the CAP line was killed (more like
>it was stillborn, but oh well...)  That's what I meant by them "not
>making enough of a profit" -- they did make a profit, but not nearly as
>much as WotC was able to make with the non-roleplaying MTG.

And yet with their profits MTG wnet  and bougth TSR.

One wodners why if yhis is the repvailign attitude.

IMo teh answer is opbvious and would argue against your opther logic. A
company that does nto deversify, that relies on one lien ro a clsoel
related lien of products to surtvive is asking to fail sooner or later.

>
>That's my point... RPGs aren't profitable enough for most designers of
>them to make a living doing them and nothing else.  Only a very few
>manage that.
>

On teh toher hand, and gettign to the issue at hand. NWN, an on line RPG
ahs eben one of the msot successful on line products of all time.
Persoanlyl i believe the roleplay market is far bigegr then the pen and
paper market., Pen and pepr required a fair bit of intelligence, onlien is
muche asier to get into and loosk liek less 'work" to your average
channel-surfing american.

And that was the poitn we were originalyl dicussing, wheterh roleplay as an
onlien product is a valid market.

FRankly though ild be just as happy if everyone agreed with you and Ola.
Woudl cut down MY competiton a great deal :)  Unfrotunately, the amrket
sure doesnt look liek it agrees with you right now. I knwo of at elasta
doizen proposed or ind evelopment on lien fantasy role play projects at the
moment...

>Checking back on things, the earliest firm date for an adventure game
>I've found is Zork in 1977... and it was based on earlier text adventure 

Zork was taken DIRECTLY from DUNGEON.  A main frame game.  I played it.
ADVENTURE was taken from the mainframe ADVENTURE, wjhich was done maybe a
year earlier.

I played DUNGEON on the UW-Madison Dec System 10, freshly improted from
MIT, in the summer of 76 or 77. Just before or just after my freshman year
in highschool.

>games.  I couldn't find anything more specific than "early 70's" for the 
>first text adventure games, so it looks like I was off a bit by putting 
>them in the 60's.  D&D, though, was first distributed in 1973, not 1977, 

Your right. I sometiems forget hwo old i am and miscounted.  Itw as inded
1973. I staretd playign around 1974 in 7th grade.
  

>If I remember right, "Colossal Cave Adventure" was the first Adventure-
>style game.  The "early 70's" reference I found was regarding it.

If by "Collosal Cave" you mean the cave with Flood Control Damn 37 or
whatever it was, that was DUNGEON. If yo umean the earlier game with the
sexy elf who asks you to drop a treasure, that was ADVENTURE, which indeed
was the first.

The two blur together in my mind a touch because I playe them one rigth
after the other.

>
>I say we call it a draw... I can't tell if D&D inspired the Adventure
>games or not, but the early ones definitely didn't have too much in
>common with D&D other than a fantasy setting.  

They had the msot improtant tthing in common-- role play.
The stats focus did not coem abotu tile Wizardry and IMO it really in teh
logn run hurt the development of compuetr based role play games by talking
the focus away form role play and onmto "game oriented playing."

>As for profitability, it's
>obvious that RPGs *can* be profitable... all I was trying to point out is
>that very few people get rich off of them.

Ah In THAT I agree.

When i get rich off of on line role play, Ill be in a very select crowd ;)

I think the origins of MUDs is a topic thats in keepign with the lsit and
has come up many times.,

Profitability of ANYTHING seems to be actually off topic for this list as
very few here are really inetrested in profityability of their projects.

JK
Jeff Kesselman
Snr. Game Integration Engineer
TEN -- The Total Entertainment Network -- www.ten.net

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