5 Genre-Defining 1980s RPGs No One Talks About

If you’re a fan of role-playing games, the 1980s are a key decade. That’s because developers of the era created many of the tropes that make the genre so popular. Obviously, future generations have expanded on those ideas in important ways, but the ’80s set the foundation as developers looked to translate tabletop RPGs to the digital world. High-profile series like Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Wizardry understandably get most of the love from modern fans, but there are a handful of important games that deserve recognition. Here are five 1980s RPGs that we should talk about more.

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5) Pool of Radiance

Developer Strategic Simulations, Inc. was one of the most well-known RPG creators of the ’80s, thanks in large part to its adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons. Pool of Radiance was the first game in the legendary “Gold Box” series, which means it pioneered the developers’ famous game engine that adapted the rules from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. While it has its flaws, particularly the rough load times, Pool of Radiance was a must-play game for RPG fans in the late ’80s.

However, it’s largely been overshadowed in the years since. The Gold Box series continued to be a major success for SSI, peaking with Neverwinter Nights in 1991, which turned the game engine into an early MMO that ran from ’91 to 1997. There have also been several other great Dungeons & Dragons games over the last several decades, taking some of the shine off of Pool of Radiance. Still, this one set the table for the rest of the series, and we should recognize how well it translated Advanced D&D to the digital world.

4) Dungeon Master

Dungeon Master was an early pioneer in first-person dungeon crawling. Using sounds to let a player know when an enemy was approaching, the developers at FTL Games pushed the genre past traditional turn-based combat toward real-time fighting. It’s not exactly real-time, instead drifting closer to Active Time Battles seen in the Final Fantasy series. Regardless, it was an important step for PC RPGs.

Sure, it might look a little dated by modern standards, but Dungeon Master was visually impressive for the time. It also let you level up by using skills instead of relying on experience points like most other games of the era. Throw in a novel spell crafting system that had you combining elements to create new spells, and you have one of the more ambitious RPGs of the late ’80s. Dungeon Master is a foundational game for series like The Elder Scrolls, but you rarely hear about it these days.

3) Sid Meier’s Pirates

There have been quite a few remakes and remasters of Pirates over the years, so it might’ve come across your desk at some point. It also doesn’t hurt that it has the “Sid Meier” name, which is always a bonus considering he’s the name behind Civilization. That said, Pirates doesn’t usually get the love it deserves.

After all, this 1987 classic was an early version of an open-world RPG. You jumped into the shoes of a man living and working in the Caribbean during the age of pirates, but could do almost anything you wanted. If you wanted to be a pirate and steal booty, that was an obvious option. Though if you wanted to go the other way and hunt pirates, you could do that too. For the time, it had a dizzying amount of options, letting you craft your own story. In fact, there’s not even a set ending. You just decide to retire after aging enough, and then the game tells you what happened in your life after sailing the seas.

2) Sweet Home

Capcom’s Sweet Home does get mentioned every time someone talks about the creation of the Resident Evil series, but that’s about it. Granted, being the game that inspired Resident Evil, one of the best series in the history of gaming, is far from a bad thing. Still, it should get more love as a video game, and not just that Capcom’s RE team loved it.

After all, it was an early innovator of survival horror, quick time events, inventory management, and even Metroidvania-esque exploration. It’s also a terrifying story, filled with moments that’ll leave you quivering in the corner. Unfortunately, it never left Japan officially, which does make it difficult to get your hands on Sweet Home. However, if you consider yourself a fan of horror and RPGs, this is a must-play game. It’s not just a foundational game for several series; it’s also just a great video game that still holds up.

1) Starflight

Starflight is sort of like Sid Meier’s Pirates in space. That’s obviously a bit reductive, but this is another game that lets players loose in a relatively open world. There’s no set path through the storyline, and the procedurally generated universe is wide open for exploration. If you want, you can spend almost all of your time in this sandbox world mining planets, fighting other ships, or just engaging in diplomacy with various aliens. It might be the closest the genre got to playing Star Trek during the ’80s.

The best part is that you can play through Starflight several times and will rarely see the same path. That’s because there are around 800 different planets to explore and several different alien races to meet. You can also recruit characters from five of those races to help crew your ship. Like the other games on this list, it’s been deeply influential, inspiring everything from Mass Effect to Dwarf Fortress. It’s never gotten an official remake, but is freely available, which has resulted in several fan remakes.