Might and Magic VI - The CRPG Renaissance #2

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The Digital Antiquarian looks back at Might & Magic VI:

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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 2: Might and Magic VI

From the 1980s until well into the 1990s, the CRPG genre was typically dumped into the same broad bucket as the adventure game by the gaming press. Indeed, as late as the turn of the millennium, Computer Gaming World magazine had an "Adventure/RPG" department, complete with regular columnists whose beat encompassed both genres. Looking back, this lack of distinction might strike us as odd: CRPGs, which are to a greater or lesser extent simulations of an imaginary world with a considerable degree of emergent behavior, are far more procedurally intensive than traditional adventure games and provide a very different experience.

Back in the day, however, no one blinked an eye. For the one thing the genres did plainly have in common was sufficient to set them apart from all other sorts of games: their engagement with narrative. Whatever else they might happen to be, both an adventure game and a CRPG were a story that you engaged with much as you might a book - that is to say, you played through it once to completion, then set it aside. Contrast this with other kinds of games, which provided shorter-form experiences that you could repeat again and again.

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If we're looking for a poster child for the trend, it would be hard to find a better one than New World Computing, a studio and publisher that was located not that far from Interplay in Southern California. New World's equivalent of Brian Fargo was one Jon Van Caneghem, who built his company on the back of a CRPG franchise known as Might and Magic, producing five installments of same between 1986 and 1993. Might and Magic's commercial fortunes paralleled those of the genre writ large. Plotted on a grid, they would yield an almost perfectly symmetrical bell curve, rising to a peak with Might and Magic III in 1991 and then declining markedly again with the next two games.

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