Your point? This modern tendency of saying/writing as little as possible can get so annoying at times. Does it have something to do with trying to seem clever?
You reversed the last two digits in your date. I started playing computer games sometime around 1979. My friend had a DEC PDP-10 or PDP-11 (not sure which) and we played Super Star Trek and Adventure on it. Soon after that, probably around 1980, the Atari 2600 was getting very popular and several friends ended up with one. So I played that tank battle game and that Adventure get the chalice game etc. A couple of years later I bought myself a 64k Atari 400 with disk drive. Unfortunately my father disliked computers and refused to even consider buying one. So I was lucky that I was able to save enough money to buy my Atari 400. It cost me around $300 IIRC. Compared to thousands for the alternatives. I always envied my friends who had an Apple II and badly wanted to buy either that or a TRS 80 Model III. They were so sexy looking. They were" real" computers unlike my Atari. I also wanted to program and the Atari support for that was not great. Both Apple and Tandy had these beautiful ads in magazines like Creative Computing that made me drool. Although I don't think they were quite as torturous as those Amiga ads in science magazines like Omni that I recall from around 1987 which seemed to present a whole lifestyle associated with owning one. My favorite games included Archon, Castle Wolfenstein, Crush, Crumble, and Chomp (I want to do a remake of that one), and Choplifter. I also played Lode Runner, Pole Position, and some kind of Frogger like game that I can't remember the name of. And of course Zork which I bought after reading a great review form Isaac Asimov in Creative Computing, and I had my first experience of the frustration/annoyance gameplay mechanic with Wizard and the Princess. I remember having to call some kind of hint line to get help with those annoying puzzles. I hated that game, but couldn't stop playing it. Sound familiar? I did play some early RPGs but mostly on friends computers. I don't think there were many titles available for the Atari 400/800. I remember them mostly being on the Apple. I was never able to play one particular graphic adventure game called Cranston Manor because it was also only available on the Apple. There was also some kind of text adventure on the TRS-80 which I loved, but couldn't play at home. I couldn't afford to buy a real computer until my Sophomore year in college when I spent $3300 I think on my Tristar 486-33 which I bought through Computer Shopper magazine. That was when I played Wolfenstein 3D so much that surely my grades must have suffered. And then Ultima Underworld and TES: Arena were released and I was in heaven.
This wall of text reminiscence about the early days of personal computer gaming has been your punishment for being cheeky.
that sullied the fertile ground of crpgs, how is it that 10 of the 13 games in your signature (I'm assuming these are your favourite rpgs) were made after it?
