RPG QUEST

IT’S ONE THING TO ATTEMPT TO SET OUT TO PLAY EVERY SINGLE GAME IN AN ENTIRE GENRE. BUT TO FINISH EACH ONE IN THE ORDER THEY WERE RELEASED AND THEN TO BLOG DETAILED ACCOUNTS OF THEM IS A QUEST BEYOND. THAT’S WHAT CHESTER BOLINGBROKE, AUTHOR OF CRPG ADDICT, SET OUT TO DO IN FEBRUARY 15, 2010, WHEN HE WROTE THE BLOG’S FIRST POST. OVER TEN YEARS LATER, HE’S STILL GOING.

- Alex Wiltshire

So far, Chester has ventured through the very first mainframe-based computer role-playing games, charted the rise of Ultima, and battled through generations of computers. He’s faced adversity, balancing the thousands of hours his adventure demands against the needs of his personal life. He’s worked on it from his home in Maine, grappling with emulators and translations, and from hotels across the US while travelling for his job. He gave up on the whole endeavour once. But he’s just as active now as he was when he started, and that’s despite knowing that the whole thing is impossible.

It’s already taken him over two years to play through the games of 1992, from Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (“has a way of feeding the player overwrought prose”) to Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (“groundbreaking, innovative, well-produced, addictive, enormously fun to play – and at the same time a bit disappointing in what they did and didn’t do with the story”). And also the games you won’t remember, from Bandor: The Search for the Storm Giant King (“I binged a decent chunk of TV series episodes while playing the game because I needed some other source of entertainment”) to Ultizurk II: The Shadow Master (“extremely basic”).