Ultima

Sakaguchi has named Ultima and Wizardry as the games Final Fantasy was built from, and the split is usually described the same way: Wizardry supplied the first-person party combat, Ultima supplied the overworld. Concretely that means a top-down map walked between towns and dungeons, shops and inns, a party of classes chosen at the start, and a story told by talking to townspeople. The Japanese console RPG is these two American computer games rebuilt for a controller and a cartridge. Dragon Quest sits in the middle of this line and is not yet on the map, which a moderator may want to note.

The Zelda team has credited the American computer RPGs, Ultima among them, for the shape of the overworld: a continuous top-down land explored freely, with dungeons set into it and equipment that changes where you can reach. Miyamoto's own stated starting point was different and personal, a childhood memory of finding a cave, and Zelda drops the things that make Ultima an RPG. There are no experience points, no classes, no party and no statistics. Filed MEDIUM for exactly that reason: the debt is to the exploration structure rather than to the rules.

Richard Garriott played D&D as a schoolboy and wrote his first games to reproduce it on a computer. Akalabeth, the 1980 predecessor, is a dungeon crawl with hit points, armour classes and a bestiary of the game's monsters under other names. What Ultima carries over: levels and experience, class and race choice, hit dice, a top-down world with dungeons set into it, and a dungeon master's world simulated in code. MEDIUM rather than HIGH because the specific debt is to the tabletop hobby broadly, and Garriott's own account also credits Tolkien and his father's Apple II. The line from the table to the screen is not in dispute; which rulebook, slightly.