Game narrative has been around almost as long as video games themselves. Although many of the early stories were either self evident, such as Space Invaders or Frogger, while some made the imagination run wild… I still am not quite sure what is going on in Q*BERT or Pac-Man. As the home consoles gradually caught up with the arcade machines, it fell upon the instruction booklet to fill the void left by the small chip capacities, which in many cases were less then 100k in size.

With the PC, and its larger storage capacity, came text adventures and later the birth of point and click adventure games. This tech helped foster the evolution of the modern PC RPG which then evolved into the console RPG, with games series such as Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy. Although sparse on narrative, these games laid the foundations for what would become the standard for future game narrative. (more…)