The Weird RPG That Changed The Gaming Industry Forever
You can’t dive too deep into any modern video game release without discovering that it has some kind of role-playing game mechanics shoved into it. The RPG genre successfully infested the entire industry, bringing skill trees, experience points, leveling up, and vast narrative-driven adventures to all kinds of unexpected titles and settings.
It wasn’t all that long ago that RPGs were thought of as super weird things that only very specific gamers might enjoy. They weren’t at all targeting the mainstream — they were for super nerds. Before the flashy action spectacles of modern titles, the RPG genre was instead very menu-driven, dripping with mathematics, stats tables, and points to spend.
2011’s Skyrim is often cited as the moment that this all turned around, and the RPG genre cemented itself as a mainstream success. The game sold a comically large pile of copies, with its original launch and many re-releases accumulating sales of well over 60 million units. There’s no denying that it brought its wizards and swords and number-based adventures to one of the largest audiences ever reached by such a game — but I’d argue it was the second wave of this popular interest, not the first.
