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I think I started playing D&D (basic set, Frank Metzer Red Box) in 1983-1984. I remember listening to a lot of the 1984 VanHalen album during those early days, but I don't recall which came first.
In those early days, D&D was me drawing a dungeon (essentially a maze) filled with whatever cool creatures were presented in the back of the DMs Guide. My little brother was my only player, and he spent hours wandering the maze, killing whatever he could find, and taking their stuff.
In those days, the pinnacle of video game technology was the original Nintendo game (NES) iirc. My brother and I played a hell of a lot of excite bike when we weren't playing D&D.
I remember day-dreaming about the day when D&D would be translated into a video game. I didn't have to wait long. Games like the Legend of Zelda came out on the Nintendo, and eventually the Personal Computing market exploded.
I quickly upgraded to AD&D about 1985 or so. I graduated High School in 1990, and was running regular AD&D games with my brothers and my own friends (we are all still friends to this day). We talked about the day when they would make a "real D&D video game" rather than the "fantasy D&D-like video games". Heck, I think we even envisioned virtual reality D&D games we would be playing in the future. Good times. Depeche Mode was playing constantly. We were mostly playing "warez" we got via BBS's on our commodore 128 at the time. We ran our own BBS, the Boatman. We we sort of out-of the video game mainstream at the time, but in retrospect very ahead of the curve in terms of computer tech. Final Fantasy II was the hot game on the Super NES, although I didn't own it, my fiends did. I didn't have the time/money. I was busy running a BBS!
2nd Edition came out just before I graduated, and as DM I bought into it, readily accepting the "clean-up" of 1st edition. But we were out of High School by this time, busy with college, or Alaska trips, and what not. We played, but less frequently. Grunge music exploded on the scene, and being a rocker at heart, I abandoned the proto-emo music I was listening to and embraced it with gusto. Nirvana rocked the house as we wrestled with something called Baetzu. WTF? Playstation launched, and Final Fantasy (seven?) came out soon after and things were looking great for the whole genre.
By 1997 Ultima Online was released. Personal computing was exploding, and 2nd edition D&D was dieing. The "Options" rules (AD&D 2.5) was release around this time, but I had completely stopped playing D&D as well as stopped listening to "grunge". What was I thinking? I returned to old Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, VanHalen of my youth. Eventually, as the millenium approached, there was some hope on the horizon.
Everquest came out in 1999, D&D 3.0 released in 2000, and soon after, in 2002, Even Ozzy Osbourne had a TV show. Rock On! Everquest 2 released ion 2004 as did World of Warcraft.
The dream of a video game version of D&D never materialized. Many attempts were made, but none have been able to capture it. I beleive it's the Dungeon Master that makes the game. Video Games will remain a distant cousin to D&D until such a time as we have "real" artificial intelligence that can make for a dynamic play experience tailored to the the individual players. Music will continue to get worse.
If you managed to wander this far down memory lane, I thank you. But I do have a point. Sort of. I think the video game industry has been driven to some extent by the fantasy rpg industry. We want an a fantasy video game that mimics D&D. The Video game industry has responded. Games like WoW are an expression of that. The mechanics of video games are similar to the mechanics of D&D. There are "Hit Points" and "Strength Scores" and such. While I don't see it, my video game character makes a "to hit roll" to over come a creatures "armor" etc.
Video games, due their wide audience, and fast-paced nature have driven the mechanics of such games hard. Anyone who played the Original Ultima, Everquest, or even Diablo know that there are some "broken" aspects to those games. In this light, Video games have "evolved" faster than D&D. I think there are a lot of things that Video Games can teach D&D.
WotC seems to be looking in that direction for that reason. Not everything translates of course. As I said, D&D is great because of DMs because a human being is better than any "AI". There are many posts of 4E becoming too "video-gamey". But I am not so sure this is a bad thing. Relegating the DM to the status of "Computer AI" is a bad thing.
I think 4E will do well financially but it will, say a decade from now when 5E is released, be remembered as a hamfisted attempt to adopt what worked in video games that ultimately tried to fit a square peg in a round hole. 5E will learn from this "mistake" and adjust, and the game will go on.
By then, who knows? Maybe I'll get to play the holodeck version of Everquest 4.