Ultima 1: The First Age of Darkness

Before Ultima 1 came along, role-playing games on PC were about as sophisticated as a pocket calculator. Then Richard Garriott threw players into a digital world full of space travel, dungeons, and dragons—yes, all at once. The plot is straightforward: evil wizard, lots of fighting, plenty of treasure. But the novelty back in 1981 was the sheer audacity of cramming so many ideas into one floppy disk. You’ll slay monsters, zip around in a rocket, and probably get lost in a dungeon that looks suspiciously like an ASCII maze. It’s primitive, but you can see the spark of the sprawling series it would spawn.