There’s a specific kind of clunky magic you only find in an old 1st person rpg. You know the feeling. You’re staring at a wall of pixelated stone textures, the UI takes up half the screen, and you have absolutely no idea where the quest marker is. Actually, there is no quest marker. You have to read a journal entry that says "turn left at the weirdly shaped oak tree," and honestly, that’s exactly why people are flocking back to them in 2026.
Modern games hold your hand. They treat you like you’ve never seen a video game before. But back in the 90s and early 2000s, developers like Sir-Tech or New World Computing didn't care if you got lost. They wanted you to inhabit a world, not just pass through it.
It’s about friction.
The grid-based obsession of the early 90s
Before we had true 3D environments, we had "blobbers." That’s the nickname for games where your whole party moves as one single unit—a "blob"—through a grid. Think Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant or the early Might and Magic titles. In these games, the world moves in chunks. You press 'W' and the entire world jumps forward ten feet. It feels stiff at first if you’re used to Cyberpunk 2077, but there is a mechanical depth here that modern games often trade for visual flair.
Take Wizardry 8. It was a late-comer to the party, released in 2001, but it perfected the first-person party dynamic. You weren't just one guy swinging a sword; you were a tactical unit. Positioning mattered. If a rogue snuck up on your flank, your mages were toast. Most people think these games are just "math simulators," and they kind of are, but the math represents a brutal, uncaring world that feels rewarding to conquer.
When you play an old 1st person rpg today, you’re engaging with a puzzle. You aren't just following a golden line on the floor. You're drawing maps. Real maps. On graph paper. Or maybe using a digital tool like GridCartographer, but the spirit is the same.
Why the "Look" of Ultima Underworld changed everything
In 1992, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss dropped and basically broke everyone’s brains. Before this, 3D was mostly fake. Wolfenstein 3D was flat; you couldn't look up or down. But Ultima Underworld let you look around, jump, and even swim. Paul Neurath and his team at Blue Sky Productions (which became Looking Glass Studios) created a "simulated" world.
If you threw a torch into a river, it didn't just disappear. It floated. This was 1992.
This birthed the "Immersive Sim" subgenre. It’s a lineage that leads directly to Deus Ex and System Shock. These games aren't just RPGs; they are philosophy engines. They ask: "Here is a locked door. How are you going to get past it?" You could find the key. You could pick the lock. You could blow the door up with a GEP gun. Or, you could stack five crates, climb through a vent, and bypass the door entirely.
The weirdly deep mechanics of Morrowind and Daggerfall
You can't talk about an old 1st person rpg without mentioning Bethesda. But I'm not talking about the streamlined Skyrim. I'm talking about the sheer, chaotic ambition of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.
The map of Daggerfall is roughly the size of Great Britain. It’s procedurally generated, mostly empty, and incredibly buggy. But it offered a level of life simulation we still haven't quite replicated. You could buy houses. You could join a dozen different knightly orders. You could contract lycanthropy and turn into a werewolf, which completely changed how you played.
Then came Morrowind in 2002. It ditched the infinite procedural land for a hand-crafted island called Vvardenfell. It was alien. There were giant mushrooms and silt striders—massive insects used for fast travel.
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The biggest thing people get wrong about Morrowind is the combat. You’ll see your sword physically hit a mudcrab, but the game says you "missed." That’s because it’s a dice roll behind the scenes. It’s frustrating for five minutes. Then, you realize your character actually has to learn how to use a longsword. You start as a nobody who can't hit the side of a barn. By level 20, you’re a god who can leap across the entire map in a single bound because you exploited the spell-making system.
That’s the "RPG" part of the first-person RPG. It’s not an action game. It’s a character-growth simulator.
The brutal reality of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder
If you want to talk about stress, let’s talk about Dungeon Master (1987) on the Atari ST and Amiga. It was the first one to really make the first-person perspective feel claustrophobic in real-time. Before this, most RPGs were turn-based. In Dungeon Master, if a mummy was chasing you, it didn't wait for you to choose "Attack" from a menu. It just hit you.
You had to manage food. You had to manage water. If your torch went out, the screen went pitch black. You’d be sitting in your room at 2 AM, hearing the skittering of spiders in the game, frantically clicking your mouse to find a flint and steel.
Eye of the Beholder took this formula to the Dungeons & Dragons world. It simplified some things but kept that terrifying real-time pressure. These games taught players that the environment was just as dangerous as the monsters. Falling into a pit trap wasn't just a "Game Over" screen; it was a setback that forced you to find your way back up from a lower level you weren't prepared for.
The 2026 Resurgence: Why we are going back
So, why are these ancient relics trending again?
Part of it is "boomer shooter" energy bleeding into RPGs. We’ve seen a massive wave of "retro-revival" games like Lunacid or Dread Delusion. These developers are intentionally using PlayStation 1-era graphics to capture that eerie, lo-fi atmosphere.
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Lo-fi graphics force your imagination to do the heavy lifting. When a monster is just a cluster of 50 pixels, your brain fills in the terrifying details. Modern 4K graphics are beautiful, sure, but they leave nothing to the imagination. They are literal. An old 1st person rpg is impressionistic.
There's also the lack of "bloat." Modern games are filled with 400 icons on a map. They want to keep you playing for 200 hours so you’ll buy a battle pass. An old game like Arx Fatalis just wants you to figure out how to cast a fireball by drawing runes in the air with your mouse. It’s a self-contained experience.
How to actually play these games today
You can’t just go out and buy a 1994 floppy disk and expect it to work on Windows 11 or 12. But the community has done the hard work for you.
GOG (Good Old Games) is the gold standard here. They wrap these old titles in DOSBox or custom wrappers so they run with one click. But if you want the "true" experience, you need to look at source ports.
- Daggerfall Unity: This is the only way to play Daggerfall. It recreates the entire game in the Unity engine, fixing thousands of bugs and adding modern resolutions while keeping the retro aesthetic.
- OpenMW: A completely new engine for Morrowind that makes it stable on modern systems and even allows for multiplayer.
- ScummVM: Most people think this is just for adventure games, but it actually supports several 1st person RPGs now, like the Eye of the Beholder series.
Don't be afraid of the manual
Here is the biggest tip for anyone diving into an old 1st person rpg: Read the manual.
Back then, the manual wasn't just a safety warning. It contained the lore, the spell lists, and often the basic instructions on how to move. These games were designed with the assumption that you spent thirty minutes reading the booklet on the bus ride home from the store. If you try to "wing it," you will die in the first room.
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And honestly? That’s okay. Dying is part of the learning curve. These games respect your intelligence enough to let you fail.
Actionable steps for the retro-curious
If you're ready to jump in, don't start with the hardest thing possible. Ease into it.
- Start with Star Wars: Dark Forces or Strife. They are technically shooters, but Strife has heavy RPG elements—hubs, quests, and dialogue. It’s a great "gateway drug."
- Download Daggerfall Unity. It’s free. Completely free. It’s the best way to see if you can handle the "blobber" style of navigation without spending a dime.
- Keep a physical notebook. Don't use a second monitor or a phone app. There is something tactile about scribbling down a door code or a map hint that makes the immersion hit harder.
- Check out the "Dungeon Crawler Jam" on Itch.io. You can see what modern developers are doing with these old-school constraints. Some of the most innovative RPG design is happening in the indie retro space right now.
The beauty of the old 1st person rpg isn't just nostalgia. It's the fact that these games were experiments. Developers were figuring out the rules as they went. Sometimes they broke the rules. Sometimes they made the games impossible. But they were never boring. They were never "corporate." They were just weird, dark, and incredibly deep. Go get lost in a dungeon. It’s good for the soul.