Diehard GameFAN Hall of Fame Nominee: Neverwinter Nights (1991)

DHGF: In honor of the release of the Neverwinter Campaign Setting for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, it is Dungeons & Dragons week here at Diehard GameFAN. As part of this week, we will be opening up the Diehard GameFAN Hall of Fame to five nominees – all video games based on Dungeons & Dragons in some way. Our standards are just like the Baseball Hall of Fame: every game will be voted on by members of the staff, and any game that gets 75% of the vote – with a minimum of four votes – will be accepted – or thrown – into their respective Hall.

I’m always saddened by how this game has been lost to the sands of time. 99% of MMORPG fans don’t realize that this was the first ever game of its type and assume that the only game bearing this name is the 2002 BioWare title that uses the same name. Without the massive success of Neverwinter Nights, we wouldn’t have had Everquest, World of Warcraft and the other games that flooded the PC market a decade after SSI and AOL teamed up to create a whole new genre of role-playing game that would fundamentally change the gaming industry as whole. Who would have thought that in 1991 that you could have a game that was able to be played online like a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) but with (for the time) top shelf graphics and immersive gameplay similar to The Bard’s Tale and other SSI Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games?