I don't know why, but I never took to them. I tried one of the early Heroes of Might & Magic games - either 1 or 2, I think - but I found it thoroughly boring. When you were travelling, you were crossing a map rather than proper territory, and all the battles were of the same format, your party lined up on the left, and the opposition lined up on the right, with a bit of perfunctory scenery so you could distinguish one place from another.There were two early high-level programming languages. Fortran stood for FORmula TRANslator, and was for the maths-biased uses, and I was told that Cobol (which I never knew anything about) was for business and admin uses. The only low-level language I ever tried was Assembler Language, but I never got very far with it.
I believe Colossal Caves and Zork were the first two computer games to get widespread attention. I'm not sure which was around first, but I found Colossal in the mid 1980's. I never played Zork, though - more's the pity. I would have liked to have a decent crack at it, but it needed a bigger computer than any I ever had access to, and by the time I had one, Zork had been superceded by games I preferred.
The original Crowther-Woods adventure game, Colossal Caves, did have one outstanding use for the designers of the very early computer chips such as were used in the Sinclair Spectrum and the Oric. If you could play the game and finish it successfully, your new chip had been properly designed.
I always reckoned that Eye of the Beholder 2 (The Legend of Darkmoon - came out in the early 1990's) was the only "first person view" RPG that got close to Might & Magic 3. That and its predecessor (Eye of the Beholder) were designed by Westwood Studios, but they handed over the design for EOB3 (Assault on Myth Drannor) to some other people who weren't nearly as good. No EOB4 was ever made.
There were some other fairly good ones, Ultima Underworld, and especially Ultima Underworld 2, but I never rated them as highly as the Wizardry games "Bane of the Cosmic Forge" and "Crusaders of the Dark Savant", and I rated those below the MM games.
