Neverwinter Nights: the greatest Dungeons & Dragons videogame ever made. Sure, other D&D games are monstrously good (Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, scads of the SSI gold box games), none of them attempted to simulate the experience of a tabletop session the way Neverwinter Nights did.

Beginning with the SSI games and continuing with the Black Isle games, developers sought to (and mostly succeeded) in reuniting narrative with mechanics in RPGs. The problem is, in a tabletop D&D game – the theater of the mind – there are no real limits. Anything can (and usually does) happen. Compare that to the linear storytelling of Baldur’s Gate: there’s only one way that game can end. (Even Zork’s narrative richness is an illusion – there is only one good ending that doesn’t involve your death and only one way to achieve it).

While it will be a long time before programming can equal the flights of fancy of the human mind, Neverwinter Nights, released by BioWare in 2002, significantly relaxed the rigid linearity of videogame RPGs.

It did three important things to achieve this. First, it made characters that were highly customizable and untethered them from a single story, allowing them to have long, weird careers outside the (frankly, mediocre) main campaign. Second, it gave players a toolkit for creating what amounted to their own modules, something the community embraced wholeheartedly (there are too many excellent self-contained modules to even mention, but the fact that Neversummer was essentially a fan made persistent world MMO built by players is a good example of the scale of game that was possible using the toolkit). Third, a player could take control of those modules and modify them on the fly…just like a pen and paper dungeon master.

Perhaps most importantly, it came with a map on a tea towel. (OK, not most important, but I do love a good tea towel map).