I love RPGs.

At this point, such a statement is basically meaningless. After all, when everything is an RPG, nothing is an RPG. We are coming up on fifty years since Wizardry began diffusing into almost every genre of video game, which over time started slowly evolving back into Wizardry again like crabs with character sheets. The numbers, long included, must be removed; long excluded, must return. Thus has it ever been.

And yet it remains true. We can be formalist pedants all day about RPG mechanics being everywhere, but when I say I love RPGS, I don’t think anyone would get me confused with someone who loves to prestiege in Call of Duty (do they even still do that?). No. I love talking to every NPC in a town. I love crawling through dungeons and building out parties. I love getting a sword that has +20 damage. I do not love getting a sword that has +0.5% poison resist on Thursdays. I love RPGs.

However, there is one problem: there are too many of them.

A few months ago I built out a Backlog of RPGs I’d like to get to one day, and the sheer length of it struck me with mortal terror. I am thirty-one years old! On some level I have to make peace with the fact that just isn’t happening. Yet at the same time, I do want to clear it. And when faced with a giant list of video games that I want to play, I did what I always do and started playing them in release order. I immediately downloaded that new Digital Eclipse version of Wizardry 1. Which is excellent. They should port all 5 of the original campaigns to that engine now the bulk of the work is done.

That was about three months ago now. As I played these games, I turned over in my mind exactly what I wanted this project to be. I wanted some kind of product to show for my work, something to be proud of. But at the same time, I didn’t want the desire for A Project to overtake my primary goal, which is to play a bunch of RPGs. The games are at the heart of this.

I thought about doing more youtube videos, or twitch streams, two platforms I have briefly experimented with but never truly kept up. They might be the more popular platforms of the day but, as mentioned earlier, I am thirty-one years old at time of writing. I needed to abandon the modern ways and retvrn to tradition. I needed to start a blog.

So that’s what this is. Welcome to ATB: All Time Bangers.

Here’s the plan: this is the backlog. You will notice it has over a thousand games on it. First of all I just want to reassure you/disappoint you: I wil not be playing over a thousand RPGs. I would love to, but I just don’t think that’s going to be realistic time-wise. That is, if our society somehow avoids collapse before 2045, an RPG a week for near enough twenty years. No: the backlog is just a guide. I will skip games, I will drop series, I don’t want to force myself to play anything I don’t want to. Again, the project exists to give structure to enjoying some RPGs, not the other way around.

This is also not an encyclopedic history, or comprehensive critical analysis. I’m not going to be writing 40,000 word retrospectives that are 70% development history and plot summary.

What this is then, is a Diary. I’ll journey through the backlog, from past to present, and leave on this site some short reflections on my experience. I’m aiming for around 500 words, but there’s no hard and fast rule. There’s nothing I love more than coming up with a project that I re-orient my entire life around then abandoning it six weeks later, so I’ve deliberately made this one as casual and low stakes as possible, while also holding off on announcing it til I have enough games already finished to have some publishing runway.

The backlog as it currently stands definitely favours JRPGs, as if you know me you know that’s where my interests tend to lie. But there’s plenty of CRPGs there too, as seeing the divergent evolutions of the genre across the 90s and 2000s fascinates me. I want to play Baldur’s Gate alongside Suikoden II. Those are the kind of fun comparisons you get to make when you do a ridiculous release order project such as this.

I don’t want to say anything more definitively, this is intentionally loose and casual, and I hope people enjoy reading an extremely 00s-core blog. I ripped out like all the features from wordpress and yelled at it til it gave me the simplest homepage possible. Just the posts in order, thank you. There’s an RSS feed at the bottom of the page if you’re still living that life, and to everyone else I’ll be posting out articles as they release on Bluesky.

Thank you to everyone for joining me on this journey, and I hope we can enjoy some RPGs together…