Progress Quest

Progress Quest was created in 2002 as a parody of the text-based RPGs popular at the time, but it ended up accomplishing something far more interesting – it created an entirely new genre of games that essentially play themselves, without any input from the player. At the start, the player picked a character's race and class, gave it a name, and that was basically the end of their active participation. Everything else happened automatically: the character went on quests, fought monsters, and collected experience and items, while the player just watched bars, numbers, and randomly generated text descriptions of events tick by.

The joke was that Progress Quest was poking fun at RPG players' obsession with watching numbers and progress tick up without actually having to do or decide anything themselves. Eric Fredricksen thereby unwittingly foreshadowed the entire later boom of so-called idle games and clickers, which a decade later flooded mobile stores and browser portals around the world. Progress Quest thus remains the historical point zero for the whole genre, even though its author intended it primarily as a joke at the expense of the genre's clichés of the time. The game's graphics were limited to a handful of text boxes and ticking bars, which only underlined that it was a parody rather than a full-fledged game with ambitions of its own.

The game still exists today in several versions and, even years later, continues to attract players and developers who want to see exactly where the idle genre began and what it looked like in its purest, completely uncommercialized form, without a single payment or advertisement.

Why play: For fans of idle games and clickers who want to experience the genre in its ironic, absolutely original form – without a single extra click.