Progress Quest

Progress Quest is Eric Fredricksen's 2002 EverQuest parody, the zero-player game from which this entire genre descends: roll a character, watch the bars fill, and understand what every idle game since has been politely pretending not to be. It stands at progressquest.com, runs on Windows, Linux and browser, connects to online realms with leaderboards and guilds, released its source in 2011, and shipped a Twentieth Anniversary Platinum Edition in January 2022.

What the loop feels like

You roll a character, choosing a splicing of race and class from the parody bestiary, and pick a realm: Knoram, Expodrine, Oobag, Spoltog, Pemptus or Alpaquil. Then the game begins, which is to say, it does not wait for you. Stats rise, quests complete, loot fills the pack, and your character executes battles you never commanded. That's Progress Quest.

You come back an hour later and the log has grown: new levels, a better weapon auto-equipped, a quest ticked off, a kill credited, your standing on the realm leaderboard quietly moved. The joke is that nothing you do changes any of it, and the deeper joke is that the numbers still feel good. That's Progress Quest, and every idle game since is a negotiation with that feeling.

How it actually works

The design is the genre reduced to its skeleton. Character creation is the only meaningful input: race, class, realm, name. From there the engine runs itself, auto-progressing stats, quests, combat and inventory with zero player commands, which is why it is cited as the original zero-player game. The online realms add the only competition available: leaderboards and guilds where your self-playing character is measured against everyone else's self-playing characters. The interface is a set of panels, character sheet, equipment, spells, quests and a scrolling combat log, and it has barely changed since 2002 because change would rather miss the point.

Where it stumbles

On purpose, and it will still lose some players. There is literally nothing to do after character creation, no hidden layer, no prestige, no moment where the game turns and needs you; the parody is the product. The interface is a period piece of grey panels and dense text, and the humor lands only if you recognize the MMORPG grind it was mocking. As a game to play it is a curiosity; as a document of where this genre started, it is essential. Godville carries the same zero-input comedy forward, Candy Box 2 and A Dark Room descend from its design directly.

Playing it today

Free in the browser at the official site, with native clients for Windows and Linux and the source on Bitbucket since 2011. The site was verified live at research time, which is more than most forty-year-old genre ancestors can say.

The verdict

The genre's founding document: featured on this catalog's first shelf, and arguably the only game here that predicted all the others. Roll a character, watch, and pay your respects.