Forget me not

Jeremy Peel delves into the catacombs to exhume the games that made D&D's Forgotten Realms a fixture on PlayStation

The Forgotten Realms is not just Dungeons & Dragons' most popular setting, but one that belongs to everybody. One where the story told by your dungeon master across a dining room table is every bit as valid as the one projected onto a cinema screen in Honor Among Thieves.

It's no surprise, then, that it's proved a perfect playground for videogames - a medium where the storytelling is shared between you, the player, and the professional writers who've put together your dialogue options. From Baldur's Gate to Neverwinter, in RPGs and action games, developers have been sending us to the Realms for decades now. And in the absence of a passing bard, we're your guide to the very best of it.

Infinity and beyond

The most respected videogames in Dungeons & Dragons history are a peculiar-yet-perfect set of isometric RPGs kicked off by Bioware Baldur's Gate defined the shape of the Western RPG as we know it, setting the stage for Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3 many years later.

In fact, we're so familiar with its innovations today that it can be difficult to appreciate just how strange and experimental Bioware's pitch was back in 1998. The prototype the studio brought to publisher Interplay was an unprecedented fusion of tabletopstyle RPG stats and fast-moving isometric combat, the latter inspired by the rise of speedy strategy games like Command & Conquer.

Feargus Urquhart - then a producer at Interplay's Black Isle division, later the head of Obsidian - took a chance.

He pushed to grant Bioware the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and it proved an ideal pairing. Characters flowed straight from the Canadian developer's tabletop sessions into Baldur's Gate, providing the story with both its villains and memorable companions, such as the dunderheaded yet endearing barbarian Minsc, who is set to return in this year's Baldur's Gate 3.