Folks nowadays seem to think that open-world or even sandbox games are a modern development. They are from a technical/graphical standpoint, and from that aspect, they're pretty amazing. But the concept has been around since way back. Games like "Angband","Elite", "Autoduel", and "Echelon" (even "Adventure" for the atari could be considered; game select-version 3, of course). What are some of the other greats?

I'm thinking starting with PC gaming and leaving out consoles. Here are a few of my favorites, several available right here on gog:
Pirates!
Darklands
Starflight (on 512k no less!!)
Sentinel Worlds: Future Wars (and the sequel Heavy Nova)
Wasteland

Elder Scrolls Arena
Might and Magic

There's a few of my favs.

I think many see open-world as being something that it's not (at least, not how I interpret it).

Alan Wake was called "Open World" in its lengthy description on Amazon. It's nowhere near open world. It's a very very tight world. You have a few yards (meters) in either direction you can run. That's it. And the game is very linear.

Even games like Fable are called open-world. And to an extent they are. But they're nowhere near open world like Might and Magic or Arena or Pirates. Those things are huge and you can go do whatever you want.

What's exciting right now is that open-world has a new adjective that modern PCs are giving it. And that adjective is "living." A living open world is so much more fun than a static, dreary, procedural open world like many old ones like Might and Magic. But even some old games had a very lived-in feel. Pirates comes to mind. And if you move forward a decade, Hardwar was one of the best lived-in open worlds I ever saw. Every NPC was doing something all the time. And the world responded to it.

Mercenary
Hunter
Lords of Midnight / Midwinter

Ah, Hunter! That was an awesome game for just dicking around in. I don't think I ever completed more than a couple of the missions, because just exploring the world and blowing stuff up was so much more fun.

Oh yeah, OUTCAST! Skyrim has no right to say how amazing and innovative it is that world changes according to what you do when I see how world of Outcast dynamically changes according to your actions, how when I have freed one place and they started to train militia... Amazing!

I'll second that. Outcast was amazing, especially since when I picked it up from the bargain bin having never heard of it, I didn't know what to expect.

I remember just being amazed when asking one of the freaks where someone was, he would point in the right direction. And the humor was great too!

Yeah, in another thread someone gave the award for 'Best game no-one played' to Anachronox but MY academy vote goes to Outcast (saying that I haven't played Anachronox so maybe is more true on the 'no one played' side!) - simply amazing!

Where do the early builder games, like Railroad Tycoon and Sim City, fit in? Not RPGs, but you're handed a blank slate and the world reacts to the player actions. In the case of Railroad Tycoon, the world also progresses without the player.

The first open-world/sandbox game I ever played was called The Terminator (MS-DOS, 1991) and was, obviously, based on the 1984 movie of the same name.

You could play as either the T-800 or Kyle Reese in the main game. There was also an option to play without an opponent. That way you could just screw around and do whatever you wanted.

The game was amazing for the time. You could walk or drive just about anywhere in Los Angeles. You could go into different types of stores (pharmacies, sporting goods, gun shops, etc) and purchase nearly anything there.

If you wanted to be a psychopath, that was easy too! You could steal money, hold up cash registers, steal cars, murder anyone (men, women and children) by hitting them, stabbing them, shooting them or even running them over in a vehicle.

The graphics sucked, but it was a 3D game in 1991; in other words, it wasn't going to look pretty. But it let you have more freedom than any game at the time and even most games today.

Hmm... come to think of it, this is a game I wish GOG would get on here. I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

It's a matter of scope, Assassin's Creed was the first time I heard of an open world game as such, it took the developer a really long time to render out the buildings and attach anchor points so that you could climb on any building you could reach and people would react to it.

Most of those other games are fairly small by comparison and didn't involve anywhere near as much detail as modern open world and sandbox games do.

So, yes it's not necessarily new, but it is a significant step in evolution.

i'd wager that's because it was initially planned as a true open-world game. you know, back when it was supposed to be Microsoft's DirectX 10 flagship game...

either the description you're referring to hadn't been updated or the author missed the fact that the game got re-designed for its xbox release.

Both have earned the "most anticipated sequel never released". And Outcast was damn amazing. The usage of Voxel was great. I immensly enjoyed that game.

*sigh* well we all have our fingers crossed for this and games like it but the sad fact is that many games licenced from real world IP like films and brands are unlikely to ever show up because the licences to use the IP has expired by now and it would have to be licenced all over again, see Also: Blade Runner, Any racing games that use real world cars and we've even had games pulled because of licensed songs on the soundtrack!
Sad!
Yeah Cutter Slade should be in more games and be a bigger name than Lara Croft by now!
There's just no justice in the world!

Who in the right mind would choose to play a massive escort mission as opposed to play as ... Well ... Killing machine