While most well know for their "Games" series of olympic sports games, a few people are familiar with the former incarnation of this company, knwon as Automated Simulations.  While Richard Garriott was busy bringing to life Lord British in his first published game, Akalabeth, and probably before Andrew Greenberg had begun to even think about Wizardry, way back in 1979, this company was churning out RPG after RPG in what they called their DunjonQuest series.  While most of the work was left to the player in the earlier games like Temple of Apshai (i.e. saving your game meant typing in your current stats each time you loaded the game, and room descriptions and treasure values were in a separate booklet rather than the game itself) these were perhaps the first computer games intended to be a replacement for pen and paper role-playing.  Axe of Rage is also worth mentioning as a very funny (and a bit gory) action/adventure game and is highly recommended.