14 DAY TRIAL // I bet you don't know what the "Golden Age" of RPG games is. You'll be surprised to learn that such "Golden Age" occurred between the years 1985-1993. How come? Well, those at Gamasutra made up no more and no less than a nine-pages article containing information and a description of what makes the RPG games and why they were so popular in that period that it became the "Golden Age" of RPGs:
"The first CRPGs appeared on mainframes like the PDP-10 and a special educational platform called PLATO. By the early 1980s, these graphically simplistic but technically masterful games had been adapted or ported to almost every home computer on the market. Although the first commercial CRPGs for home computers (Akalabeth for the Apple II and Temple of Apshai for the Commodore PET and TRS-80) are hardly ever played today, they laid the groundwork for much of what would follow".
I don't even want to imagine how big of a geek that guy who wrote them is and how much time he wasted talking about a subject that doesn't help the world in any way. This may strike you with confusion, but it's the same in every field, like music, film, architecture and others: once the first "building blocks" are set, imagination is left to do all the work from there and as time passes, improvements are made based on fixed mistakes and innovations in that certain domain. Take House music for instance. You'd never guess that Classic music is what many DJs have based their songs on, like Tiesto with his famous "Forever Today" song.
So, in the 1980s, when the first building blocks of RPGs were set, it wasn't very hard to apply all the new ideas on an already defined gameplay mode. All that developers had to do was to come up with new story lines on which to set their characters with special abilities. So there's your answer for why there was a "Golden Age" of RPG games.