Game 123: Orthanc (1975)

The Orthanc main screen lacks the fun images of some of the other PLATO games.

     

Orthanc

United States
Developed by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

No copyright date listed, but developer confirms original version in 1975

Played today through the efforts of Cyber1.

Date Started: 9 November 2013

Date Ended: 10 November 2013

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 16
Ranking at Time of Posting: 17/142 (12%)
Ranking at Game #404: 77/404 (19%)

I want to do a quick recap of the PLATO series because I've been playing the games out of order and unless you've been following the entire series (and remember them), it's easy to get lost.

In short, the games developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on the PLATO mainframe (a multi-million dollar educational system), are the earliest computer RPGs that we know about. They survive today thanks to the preservation efforts of the folks at Cyber1. The list of RPGs developed for this system (which may not be comprehensive) includes:

• m199h (1974): The lost "first CRPG," created in the same year that Dungeons and Dragons was released. Its existence is attested by an article on the Cyber1 server by Dirk Pellett. No one seems to remember what it looked like. It was deleted shortly after creation by an administrator on the system. Man, screw that guy. [Ed. Years later, I got some information that mostly proves "m199h" was a 1976 remake of "pedit5," below. That makes this 1974 date unlikely, though you'll still find it as such on some other sites.]
  
• The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1975): This game, by Reginald "Rusty" Rutherford, is the first known RPG that still exists. Like "m199h," it was initially deleted, but Paul Resch (creator of Orthanc) managed to preserve a copy as "orthanc1." The game is a top-down dungeon crawl for a single player. I reviewed it in December 2011.
• The Game of Dungeons (aka "dnd," 1975): Created shortly after The Dungeon by Ray Wood and Gary Whisenhunt, with further version work by Dirk Pellett and Flint Pellett. It's also a top-down dungeon crawl that builds on The Dungeon with some additional features. I reviewed it in February 2012.
• Dungeon (1975): Created in 1975 and updated in 2004, the authors are listed as John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jon Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada. A file by this name exists in PLATO and loads a really nice opening screen, but I can't seem to get anything to happen after that. I haven't found a good description of the game online.
• Orthanc (1975): The game I'm reviewing here. Another top-down dungeon crawler, a clear adaptation of "pedit5" by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, Eric Hagstrom, and Mark Nakada.
• Moria (1975): By Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin. The first first-person CRPG, this game is way ahead of its time, offering cooperative multiplayer and lots of other innovations, including the first in-game stores. I just reviewed it.
• Oubliette (1977): By Jim Schwaiger, John Gaby, Bancherd DeLong, and Jerry Bucksath. Essentially a more advanced version of Moria, with new features and more standard D&D conventions. I reviewed it in October 2013.
• Avatar (1978):  Probably the most complex of the PLATO games, taking inspiration from multiple predecessors and offering a very complex multi-player experience.

The years given are approximate, based on things like file creation dates and recollections of the developers. Complicating matters are the continuous development of some of these games. Avatar spawned several versions, the last one created as late as 1995! Oubliette, Moria, and Orthanc all had updates within the past decade.

These games are important because of what they inspired. Wizardry (and thus Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, and other first-person multi-character games) took inspiration from Oubliette. The pedit5/dnd/Orthanc line produced the DND/Telengard series in the 1980s for several platforms, and some sources give these games as the ancestors of Rogue, though I've found no evidence that Rogue's creators had any experience with PLATO.

A typical Orthanc screen. My character, at Level 6 (and just on the cusp of Level 7), faces a bugbear on Level 2 of the dungeon. A secret door lies to the bugbear's south. I have a pair of levitation boots and a ring of protection active and have also cast "Continual Light." I'm carrying 32 points of coins equaling 160 gold pieces. The automap in the lower-right shows that I've mapped the dungeon's perimeter.

Orthanc, as I've said, is an update of the earliest extant RPG, The Dungeon. It offers a revised interface but almost identical gameplay. Demonstrating stark originality, the developers drew the name of the game from The Lord of the Rings--specifically, the black tower that sticks up out of the fortress of Isengard. In the game, however, "Orthanc" is a dungeon to which the player, a knight, has come to make a name for himself and "retire with honor near the seat of the king."

Rolling a new character.

There's no character selection; every player plays the same combination fighter/magic user with strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity, and hit points. You don't even get to specify the character's name unless he's successful enough to retire. After a brief character creation process, you're launched into the Orthanc dungeon. As with all of these PLATO games, death is permanent, so the tension builds from the very first square.

You see this message a lot.

Survival depends on caution and, at the earliest character levels, a lot of luck. As you wander through the corridors with the WAXD keys, you'll encounter monsters of various types and levels, plenty of whom are capable of killing you in a single hit, and an equal number of whom get the first movement in combat. Combat options are limited to fight, cast a spell, and run, and "run" fails to appear a staggering amount of the time--almost always when you really need it. (Technically, the documentation says it works in corridors but not in rooms, but I don't see it as an option in plenty of things that look like corridors.)

Fighting a kobold. For some reason, "run" isn't an option here.

As limited as the magic system is, spells are really the lifeblood of the game. There are four spell levels and 22 total spells. Some spells help in combat (charm, sleep, magic missile, blastbolt), some with defense (protection, invisibility, speed), and some with navigation (light, depth, levitation, passwall, pass ceiling). There are two levels of healing spells and a couple of high-level ones that teleport the enemy out of the room and away from you. Every character can cast any spell level from the outset, but you only start with 4 spell points, so if you blow them all on one "Teleport," you need to exit the dungeon to replenish. You gain 3 new spell points per character level.

Casting "pass ceiling" to get back to the first level and out of the dungeon.

Surviving the earliest character levels generally means hanging around the dungeon exit, carefully finding enemies, blasting them with "magic missile" as early as possible in the round and then, if victorious, leaving the dungeon and returning.

Preparing to cast "magic missile" on a Level 3 ghoul, who has already brought  me down to 15 hit points from a base of 33.

Exiting the dungeon accomplishes a few other things. It converts your accumulated treasure to experience points, and it's the only way to level up if you've achieved enough experience.

Once you hit Level 2 and especially Level 3, you can start to relax a bit. At this point, it makes sense to have "continual light" active all the time so you can see secret doors and nearby enemies. But you still can't get cocky. There's a 5% chance of a Level 4 enemy showing up on the first dungeon level, and something like a Level 4 minotaur is more than capable of smashing a Level 3 character to smithereens with one hit. I lost plenty of characters just at the point I thought I could "start to relax a bit." Since you cannot see your attacker's combat rolls, death is often completely inexplicable. I've had Level 1 spiders kill me in one blow when I had more than 20 hit points.

Chances of encountering each level of monster on each level of dungeon.

There are 10 dungeon levels, each 24 x 22 squares in size. The levels are fixed, but the game runs an automatic process to reconfigure them every 180 days, so truly dedicated players have to keep learning new layouts. Since there are no special encounters, NPCs, fixed treasures, or any other staples of later RPGs, there isn't much sense in exhaustively mapping each level. You basically just need to know how to get from one stairway to another. Secret doors, which are visible 1/6 of the time normally and all the time with a light spell active, are similarly useless, as there's nothing special behind them.

You'll notice an automap in the lower right-hand corner of my screenshots. It's a great idea. Little dots annotate stairs, so you don't have to keep your own paper maps. This would be a "first" in CRPGs except that I don't think it was in the original version. Some comments in the notes files suggest that it was added quite recently, in the 2000s. [In an e-mail, Mr. Resch confirms this was added after Cyber1 resurrected the PLATO files. "The language used by the system, TUTOR, is amazingly complex and yet simple. After not seeing the code for decades, I wrote the auto-mapper in just a few hours."]

The explicit goal of the game is to get enough experience--through both combat and gold--to retire, something that the game appears to allow once you've attained enough for a slot in the Hall of Fame, which means beating at least the lowest-ranking player already in the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame resets every time the dungeon does (every six months), and with very few players today, it didn't look hard to make it on the list. The lowest-ranked player had only 4,436 experience--though the lunatic at the top had over 38 million. I can't imagine the type of dedication it must take to get that high, especially playing a game that's 36 years old.

There's no multiplayer option in the game, but users can encounter each other in the dungeon and either chat or (after Level 1) fight. I didn't encounter any while I was playing. [In his e-mail to me, M. Resch notes that he removed the ability for players to fight on Level 1 because "higher-level players took to hanging around the entrance and killing lower-level players for the experience." Oddly, he says, "lots of people just talked to each other, even though you could do that anywhere on PLATO."]

Monsters occasionally leave copper, silver, gold, electrum, or platinum pieces. They have the same values as in D&D, and when you leave the dungeon, their equivalent in gold is converted to experience. It really isn't worth picking up anything lower than gold pieces, as they just add to your weight. Monsters also rarely drop gems, which are worth a lot and can sometimes level you up by themselves, and magic items such as rings and boots. Magic items keep their spell equivalents continually active.

After fielding a few doomed characters, I got lucky with one of them and managed to completely finish exploring Level 1, got a Ring of Protection and Boots of Levitation, and ascended to Level 7. I had more than enough experience to get into the Hall of Fame at around the middle position, but I had grown addicted to the rapid character development and accumulation of treasures, and I kept thinking "another 10,000 experience and I can get into the Hall of Fame at an even higher level!" My greed was my undoing, and I was killed by a Level 5 dwarf while exploring dungeon level 2.

Determined to make it to retirement, I ran about six more characters, all of whom died prematurely, before I finally managed to top the lowest-ranked player. I retired and, as far as I'm concerned, "won" the game. Incidentally, two of the top spots are held by user "Resch," who I'm guessing is creator Paul Resch.

I'm not really sure what "% kills" means. I don't think this character fled from any enemies, so I'm not sure why mine is at 80.8%. [Late edit: Paul Resch explained it. The "% kills" is the percent of experience that comes from combat, as opposed to finding treasure. It was prestigious to have a higher percentage here.]

The Hall of Fame is a huge part of the game's addictive nature. The gamble over whether to retire now at position x or re-enter the dungeon and try for position y is perhaps the game's most difficult decision. I imagine it was a lot of fun back in the 1970s, with hundreds of students playing the game, for everyone to jostle their way into the various positions, the experience point totals climbing higher and higher, until 180 days passed, everything reset, and the board was a free-for-all again. Just getting onto the board at all kept me occupied for over my six-hour minimum, long past the point when I'd experienced what the game had to offer.

In a quick GIMLET, I give the game:

• 1 point for the basic sketch of a game world.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Not much to it, but goes along at a nice clip.

• 0 points for NPC interaction.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The foes are categorized into groupings such as "undead," "animals," and "mythicals." The game's documentation gives an exhaustive run-down of each enemy's hit points, attack points, experience, and level, and while these affect combat rolls, you don't really see any of it in combat, and there isn't quite enough to develop special tactics for certain foes.

Part of the game's exhaustive documentation on monsters.

• 3 points for magic and combat. The combat system hardly gets any of these points, but the more I played, the more I appreciated how well-balanced the magic system was. Every spell is useful. You don't get so few points that you have to rely entirely on melee weapons, but you don't get so many that you can cast spells willy-nilly. You get just enough to get yourself out of a few tight situations, and a big part of the game's strategy is determining how far to extend yourself into the dungeon before heading back to the entrance. This dynamic gives the game a feeling of tension that few other games rival.

Part of the game's excellent documentation. "Magic missile" does enough damage to kill almost all Level 1 monsters, which would make it a bit of a game-breaker if you started with the ability to cast more than 4 of them.

• 2 points for equipment. There isn't much of it--sword and armor improvements, a few rings and boots and such--but these rare finds are very welcome.

Finding some special equipment.

• 1 point for economy. As just an extension of the experience system (you can't actually buy anything), there isn't much to it. Determining whether to burden yourself with another haul of coins is one of the tactical choices in the game.

• 1 point for quests. The "main quest," as such, isn't very well-defined, and there's no actual plot to it.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. Like all PLATO games, the monster icons are nice, but there's no sound. The keyboard commands are intuitive enough, though I really don't see the need of hitting SHIFT with the directional arrow to go through doors. It just slows down movement.

• 2 points for gameplay. A deliberately-challenging game that somehow remains addictive despite limited game mechanics.

 

The final score of 16 makes the game not as good as Moria or Oubliette--it simply doesn't have enough content--but still fun in its own way.

I don't know about its later influence. Of the top-down PLATO games, The Game of Dungeons (dnd) seems better remembered, and the one that gave its name to the Daniel Lawrence derivatives, including Telengard.

I know I'm supposed to be playing Legend of Faerghail right now, but that game just hasn't gripped me, and this was a nice, simple alternative to playing nothing at all. I'll get back to Faerghail for the rest of this week.

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Later edit: Only a couple of hours after this post was published, I heard from author Paul M. Resch. He said that the game was developed considerably earlier than the dates given by most sources--that people were playing it in 1975. In fact, it was the deletion of "pedit5" in 1974 that prompted the creation of Orthanc in the first place, and that creation was immediate, after Rusty Rutherford gave his blessing to Resch and his collaborators.

Mr. Resch also says that the team wrote to TSR to get their permission to use their monsters, attributes, and characteristics for the game. TSR "didn't seem to know what we were talking about, but agreed that  we could use it as long as we didn't sell anything."

Mr. Resch indicates that within a couple of years, Moria was making Orthanc feel a little stale, so he, Kemp, and Hagstrom began working on a successor but got distracted by other projects and never finished it.

 I've included some other comments from Mr. Resch in the post above.

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Further reading: Catch up on the rest of the PLATO series with my posts on The Dungeon, The Game of Dungeons, Orthanc, Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar.

My winning character didn't stay on the list very long: he was bumped off by Nathan Mahney of "CRPG Adventures," who not only won the game but spent a crazy 7 months mapping every level. Check out his series of posts starting here.