Game 124: Avatar (1979)

      

Avatar

United States

Independently developed by college students for PLATO educational system starting in 1979

Date Started: 16 November 2013

Date Ended: 17 November 2013

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 32

Ranking at Time of Posting: 74/125 (59%)

Raking at Game #455: 308/455 (68%)

    

I feel like I'm on a roll with these PLATO games, and I wanted to finish up while I still had the other games, and my conversations with the developers, fresh in my mind. I gave a quick chronology of the PLATO series--the earliest computer RPGs that we know about--in my Orthanc posting. Avatar is notable as being the last of the series, and the only one initially developed after commercial RPGs were hitting the market for the Apple II and Commodore PET. (I wonder how the students exposed to the PLATO games reacted to the first commercially-released RPGs. They must have been a little underwhelmed.)

Wikipedia's entry quotes author Richard Bartle as saying that Avatar was written to "out-do Oubliette" (I blogged about that game in October). It was wildly successful--"the most successful PLATO game ever," accounting for "6% of all the hours spent on the system between September 1978 and May 1985."

The town section of Avatar.

I can certainly see why. Avatar is impressive now and must have been mind-blowing in 1979. It draws from the best elements of the PLATO games that preceded it (particularly Oubliette, but also Moria and Orthanc) and anticipates games to come, including roguelikes and MMORPGs. And it's still quite alive: the November 15 reset of "Vavatar" (one of the three versions) was big news on Cyber1, and when I signed in on Sunday afternoon, there were 35 other players. They're not just playing for historical curiosity; Cyber1 enforces strict cheating rules in the active versions of the game. There are fan pages, items lists, maps, and hint files all over the place on the Internet. If the community isn't quite as populous or tech-savvy as that of, say, NetHack, it's still very active.

The users when I joined the game. Even "Batkid" likes this game.

As with the other PLATO games, Avatar was continually developed after its initial release in 1979, so I'm not sure how much I'm about to relate is from the original version. The latest copyright date on all of the versions' main screens is 1984. I did most of my playing in the "2avatar" lesson, which Cyber1 says is the closest to the original.

The game takes place in a dungeon of 15 levels of 900 squares (30 x 30) each, with a town on top. Unlike in Oubliette, the town in Avatar is a menu town; exploration doesn't start until you actually head into the dungeon (I thought it had been Wizardry that first adopted this convention). The dungeon, like those of the game's predecessors, are filled with monsters and treasure. The player has no specific overall goal or quest except to develop in level and guild membership. His experience is bounded only by old age (every race has a max age) and the occasional administrative reset of the dungeon.

A typical Avatar exploration window. You can see my stats in the lower left, my equipment in the lower right, a door in front of me, and two--excuse me, one--goblin in between.

Like Oubliette, Avatar uses the standard six D&D attributes and expands upon D&D with a greater selection of races and "classes." Among the races, the player can choose the standard humans, elves, dwarves, and gnomes; monster classes like trolls, ogres, and giants; and exotic selections such as Cirilians ("most versatile"), Osiri (make good thieves), and Morlochs (who have a natural magic ability). I don't know the sources for any of the latter three except for the obvious connection between the last and H.G. Wells's Morlocks.

Creating a new character.

The game is the first to allow an alignment choice of good, neutral, or evil (Oubliette had alignments, but they were lawful, neutral, and chaotic) and the first to allow the player to choose a sex. It's also the first to have certain items of equipment aspected to particular alignments.

The player doesn't choose a class for his character but rather determines his attributes from a pool of points (with minimums and maximums based on race) and then later chooses which guilds to join out of 11 possibilities: warrior, ninja, thief, mage, sorcerer, healer, wizard, scavenger, seeker, paladin, and villain. Every character belongs to the "nomad" guild from the outset, can choose a different one for free, and can pay to join additional ones after that. The guilds all have minimum entry standards for attributes; for instance, you have to have a charisma of at least 16 and dexterity of at least 15 to join the paladins' guild. They also have alignment standards (no good villains or evil healers) and race standards (no ogre healers or troll paladins). My most successful character, a good Osiri with 16 strength, 9 intelligence, 6 wisdom, 12 constitution, 12 charisma, and 20 dexterity, was qualified only for the scavenger (fighter/thief) guild, mostly because of his low wisdom, but also because the warriors' guild (which he qualified for in attributes) doesn't allow Osiri.

Joining the scavengers' guild.

Guild membership not only determines your available spells but also what weapons and armor you can wield and what additional skills you have. When you amass experience points, you can choose which guild (i.e., class) to level in. Essentially, we're seeing AD&D 3rd edition multi-class rules here in 1978.

Combat, unfortunately, has the same limited options as Oubliette or Moria, basically amounting to hitting "f" to fight or "s" to cast a spell. Success is governed by the attack and defense scores--in both cases, the higher the better. I don't think there are any theoretical upper and lower bounds to either. You start with a base chance of 50% to hit, modified by adding your attack score and then subtracting the enemy's defense score.

Equipment, of course, modifies both attack and defense. You start the game with 500 gold pieces loaned from the bank. Items are limited by your class. They start cheap for leather and bronze equipment and then rise dramatically into the thousands of gold pieces for anything better. The game is unique in that it has a closed economy--a fixed number of gold pieces possessed by the bank, monsters, and the players. In between resets, some late-arriving players apparently find that gold is very hard to obtain.

Jesus, what's that padding made of?

I didn't get to experiment much with spells. As I noted, each class has a unique spellbook, with the spells organized into different types, including damage, healing, buffing, and navigation. The "seeker" class is an interesting one that specializes in being about to move about the dungeon quite rapidly with a variety of teleportation and information spells. New to this game is the ability to "quickslot" your spells by assigning them to number keys.

Spells available to the paladin guild members.

Avatar is fundamentally a multiplayer game. You can journey on your own, but you need a lot of luck. As the help file notes, solo journeys carry a risk "because you will only have one or two skills on a single character where three or four are normally required to be safe." The dungeon is horrifically deadly for new, inexperienced, solo players, as I discovered repeatedly with my initial attempts at characters. None of them survived more than a few combats, even when liberally retreating to the stairs to head back up to the town and restore health. Moreover, some of the game's best features are multiplayer-oriented, such as the messaging window, the ability to call for help, and the ability to trade items. New players on multiplayer servers have a much easier time if their companions allow them to tag along in the rear and give them better equipment and attribute-boosting potions.

Mostly from the documentation rather than personal experience, I found several other "firsts" in the game:

• Guilds can give quests to kill certain monsters or find specific items, making this the first game to offer such quests. The monsters chosen seem to be random, though based on the player's current level. The dynamic is so similar to what Richard Garriott introduced in Akalabeth that it's hard to believe that one didn't influence the other, but I don't see how that's possible. I can't place Garriott anywhere where he'd have access to PLATO, and in any event the first version of Akalabeth was out the same year--but not widespread, making it unlikely that Avatar was influenced by Akalabeth.

• Random encounters with monsters can be peaceful. Monsters may even join the party if the leader's charisma is high enough.

Chester meets a couple of friendly goblins. Alas, they did not remain that way.

• Players can ask each other to "send reports" of monsters encountered in specific locations to make it easier to find them and solve the quests.

• The game is deliberately vague about the monsters and items you can encounter in the dungeons, encouraging players to take notes, learn about them, and share their knowledge with other players, a dynamic that we see in many later roguelikes like NetHack.

• The dungeon features traps and navigation obstacles that we haven't seen before but will find in dozens of later games, such as teleporters, pits, zones of darkness, revolving squares or spinners, and squares that extinguish active magic spells. There are also some obstacles that are rare or unique to this game, such as quicksand, "illusion squares" that show you things that don't exist, and corridors that gradually slope down, taking you to a new level without you realizing it.

• Monsters can cause the large variety of special effects that we've come to expect from CRPGs, including poison, disease, stoning, aging, sleep, paralysis, attribute drains, breath attacks, and the ability to destroy or steal items and gold. Again, these features anticipate Rogue and NetHack over the coming years.

• There are a large number of contextually-sensitive keyboard commands, with upper- and lower-case  variants having different effects. For instance, "t" moves you up or down stairs, but "T" has you track another player.

As I said, Cyber1 has three versions of Avatar, which it lists as "'2avatar' for the original, 'Zavatar' for the updated game, and 'Vavatar' for the 'lunatic fringe.'" I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that last bit, but "Vavatar" had the most players. Each version allows the same player to run more than one character, and the policies warn you that if you're caught exceeding a limit of two or four with additional logins, you'll be deleted summarily. It's a nice idea that allows a single player to control a party, but I couldn't get it to work. Perhaps you have to have login privileges that allow you to log in from more than one terminal at once (I don't), or perhaps you have to have different logins for all of them.

In any event, after experiencing as much as I could of the earliest version, I checked out "Vavatar." All I could really see that was different was a new "Warlock" class that's something like a fighter/thief and some new skills and abilities that come with each guild membership. Exploring the dungeon, it seemed to me that there were fewer enemy parties with multiple enemies, making things a little easier, but I still couldn't survive to Level 2. I thought about looking around for a party to join, but I didn't know how to find them, and anyway, I prefer single-player games for a reason.

While Avatar is improved from Oubliette, it doesn't do anything new or better in terms of things like story or NPCs. In fact, it does a bit worse, as it doesn't tell you anything about the game world, or even give it a name. It also lacks Oubliette's hirelings, which would have made the single-player experience a lot easier, and overall it's simply too difficult as a single-player game. But its more sophisticated than Oubliette in its economy, equipment, and limited quests. These positives and negatives almost cancel each other out, and Avatar ends up with a score of 32 on my GIMLET to Oubliette's 31.

The three original creators plus the later developers of Avatar seem to have enjoyed solid careers befitting their talent. Bruce Maggs went on to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon and Duke University; Andrew Shapira is a principal engineer at Amazon.com; David Sides has had a series of management positions in software development; Tom Kirchman has been the chief technology officer for two companies; Greg Janusz is the president of his own company; and Mark Eastom I can't find anywhere. But we're 5 for 6.

A single-player, commercial version of Avatar was released for Windows 1995, titled Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol. Judging by Wikipedia's entry, it seems to have preserved the classes, 15-level dungeon, and guild system while offering a boss enemy (the "Prince of Devils") to defeat in a main quest. I don't know what kind of deal (if any) developer David Allen worked out with the developers of Avatar, so I'm not sure whether the game is a blatant copyright violation or a nice homage. Either way, I'll play it in a few years.

Now that we've finished the early PLATO series, lets see what conclusions we can draw from the games in general. The following come to mind:

• The earliest CRPGs were based unabashedly on Dungeons & Dragons, liberally borrowing attributes, classes, and races. This adoption was immediate, with most of the computer games developed in the first two years of D&D's initial release.

• Yet the PLATO developers weren't slaves to D&D. They didn't hesitate to adjust combat rules, offer alternate attributes, throw in their own monsters (some adapted from other fantasy stories), invent their own items, and define their own experience tables.

• The PLATO games were built on a college campus using networked terminals. Given the setting, they weren't interested in isolated single-player gaming as much as a sense of community. Even the games that didn't allow cooperative multi-player still had leaderboards and discussion groups. The earliest CRPGs were thus, inescapably, multiplayer RPGs. Single-player games for non-networked computers had a more spontaneous generation as the PLATO CRPG era was coming to a close.

• Perhaps as an extension of the point above, there wasn't a single PLATO RPG that didn't feature permadeath. There were some--Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar--in which slain characters could be resurrected by other players, but none in which dead characters could be revived from a save point. (It didn't occur to me until now how late "reloading" came to CRPGs. Looking at my list, I think maybe the first game to feature it was Ultima in 1981.)

• Again, partly because of the multiplayer aspect, these games weren't concerned with ideas of "role-playing" as we think of them today. They didn't steep their games in history and lore or fill the dungeons with special encounters and NPCs. One wonders if these trappings arose precisely as a way to compensate for the lack of interaction with other human beings in offline play.

• The focus of these games--combat statistics, logistics, and permadeath--reflected the realities of pen-and-paper roleplaying at the time. You couldn't "reload" a slain tabletop D&D character, they must have reasoned. Why should you be able to do so on the computer?

• It was many years before the computing capabilities of home computers could match what was programmed on the PLATO mainframe. Some of the ones that did it the best took obvious inspiration from the PLATO games.

• None of the PLATO developers, despite all their work and great ideas, seem to have gone into gaming as a career. The one small exception is Jim Schwaiger, who participated in a commercial version of Oubliette.

• All the PLATO games featured excellent documentation.

Part of Avatar's help file, indicating what classes are available to which races.

Technically, though, we aren't done with PLATO. Cyber1's home page has an announcement about Camelot, a new PLATO RPG based on code originally developed in the 1980s. The home page lists copyright dates from 1982-2013, so I guess I'll call it a 1982 game and put it on the backtracking list.

Next up: either a return to Legend of Faerghail (if I can figure out the Amiga emulator) or an early start on Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday.

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Further reading: Check out my coverage of "the Earliest CRPGs" written in PLATO and available on Cyber1, including The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1974), The Game of Dungeons (aka "dnd," 1975), Orthanc (1975), Moria (1975), and Oubliette (1977). "The Game Archaeologist" covered PLATO games (not just RPGs) in August, and Matt Barton had an article on his experiences with the PLATO RPGs in 2007 plus a video review in 2009.