Wednesday, June 30, 2021

BRIEF: Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play

A PLATO terminal in a museum case at the University of Illinois; photo taken by the author in 2013.
        
This entry summarizes a series of 1970s mainframe games that have been so lost we don't even have screenshots. 
 
Before posting this entry, I scoured available books, magazines, web sites (including those archived), and message boards. I also asked several dozen PLATO authors, administrators, and former CRPG Addict contributors--everyone I could find--for any additional recollections about the games. I stopped only when I was confident there was nothing left to learn. If you have any new or conflicting information about any of the games below, I welcome your comments below or an e-mail to crpgaddict@gmail.com. I will update the information below with any new material discovered. However, please do not take it upon yourself to try to track down and contact any of the people listed here on my behalf; it is likely that I have already reached out and they either declined to respond or already told me all they could.
 
Except for Don Daglow's Dungeon, all the games listed below were written in a language called TUTOR for the PLATO educational mainframe hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (Some of the authors of these games come from schools that had PLATO links, like Purdue University, Iowa State University, and Indiana University.) Many of the games written on this system have been preserved and are playable today at Cyber1. Games that are not lost, and that I've already covered, include The Dungeon (1975), The Game of Dungeons (1975), Orthanc (1975), Moria (1975), Oubliette (1977), Swords and Sorcery (1978), Avatar (1979), and Camelot (1982).
   
Students began writing these games almost immediately after the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The developers were aware of the games being written by other students, and there was a healthy mix of cooperation and competition. It's tough to nail down specific dates, or a specific order, for some of the games because they were continuously updated throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. (Some of them, like Orthanc, even had new coding added well into the 2000s.) What is the "release year" of games developed under such circumstances? There was no distinction between "beta testing" and actual gameplay.
     
The other important thing to understand about these early games is that they were bootlegging computer space. In the early years, university administrators and system operators frowned upon wasting precious system resources for games (not an entirely unreasonable perspective given the number of stories I've heard about students neglecting their studies to write and play games). Authors tried to disguise their games by giving them educational-sounding names or prefixes used by the lesson spaces allotted to various university departments. pedit5 (The Dungeon) had that file name because it was created on the space allotted to the Population and Energy group. I don't know what the prefix for m199h meant, but that was almost certainly a file name, not the actual name of the game, just like almost no game in Daniel Lawrence's DND line, including Lawrence's, was actually called DND.
   
Many PLATO RPGs were started, deleted, re-started, and deleted again. When Reginald Rutherford's pedit5 was deleted, students re-created it as Orthanc. When Orthanc got axed, they brazenly followed up with Orthanc2. An entire series of games beginning with the word Think was chased off the system one by one and re-created. Eventually, university officials gave up and allowed the games to remain, which is why the post-1976 games are much better preserved, sometimes in multiple versions. 
    
m199h (1976, possibly earlier)
           
Long offered as the legendary lost "first" PLATO CRPG, recent evidence has suggested that instead it was a remake-expansion of The Dungeon ("pedit5") of 1975. Information about the game is inconsistent, many sources drawing from a note file on PLATO written by Dirk Pellett, one of the contributors to The Game of Dungeons. It covers the history of RPGs on PLATO. He says:
        
It is "common knowledge" that someone created the very first dungeon simulation game in a lesson called "m199h" which was NOT created by the account director for the purpose of gamers playing games. When it was discovered, it got the axe. Unfortunately, little else is known about m199h, either the author, or what it was like, and no known copy exists.
     
This would seem to be the source of Brian Dear's brief mention of the game (which he accidentally calls m119h) in The Friendly Orange Glow, the basis of numerous subsequent citations.
 
Adding to the mythology, a Cyber1 administrator wrote in the PLATO notes files in 2011 that "m199h" was based at least partly based on a game called Monster Maze written by a Terry O'Brian on a CDC 6600. My colleague, El Explorador de RPGs, demonstrated conclusively that in fact Monster Maze was based on "pedit5."

In August 2023, I was sent some screenshots and hand-copied images from the game by a contemporary player, as documented in the link above. I now believe.
   
  • "m199h" was the file name, but the proper name of the game was Dungeon.
  • It was created in 1976 and deleted by early 1977.
  • It was an expansion of The Dungeon ("pedit5") and thus not the first CRPG. It was a top-down dungeon crawler.
  • The main character was a combination fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief on a mission to get enough experience points to get into the Hall of Fame.
  • Its monster list included griffins, harpies, demons, dragons, deaths, wizards, werewolves, dwarves, thieves, Spirits of Christmas, vampires, dwarf wizards, medusas, cockatrices, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins, zombies, nazguls, and wraiths. Many of these shared the same graphics. There may also have been some punny monsters with names like "hisnia" and "yourgraine" (after hernia and migraine).
  • Its spell list promised every spell available in the Greyhawk supplement (March 1975) the D&D rules, whereas "pedit5" only offered about a third of them. Whether all of these spells were actually programmed is uncertain; "pedit5" had listed more than actually worked, with the yet-to-be-programmed spells identified in the instructions with an asterisk.
  • It introduced teleporters and chest traps.
    
For more information about the recent findings, see my October 2023 article. We still do not know who created it, but the file name suggests a lesson space reserved for the mathematics department.
        
Dungeon (1975)
     
Dungeon, credited to John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jon Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada, is in some ways as much of a mystery as m199h. John Daleske is famous in PLATO circles for creating Empire when he was an Iowa State University student in 1973. Numerous game histories and PLATO histories mention him and Empire, but none of them seem to be aware of Dungeon. The game doesn't show up in Dirk Pellett's history, either. I wouldn't have known about it at all except I was trying obvious keywords in PLATO, and up popped the title screen you see below. The copyright dates show that someone visited it as late as 2004.
      
The one game for which I can show an image.
      
In any event, the game doesn't seem to be any more than the title screen. The key commands that would normally run the program or take you to the documentation do nothing.
   
Daleske's notes say that the game was "incomplete," which is probably why we cannot play it today. He also says that it was a "predecessor to Moria," which currently has the distinction of being the earliest complete first-person, multi-character CRPG. Does "predecessor" mean that it inspired Moria or that it simply preceded it? 

Edit from December 2021: Commenter "half" managed to inspect some more elements of the file and extract and reassemble the game's icons:

      
half's analysis shows files edited as early as 1977 and as late as 2004.
    
Dungeon (1975)
      
Dungeon is the only game on this list not hosted on PLATO. It was written in 1975 or 1976 by Don Daglow, then a graduate student at Claremont University Center in California, on the university's DEC PDP-10. Daglow is one of the only student developers from this era to make a career in game design and programming. He worked for Mattel (programming for Intellivision titles) in the early 1980s and Electronic Arts in the mid- to late 1980s, where he produced Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set (1984) and wrote a module for it. After a brief stint at Brøderbund at the end of the decade, he founded Stormfront Studios and designed the two Savage Frontier games (1991 and 1992), Neverwinter Nights (1991), and Stronghold (1993), among many non-RPGs. Later switching to more of an executive role, he oversaw the production of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (2001) and Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone (2004), again among many others.
     
What we know about Dungeon goes back to May 1986, when Daglow wrote an article titled "The Dark Ages of Computer Game Design" for Computer Gaming World. Amid a long discussion about the difficulties programming games on overburdened mainframes and hiding them from system administrators, he mentions his "first adventure game, which continually updated a 40 x 80 map to show what your party had seen, so excruciatingly slow as to be unplayable." In a subsequent article in the August 1998 issue, he mentions that the game had "both ranged and melee combat, lines of sight, auto-mapping, and NPCs with discrete AI."
    
Daglow has dropped other tidbits in a variety of interviews, but the most complete account comes from a 2015 interview with a French blogger. Here, we learn that in contrast to endless randomly-generated content of his PLATO contemporaries, Daglow designed his Dungeon more like a Dungeons & Dragons module, with both fixed encounters and "wandering monsters" on a fixed map. It was a single-player game with a party of six characters. (Multiple players could huddle around the same computer and control their own characters, but that's not the same as the multiplayer experience on PLATO, where the students could literally communicate and cooperate from different terminals.) Daglow "religiously followed all the D&D rules," which included slow combat and even slower leveling ("getting to the 4th level was a big deal"). "Graphics" were all text characters. A lot of sites, including Wikipedia, seem to rely on this interview in reporting that Daglow's line-of-sight programming included considerations of torchlight and infravision, but I'm not sure that's exactly what Daglow says in the interview. Specifically, he says that rules about lighting and infravision in D&D inspired his use of line-of-sight in the game, but not necessarily that he implemented those specific features. Nonetheless, I suppose we can extrapolate based on his claims of strict adherence to D&D rules.
    
Some sites continue to report Daglow's Dungeon as the "first computer role-playing game," a status that remains uncertain without more clarification of the dates of his game. But I don't get the sense from his writings and interviews that his Dungeon was played to the extent that the PLATO games were played. The Dungeon, Orthanc, and The Game of Dungeons, all 1975 contemporaries, had thousands of eager players competing for playing time and saved game slots. We also have recollections from dozens of actual players of the PLATO games (and can, of course, play many of them ourselves right now), whereas we have only Daglow's recollections on Dungeon. I don't mean this to cast doubt on Daglow's account, just to emphasize that the PLATO games had an influence--felt directly in later commercial titles like Wizardry (1981)--that Dungeon did not, and I would thus continue to favor them as the true "first CRPGs."
      
The Think Series (1975-1977)
      
The Think series was a succession of games, or variants of the same game, with file names like Think2 and Think15. Don Gillies told me that they had been written by students of the University Laboratory High School (basically a high school run by the University of Illinois). The original was written by a Jim Mayeda. As with many of the other early RPGs, the file names were meant to disguise from university administrators the fact that the file contained a game; the lesson spaces had been created for programs to teach students about programming. The games supposedly took the grid-based gameplay of Mike Mayfield's Star Trek (1971) and ported it to a high-fantasy wilderness setting. The files were eventually deleted, but Don Gillies used the concept to write Swords and Sorcery (1978), which I covered in 2019.
     
DND World (1976, maybe late 1975)
     
DND World is another lost PLATO game written by now-retired Boeing engineer Fred Banks. Inspired by The Dungeon ("pedit5"), it took place on an outdoor map. A party of characters, controlled by a single player, explored the world, fought randomly-generated monsters, and gained in experience and treasure. Characters acted sequentially in combat. There was no winning condition. In an email to me, Banks said that the character avatars were randomly-generated, with classes and attributes following Dungeons & Dragons rules. He also said that, the overworld was "based on an octagonal circular grid, thus allowing the person to come back to the original position by walking the same direction," something that I cannot wrap my mind around. Banks did not lock the code, and other students were free to copy it and make their own modifications.

Monster Maze (1976, maybe late 1975)
     
Knowledge of this game came from El Explorador de RPG's research into the earliest PLATO games. For a while, it looked like it might pre-date The Dungeon on PLATO, making it the earliest known RPG. But El Explorador was able to show that the reverse as true: author Terry O'Brien created it on the CDC 6600 at Indiana University after being exposed to The Dungeon (1975; also known as "pedit5") on PLATO. The game is simplified from The Dungeon, copying the same backstory but using an all-text interface, no secret doors, no winning condition, and a slightly different spell/combat system. El Explorador was able to get access to a private server with a recreation of the game's code, and I would regard his coverage (linked above) as complete.

Pits of Baradur (1976 or 1977)
     
The limited information we have about Pits of Baradur mostly seems to come from a single source: a Griffith M. Morgan III, who wrote an article about the PLATO games in the Spring 2012 issue of the hobby magazine Irregular. He says that the game was created by his two friends, Justin Grunau and Michael Stecyk, and that he himself had designed one of the dungeon levels. Morgan is almost certain the same person as "Blackmoor," who provided essentially the same information on a message board in 2019, adding only that the file name was "baradur." Per recollections of a former student in the comments section below, it was apparently a top-down dungeon crawl (thus in the "pedit5" Dungeon line), "Tolkien-themed, brutally hard, not partiularly fun, and not super popular."
   
Bugs and Drugs (1978)
     
Image from Brian Dear's The Friendly Orange Glow,
      
Brian Dear has a little more information about this Game of Dungeons reskin by medical students Mike Gorback and David Tanaka. It predictably used the lesson name bnd. Instead of a dungeon, the game took place in a hospital. "As you walked the corridors of the hospital, you would encounter 'monsters,' but in bnd they were bacteria or germs, and your 'weapons' to fight them were various antibiotics." Dear is the sole source on this one, but Gorback confirmed the game (without supplying any more details) in an Amazon product review. In the comments section below, former student Felix Gallo says that it was ostensibly meant to be educational.
 
[Edit: Bugs and Drugs turned up! My coverage starts here.]
   
Educational Dungeon (1979)
     
Yet another game that someone decided had to be added to MobyGames despite the only thing we know about it being the author's assertion that it once existed (apparently for the PDP-10). Wikipedia, with no citation, asserts that the game was: "An attempt to make rote computer-aided instruction (CAI) programs more interesting by taking Dungeon and making correct answers propel the story." An article on Game Developer says that it was based on an earlier game. I have it on full authority that that earlier game was an RPG for Windows 11 called Vedder's Folly (1976), and thus I expect that MobyGames will be willing to list it based solely on this vague assertion.

KARNATH (1979)
    
I wouldn't know anything about this game if not for El Explorador de RPG, and everything I do know is from his article; I haven't been able to find any other sources:

KARNATH was created on a CDC Cyber ​​computer at the University of Minnesota by Tom Arachtingi with a friend while he was studying there, around 1979. It was a text-only multiplayer dungeon crawler game, inspired by the tabletop role-playing game The Fantasy Trip [1977]/

The dungeon was a cube of 16 levels, each with 16x16 rooms, and was randomly generated each time the person running the game started a new game. Players could chat with each other and receive automatic messages about each other's level ups or deaths.

Today the game is gone, but the main author keeps hard copies of the code and apparently tried to translate it into Java without success.
     
Drygulch (1980)
    
Drygulch is perhaps the best-documented game in this list, partly because it was developed as a commercial product. (Here I am continuing to rely on Dear's well-researched book.) In the mid-1970s, Control Data Corporation (CDC), which had been supplying hardware and software for the PLATO system for years, obtained a license from the University of Illinois to commercialize PLATO. Around 1980, the company began selling home terminals and terminal software for micro-computers, plus a service called "Homelink" that allowed home computers to connect to CDC's data center for $5 per hour.
   
The service failed for a variety of reasons, but one of its outcomes was Drygulch, a western-themed MMO written by CDC employee Mike Johnson. A write-up in the November 1984 Antic magazine describes the gameplay:
    
PLATO's Drygulch is set in an Old West town. You are a miner trying to live long and prosper, which is not easy when hazards abound in the mines and in the wastelands surrounding the town. You must eat and drink enough to keep healthy, make sure you have enough prospecting equipment, etc. There are elections for sheriff, mayor, and mine inspector. Each position offers potential for added fun and profit.
    
The game featured stores, a stable, a hotel, a jail, and a cemetery. Players could play good or bad characters, and the former could bounty-hunt the latter and send them to jail. The interface contrasted a two-dimensional town with a three-dimensional mine that served in place of a dungeon, allowing players to fight enemies and return with heaps of gold.
   
As Drygulch was played well into the mid-1980s, I can't help but think that some photographs, if not screen shots, must still exist somewhere, but there don't seem to be any online. I don't know why Drygulch wasn't preserved by efforts like Cyber1, but I suspect it's because the game was owned by CDC and not the University of Illinois. 
   
Emprise (1980)
    
Another lost PLATO game to which we owe everything to El Explorador, whose research in this area has been unimpeachable: "Emprise was created on PLATO in 1980 by John T. Bryan, Laura J. Bryan, and Walter G. Brooks. It was a multiplayer dungeon crawling game with first-person graphics simulating 3 dimensions similar to, and inspired by, Avatar."
 
Tunnels and Trolls (1980)
    
And yet another from El Explorador: "Created on PLATO in 1980 by Mike Medved, James Foster and more authors, probably based on the tabletop role-playing game of the same name, published in 1975. It consisted of a dungeon 15 levels deep with considerably more items and types of monsters than Oubliette, which seems to have been the authors' other source of inspiration."


92 comments:

  1. Drygulch almost sounds like it could be the grandfather of Sierra's ImagiNation Network role-playing games. Alas, INN was also a service that failed for a variety of reasons, but I have fond memories of playing Red Baron online.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting article, totally lost artifact. I was surprised by the number of games that existed on mainframe.

    Another graveyard of video games is the French minitel, I don't think any was preserved even though there were hundreds of them. Most were terrible quality and there were only an handful of RPG (almost always multiplayer - same system as mainframe) but still.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder how many other systems like PLATO were out there and hosted DND-derivatves written by eager students in the 1970s, but we don't remember them because they weren't as well-preserved as PLATO.

      Delete
    2. Rereading these threads with the recent revelations... how many other 1970s mainframe systems had the capacity and audience to host a potential CRPG? I've always had the sense that PLATO was somewhat unique in its graphical capacity and networking abilities to make this happen. That said, there is the mysterious Dungeon by Daglow that is referenced but not extant... I suppose other systems were around that could run CRPGs... I'm afraid my first memory of a computer was around 1978-9 when the middle school installed a pair of TRS-80 Model I's in the library! And I was 7 at the time!

      Delete
  3. The Plato terminals were alive and well into the early 1990s. I have vague recollections of a Plato terminal running on Macs, as the terminals became scarce.

    Also - don't forget about the 'games' that were used for teaching. I do remember an archeology class - forget which, since I took several of them, that had an online dig. You had a big grid, and you decided where to dig, and funds were subtracted from your account to finance the dig. If you found anything, it would be rendered on the screen, and you can then dig around to see if you could find anything else interesting. You were supposed to submit a paper based on your findings. You could also try to secure more funds by petitioning the professor. If he liked your proposal, you'd get more funds to continue your dig.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The first "management game" (which was influential on both RPGs and strategy games of all sorts) was an educational simulation:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sumerian_Game

      And, of course, war games themselves originated as an educational and planning tool for the actual military. A lot of game genres owe their origins to more practical products.

      Delete
    2. I was born in 78 and have vivid memories of using a program called Logos to animate geometric designs on a primitive Apple in the 80's. Monochrome monitor. Yeah, that's the totality of my street cred around here.
      This was an interesting trip into something that's not in my wheelhouse. Very cool blog, great write up, good commentary. Bookmarked.

      Delete
  4. Can't help but think of all those overzealous system administrators deleting all these games which are now forever lost to history as being a little similar to those people who used to burn Egyptian mummies for fuel. So much of the early heritage of video games is all lost because these unimaginative short-sighted spoilsports were more concerned with making sure students were doing their homework on time. I hope they feel good about themselves.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. To be fair, we're also talking about a time when computing time and memory space was a lot more valuable. I'd compare it more to someone throwing away a pile of papers littering a classroom that turned out to contain an author's unfinished manuscript - tragic, but understandable.

      Delete
    2. I can't help but detect the distinct scent of the nasty troll that keeps getting his comments deleted. The last sentence is a dead giveaway - it's how the troll doesn't feel, and why he keeps posting things to make everyone else feel like he does.

      Delete
    3. Yeah, I have to agree with Ian. It's a bit like saying I should leave the graffiti on my garage because the artist might turn out to be the next Banksy. There's no way the administrators could have known that they were seeing the birth of a new genre, that's not what the system was for anyway, and it was having a measurable effect on academic performance.

      Delete
    4. You don't burn Egyptian mummies for fuel anyway - you grind them up and snort them through the nose, like a British Gentleman.

      Delete
    5. Another thing Egyptian mummies were used for: paint. Ground up and turned into a pigment called 'Mummy Brown'. Think about that next time you visit the art museum to look at some Pre-Raphaelite paintings. You are literally seeing dead people.

      Delete
    6. Memory, storage, and processing capacity were just so limited! The PLATO story is well documented in "The Friendly Orange Glow" by Brian Dear for those interested. I read it when it came out and it was very enlightening.

      Delete
    7. Still, programming is hard. And making any game is an accomplishment resulting from focus and dedication from a human person. Even if the resources are valuable, I would want to give the author a chance to archive all that work somehow, not just delete it.

      I don't think the analogy of throwing away papers littering a classroom works. This is an art project taking up space in the corner of the classroom.

      Delete
    8. Consider the perspective of the people who needed those resources for other, more legitimate projects. They also needed the space and processing power, often for theses/dissertation work. Them complaining that they couldn't do the work may have been what drove the admins to delete the games. I know a woman who worked on Plato stuff at UIUC around this time and getting time on a terminal was a constant consideration for her. Imagine how frustrating it would be to realize that you can't work on your dissertation because a cohort of students is playing m199h all the time.

      Delete
    9. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    10. There's always cheaper storage... they had tapes that were slow and difficult, but could archive stuff you don't need access to. The compute resources could be conserved while not destroying data. From a storage perspective, also, even then, these games were still probably tiny.

      I know I come at this with decades of hindsight, but destroying data is an irreversible action. That just seems to be way disproportionate to the crime. A permanent solution to a temporary problem...

      Delete
    11. I feel like to expand the classroom metaphor, this is less throwing away a student's art project and more throwing out a comic they made using the school's resources while in math class. Sure, it's something they made, but it was made with supplies that were supposed to be used for teaching, at a time they're supposed to be learning something completely different.

      While cheaper storage existed at the time, why would PLATO admins archive something that to them wasn't even supposed to be on there at all? To them it was just taking up space that was supposed to be used for actual lessons, and distracting students from what they were actually supposed to be doing.

      Personally, I graduated from high school in 2015, and grew up with computers in school being fairly normal. A lot of this feels like the 70s equivilant of doing things like blocking Youtube or preventing Minecraft from being installed, where at the end of the day those aren't what the computers are there for and the people running it are going to do what they can to make sure they're used for education. To me, these games make me think of the Minecraft world I had in my Java class: it wasn't what I was there to do, it distracted me from actual assignments, and while losing access to it was a shame, it wasn't my computer and the school whatever they wanted with it. Now, that didn't stop me from playing Nethack because these things were running XP or were Macs and the command prompt wasn't locked down, but from the sounds of it PLATO games getting deleted didn't stop anyone either.

      Delete
    12. Very well-argued Twibat. It's too bad that the system administrators didn't realize that they were on the frontier of a new art form, but I don't think they deserve to be condemned for doing their jobs.

      Delete
    13. This might be a Lawful/Chaotic alignment split.

      Shredding a comic that a student made using (let's even say expensive) math supplies still seems pretty harsh to me... But, my son scribbles mindlessly on a scrap of paper and we put it up on the fridge.

      Delete
    14. Everything gets lost to time eventually. And digital storage, even tape, is not very suitable for long term preservation when compared e.g. to a stone tablet. When archeologists research this era in a few thousand years, they might find little information, but lots of plastic.

      Delete
    15. The mummy metaphor is somewhat ironic because mummies, themselves, were sometimes made of discarded papyrus fragments, some of which seem to contain very rare and important texts (like new poems from Sappho! Very early biblical manuscripts! - but the provenance of these documents is unclear. This article in the Atlantic about the possibly fraudulent biblical scholar Dirk Obbink is fascinating reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/). The creators of the mummies thought the documents were worthless and the mummy cartouche was valuable; unscrupulous scholars today think the documents are worth more and destroy the cartouches to try to retrieve them. And what's more, both groups may have been right when they made those decisions. How were they to know every copy of Sappho's works would be lost and they would only survive in fragments and citations?

      It's hard to blame the system administrators for not seeing the historical value of these early games, especially since none of them seem to be masterpieces based on these descriptions. This seems like a somewhat different case than the people playing the predecessors of Zork on mainframes, who must have known they were on to something special.

      Delete
    16. That article doesn't support the notion that anything potentially useful was used for mummy wrappings. The references to works of Sappho and others are to finds of loose papyrus, and it is quite specific that most of the paper found in mummy masks was worthless ephemera.

      Delete
    17. Fragments of Sappho poems were certainly found in mummy wrappings in 2004 in a papyrus held at the University of Cologne (This was published as P.Koln XI 429+430). It's likely that Obbink was copying this discovery when inventing a new provenance for his fragments. It's also possible that they were in fact originally found in a cartouche, but their provenance is uncertain because they were smuggled. In any case, the general idea that important texts were sometimes used for mummy wrappings is certainly true.

      Delete
    18. The Liber Linteus, the longest extant Etruscan text, was used as mummy wrapping: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus

      Delete
    19. The initial post about mummies being burned may have actually been referring to the Nag Hammadi codex. Read under 'Discovery'.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library?wprov=sfla1

      This doesn't really change the point of burning things that someone else will find important, but interesting anyway.

      Delete
    20. Rather than assuming we lost countless treasures though, I tend to think that much of what was valuable or popular persisted. Including roguelikes, which are born from similar ground as this.

      Delete
  5. I tend to favor the line of reasoning that m199h was never a functioning game... or that it could have been Dungeon. Or that it was a variant of The Dungeon that died quickly.

    I think Pellet wrote the article I read recently discussing the timeline of The Dungeon and The Game of Dungeons that made no mention of an earlier game that actually worked.

    I don't think we'll ever have a definitive answer unless somebody comes up with some new printouts at this point.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree. I wrote this entry as a kind-of catharsis, to put any fretting about those vanished games behind me and move on.

      Delete
    2. Nice to know a pretty solid answer is out there now... And that the answer is a variant of The Dungeon / pedit5 that died pretty quickly. Cool!

      Delete
  6. bnd was a reskin of =dnd that was ostensibly intended to teach medical students about treatment mechanisms. So instead of casting spells at monsters, you chose medicines to defeat bacteria/viruses/etc. The monsters you fought started out as common bugs, but then pretty soon you had to bust out the arcane antibiotics in order to defeat them. You also built up resistance to antibiotics over time which shortened your stay in the dungeon.

    m199h sounds like it could have been a lesson name used for a particular section of a particular class (e.g. math 199, section h) but then repurposed/hacked to be this game instead. That was fairly common on PLATO.

    Source: author of navatar, #2 all time Empire HOF (go Orions!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was hoping that this entry would attract some people who had played the games in the day. I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly! Thanks for your recollections, Felix. I'm surprised that those games still existed on PLATO as late as your years at the university.

      Delete
    2. PLATO was still going strong at UIUC CERL when I left. dnd, bnd, moonwar, adventl (adventure), empire. By the time I graduated in..92?, empire was dying but avatar was resurgent. I helped write & design the 3rd version of avatar (I invented the 'afterlife' and warlocks) with Andrew Shapira and others -- larger maps, more baddies. Opinions were mixed, and many stuck with oavatar. Around that time, someone got busted for cloning avatar and selling it; if I remember correctly, some of the avatar authors were convinced that wizardry was a ripoff of avatar, but it was different enough that they decided not to sue.

      on PLATO, because it was a mainframe and intended for computer based instruction, there were frequently sites (computer centers) where games were restricted during peak hours. We treasured finding those sites where restrictions were lax or set up wrong, and also finding games that were either in hacked versions of lesson storage or were educational games that were still fun. Bugs'n'Drugs was one such that was frequently not restricted, but which was fun to play anyway. You just had to make sure an operator didn't see you and restrict the game. Fun times. Thanks for the memories.

      Delete
  7. also, baradur was a top down dungeon crawl, tolkien themed, brutally hard, not particularly fun and not super popular. Oubliette and later avatar eclipsed it quickly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has more information about Baradur than the total of everything that existed previously.

      Delete
    2. It's nice to know Baradur actually existed...

      Delete
    3. Dan Schuller, who has an overview on the early PLATO CRPGs on his site (https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/index.html) with pages including information on each game and links, including to this blog, was able to ask co-creator Justin Grunau about 'Pits of Baradur' in a 2021 Twitter conversation linked on that game's page on his (Schuller's) site.

      Justin Grunau: "It was 2D top-down, but I hard-coded the dungeon levels which I had designed on paper; machine generation didn’t occur to me back then at age 15-16. My friend Mike and I coded it. I drew the monsters etc as best I could & I named it."

      Delete
  8. I feel these games' unavailability is all that's keeping them desirable and famous. If we could actually play them, I bet many would get the same kind of review as The Dark Kingdom did.

    Also: $5/hour for computer time in 1980 dollars. That's $16.33 today. Plus a phone line (I guess) for the communication, plus the cost for the hardware, plus it becoming useless junk when they went out of business. 20 hours of gaming a month would set you back a cool $325.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I almost never do this, but I think I need to edit that Dark Kingdom entry to be less negative. It was 1980, after all. Everything being published in that era was pioneering.

      Delete
  9. More discussion on HackerNews

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27690504

    ReplyDelete
  10. It seems like whenever something truly brand-new is invented, the earliest examples get lost to time because the people who would care to preserve it haven't found it yet.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Various people over the years have commented that the innovator in (or creator of) a product space is very rarely the market leader. I think this applies here, too. I have often wondered if this is because the innovator is a "look what I built!" person and the market leaders are those done by "wow, let's sell that!" people.

      Delete
    2. Sometimes it is a simple case of innovators not being good at selling their concept, while somebody with that ability scoops it out from under them (Xerox and the Macintosh, for example). Sometimes the innovative product is just too clunky to use and it takes serious refinement to make it mass-market ready (early MP3 players vs the iPod). And sometimes it takes an Established Name to get somebody to try a new product no matter what.

      Delete

  11. I have nothing substantive to add -- in the 1970s my interests did not include playing CRPGs -- but I love well-researched posts like this. There are few things that I enjoy more than reading about obscure historical topics. Kudos!

    ReplyDelete
  12. OCD is compelling me to ask you to number the BRIEFs, please? I need numbers.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Had to share... from the PLATO IV reference manual:

    "Of the five senses, only tasting the terminal is not advised. Although smelling the terminal is permissible, it does not appear to be of any great benefit educationally. You can, however, with rather pleasant results, see, hear, and touch it."

    https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED124144.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  14. Have you ever played any BBS door games?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One, but on a simulated BBS door, not an actual one.

      Delete
  15. Whao!

    You can still access the PLATO games.

    Magical times back then. Plasma Screens, messaging, email, printers, and much more.

    dnd was very fun.

    Yeah, I helped a tiny bit on Baradur. It was fun as heck watching Justin and Mike work on it.

    Fun times back then being surrounded by geniuses and feeling like the stupid one in the room.

    I recall at one point they even used a command to turn on the Microfiche projector when you went to the ethereal plane where the invisible stalkers lived.

    It would make a loud clunk and your orange plasma screen would be back lit with a green hue.

    I still run the weekly Sunday night Empire battles, dubbed Griff war in my honor. Dungeon games are kind of lame and always will be. Head to head fighting over a universe is where it's at. Most gamers are too weak for that kind of action though.

    Get a sign on and come play: cyber1.org

    And yes, I am a bit sarcastic most times.

    Recent history on computer dungeons games seem to overlook Future War which deserves its place in the genre.

    Griff

    Oh oh, blatant product promo to follow:
    https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sobfinal/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I started covering Future War on my own blog (http://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2020/04/game-42-futurewar-1977.html?m=1). It's definitely an RPG - stat-based combat, progression by earning experience, inventory, etc., even though it looks like a primitive 3d shooter. I got derailed from it because of a bug that meant the stairs from level 4 weren't granting access to level 5. It's been fixed since then and it's on my list to get back to at some point.

      Delete
  16. What a great article! I worked on some games while at UC Irvine 1979-81 (I didn’t graduate — long story). We didn’t have Plato but I believe we had a Dec/10 and/or PDP/11. When I left school I made sure I had printouts but sadly, I have no idea where they are now. I was more interested in space games than dnd, so that’s what I worked on. My last one was a variant of Missile Command where you had to launch escape ships and save your colonists before the dome over your space colony was destroyed. You could also target the incoming missiles and shoot them down, giving you more time to launch rockets, but you couldn't launch both defensive missiles and escape rockets at the same time. (It was called IO after Jupiter’s moon, but also because the file name could be construed as being related to Input/Output.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I attended the North Carolina Governor's School East at St. Andrew's Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, NC in the summer of 1981. It was a wonderful experience, and one of the highlights was getting to play with the computer system they had. It was, I believe, a PDP-11. And there were a number of games on there. I don't specifically recall any CRPG games, but I do recall Eliza, and some kind of multiplayer spaceship game. That was also the summer I discovered D&D, so my experience was the genesis of a whole lot of wasted time through the 80s, 90s and beyond.

      Delete
  17. This is why I'm here. Great article and comments.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "In 2016, one of my sources wrote to me that he had discovered, in some forgotten boxes, printouts of screen captures of all the spells and "graphics characters" used in m199h" - My mind is trying to grasp why someone would dangle that carrot before you, only to then say... no, you, nor anybody else shall see them! Like why mention them to you at all? Is there cause to believe it was a lie simply to antagonise you?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Chet mentions this on the missing games page (referenced on the sidebar) in the comments.

      Argh... wish the dude had come through or just said he was mistaken!

      Delete
    2. No, I don't think he was trolling. He helped me out on some other things. I think he just never found time to prioritize scanning a bunch of documents for an anonymous guy on the Internet.

      Delete
    3. Are these the records you just posted in the new article? I'm assuming they are! And if so... pretty nice to really have good evidence establishing what m199h actually was and when!

      Delete
  19. Please excuse me if this has come up before, but has Chet written anything on muds yet? In mid 90s I found them really interesting, but too repetitive for my young self. They are probably the next multiplayer CRPG step after PLATO.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2017/02/game-241-neverwinter-nights-1991.html

      He did cover Neverwinter Knights which was an early online game... not sure if it was a mud?

      Jimmy at the Digital Antiquarian did the old British game called MUD.

      https://www.filfre.net/tag/mud/

      I don't think either of them has gone forward in time enough for the MUDs of the 90s...

      Delete
    2. I covered MicroMUD, a single-player version of the original MUD:

      http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2018/02/game-282-micromud-1988.html

      I really consider MUDs and MMOs a fundamentally different experience--some of them aren't even RPGs--and thus they have not appeared on my list.

      Delete
  20. Is there a specific reason the photograph of the PLATO system at the top of this entry is posted with such a low resolution?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. I secretly hate my readers.

      Delete
    2. Sorry, that's not a secret.

      Delete
    3. My first thought was "wow that is really high-res, is he playing a modern game now?"

      Delete
    4. I thought it was for retro people on dial-up

      Delete
    5. When I go to a museum with my wife, she usually ends up waiting for me at the exit for an hour or so. That's because she browses through the exhibits, while I try to read ALL the documenting text. I would have loved to be able to read what's written there.

      Delete
    6. Ii just tracked down the original photo and uploaded it. It's still hard to read the text. I'm not sure what I used to take it--it was 8 years ago.

      Delete
    7. Very cool. Many thanks! :)

      Delete
    8. Fwiw: I certainly feel less hated now, intended or not.

      Delete
  21. ULB - Université Libre de Bruxelles - Belgium had two Control Data mainframes (CDC 720 and 750) as well as a room full of Plato terminals. Students were even payed to program educational stuff in Tutor language. The Dungeon and Dragons game was available after hours I believe.
    The Plato terminal screens were mostly b/w A4 portrait.
    Not sure if any color terminal existed.
    There was a b/w terminal that could project color slides from the back of the crt onto the crt screen !
    The geography lessons would teach you that France was about the size of Texas !
    I brought an elderly family member to show her what computers could do !
    Few members of the public had any clues about what computers were at all at the time. I wrote programs on punch cards before gaining access to Televideo terminals...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I used those terminals with the slides! Legend has it someone used the command to change slides to get the terminals to provide sound effects for a game.
      Also, in the early 80s the Center for Music Research at FSU had a single color PLATO terminal

      Delete
  22. An absolutely vital post. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  23. I made some research at cyber1 in 2018 and found other games: medcentr (like bnd), futurewar (futuristic rpg), tkm (like sorcery), labyrinth (like moria), wilderness (like sorcery), crypt (roguelike), and some other games that didn't survived like emprise, krozair or journey (this one I found very bad screenshots).

    My findings are all recollected here:

    https://exploradorrpg.wordpress.com/plataformas/plato/

    In spanish, sorry, but you can translate with google.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for letting us know about your site, and for posting the results of your research. I'll have to look into some of these additional games.

      Delete
    2. Thanks to you for this blog, it inspired me to make my site and all that research.

      I have found obscure games for other platforms too. For example, you played Lord of the Balrogs by Bob Chappell, but the original game was Lord of the Dragons for the PET, copyright 1980 (or 81, I don't remember now). And it was not his first crpg, in the same disk or tape image is his previous game from the same year: Sorcerer's Castle (not the text adventure).

      I will update my site with these and other games when family and work let me.

      Delete
    3. @Explorador: Do these 'Journey' screenshots on your site ("possibly the only PLATO Journey screenshots in existence") come from https://www.requnix.com/the-origins-of-modern-online-gaming (same caption in English) or did you two have a joint source - in which case it would be interesting to know more about it?

      Delete
    4. Sorry, I didn't read your comment at the time.

      If I remember correctly, I took the screenshots, author's name and avatar relation from the author's site (or maybe it was his son's site), but it's been 5 years and my memory may fail.

      The site you linked doesn't mention the author, but it probably had the same source. In any case, I can't find that source online now...

      Delete
    5. The other option is that I merged David Allen with the author (or author's son) in my memory... In that case the screenshot is from his site, and the other info from Cyber1 notesfiles.

      Delete
    6. By the way, following this comment I tried to find the source from which I got the name of the author of "journey" without success, so I'm pretty sure I read it in the Cyber1 notesfiles.

      What I did find, since it is not a very common name, is a more than possible reference to the author in Byte magazine of March 1980:

      https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Consumer/Archive-Byte-IDX/IDX/80s/Byte-1980-03-IDX-184.pdf

      And I say that it is more than possible because he happened to be an inmate at the correctional center in Sheridan, Illinois, where they would have access to PLATO:

      https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/archive/Alessi_1982.pdf

      Delete
  24. I managed to find out a little more about the mysterious PLATO game "Dungeon" by John Daleske. I was intrigued by those beautiful graphics of mysterious figures hiding in the battlements and had to find out more...

    Try typing "dungeon" at the prompt, but instead of hitting return, hit LAB. You will be shown a number of resources from the game. These reveal author details ("John Daleske", account="jdala") and date information (the visible resources were definitely last edited in 1977 and 2004, with the overall date string being hand set to "11/04/1975", as displayed on the title screen). There is code that draws the random stars in the background of the title screen, and I think code that draws the battlements, and perhaps other parts.

    Most interesting to me is that the figures lurking in the battlements are present, including their legs and other parts obscured in the title image. They are made from a kind of tile based font, where different letters typed bring up parts of the bodies of the figures (typically each is 2x2 grid of parts), rather like how Garriott did Ultima. I pieced together all the images and will send you them via email. They are really beautiful and evocative. However, I recognised one of them from pedit5, and then discovered that others were used in dnd, moria, and orthanc. It is quite possible they all come from other PLATO games (though vaguely possible the other games got them from here). Suspiciously, two of the 4 duplicate font files are named 'moria' (and the other two 'dungeon'). All were last modified in 1977.

    Finally, some of the font pieces are for walls and doors and secret doors
    (and two other dungeon pieces). These are clearly top-down dungeon pieces and look a lot like small versions of those in pedit5. I'm not sure if they provide evidence of this being a top-down game or not (they may come from some other game, e.g. from an automap). They are a bit too small to go with the drawings of the characters.

    None of this provides decisive evidence about whether there was actually a working game here, and the official timestamps only prove that some things were in place by 1977. But it is interesting none-the-less.

    An intriguing possibility is that it appears a system admin can edit the game program, which might reveal more information. You may want to approach a cyber1 admin and ask if they can dig around a bit for the sake of gaming history. Alternatively, you could check with Daleske, as it can also be edited if he enters his security code for the lesson (if he remembers it!).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. half, thanks for these additional discoveries and the images you sent me by email, which I am incorporating into the entry above. Sorry it took me so long to get to it.

      Delete
  25. Looking at the title screen for Daleske's 1975 Dungeon, I noticed that the clock is animated and tells the time, and if it is day time, then instead of a moon, you get a sun in the sky and its position changes as time passes. Could this be the best title screen of the era? This kind of "living world" title screen is a lovely and deep detail for a game, and rarely seen until the 1990s.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting info here and above, half! Oh, and I use cyber 1 as well <3

      Delete
  26. Yep I played Bugs and Drugs a little back in the day. It was definitely meant to be educational. Not being a med student, I was quickly frustrated at my random guesses at which antibiotics to use to counter bacteria found in the hallways of the hospital, and quit. I think when you logged in it stated that the objective of the game was educational.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Coming back every few years and checking in is always a delight. You have no doubt become the defacto CRPG record on the net. Archaeological Records like this entry are a genuine delight or learning.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Might I suggest an update to this post at the top that points to your most recent post on m199h?

    That way readers of this will easily find that one as well.

    ReplyDelete
  29. On the Plato system at the University of Western Australia, there was a somewhat playable game that was demoed to me in the late 1980s called Voyager. SF theme that felt a lot like GDW Traveller (even down to character creation) written by Chris? Twiss. Fun times!

    ReplyDelete
  30. I wonder what Dave might have in his Large Scale Systems Museum (LSSM) along these lines?
    Their website:

    https://www.mact.io

    ReplyDelete
  31. Sadly, it looks as though John Daleske passed away in Aug 2023. His obit mentions his love for, and work on, CRPGs: https://www.stumpfffuneral.com/obituary/john-daleske

    ReplyDelete
  32. A great post that brought back a lot of memories! I was a university high school, UNI, student from 1974 to 1979, it was a 7th through 12th grade program at the time. Some of the folks you mentioned were classmates, and many of us went on to be game designers, programmers etc. The program for younger students at UNI at the time was very computer focused. We spent mornings learning programming, computer construction, and many of our classes used the UI computer facilities. I have no doubt that having 12 and 13-year-olds descending into the PLATO lab was alternately frustrating and highly annoying for the countless academics and university classes that also wanted to use the resources, which as you say, were scarce, slow, and coveted. The memories that stick out were finding, hacking, and making our own games, then finding them deleted, rebuilding them, etc. There were actual school projects as well, which we would bend to our own purposes.
    D&D hit Uni my first year and the confluence of programming, PLATO, and RPGs was a match to dry tinder.
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I appreciate your recollections. It's always great to hear stories from people who were there at the dawn of the genre.

      Delete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

3. NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread. If you don't want to log in to Google to comment, either a) choose the "Name/URL" option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank, or b) sign your anonymous comment with a preferred user name in the text of the comment itself.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.