Game 421: Dungeons and Dragons #1 (1977)

 

The title "screen" in an interface that recreates the appearance of the original teletype. Note that Garriott must have assumed I'd play the game, and thus included code to boot out any player named "Chester."

       

Dungeons and Dragons #1

United States

Independently developed by Richard Garriott; never published except recently, as source code

Written with a teletype interface for a CDC-6000*, reaching its final version in 1977

Re-written from printed source code and given a new interface by Santiago Zapata in 2014

Date Started: 18 June 2021

Date Ended: 18 June 2021

Total Hours: 2
Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) unless you hit a wrong key
Final Rating: 4
Ranking at Time of Posting: 1/428 (0%)
*Thanks to El Explorador de RPG for determining that it was a CDC-6000 and not a PDP-11 as commonly reported.

      

In its efforts to catalogue everything--even unplayable, unfinished, unreleased, and just rumored--MobyGames has included Dungeons and Dragons #1 by Richard Garriott. (For anyone very new to this world: Garriott is one of the most revered CRPG developers, responsible for the Ultima series, in which he appears as "Lord British.") The story as it exists on the Shroud of the Avatar blog is that Garriott's father promised him a new Apple II if Garriott could write a working RPG. Garriott used the only tool available to him, a teletype at his high school connected by modem to a CDC-6000, and wrote Dungeons and Dragons #1. Over the years, he tried 28 more variations, until attempt #29 became Akalabeth: World of Doom (1980).

     

The type of machine on which Garriott programmed this game, from the Shroud of the Avatar blog.

        

As often happens in this era, the title of the game has been confused on multiple sites, including MobyGames, with its program name, which was DND1. Let's be clear about this once again: The name of a game is what's printed on the title screen, not what you type to get it to run. It's The Dungeon, not "pedit5"; The Game of Dungeons, not "dnd"; Pool of Radiance, not "poolrad"; and Dungeons and Dragons #1, not "DND1." And yes, I verified that was the title in the original code.

    

In any event, Garriott printed the program before he left high school and had it in a closet for years. In 2014, he scanned and published it on the Shroud of the Avatar site, offering a "Citizen Level Pledge Reward worth approximately $550" for the programmer who could create the best modern version that remained faithful to the original code. Two runners up got rewards at a lesser level. There were two winners, one (Mundi King) for a web version and one (Richard Flemming) for a Unity game engine version. Of the two, only King's is still online, but King changed a lot of stuff from the original code, including the name of the game. Like my colleague Ahab ("The Data-Driven Gamer"), who covered the game in 2019, I preferred the contribution from one of the runners-up: Santiago Zapata, AKA "Slashie," a Colombian developer. His interface is brilliant, recreating the look, feel, and timing of a teletype printing the game line by line on a piece of off-white paper--which would have been necessary, of course, for any teletype interface without a monitor. He also produced a plain version (to which I switched after the gimmick wore off) and an "enhanced version" which fixes typos and various oddities.

    

The original version (or port of the original version) is pretty rough. After the title "screen," it asks if you need instructions. If you say "Yes," it says, "Who said you could play," and quits. There are, in fact, no in-game instructions. If you enter any player name other than "Shavs," it quits. You can't backspace if you make a spelling error (remember, this is all being printed as you type). If you get past that, it automatically rolls 0-18 values for strength, dexterity, constitution, charisma, wisdom, intelligence, and gold--no re-rolling allowed--and then forces you to pick from fighter, cleric, and wizard classes. Charisma always rolled 0 for me, but a video recorded by Zapata shows him getting values in that attribute. Fortunately, the reference card that comes with the game indicates that "nothing happens" based on charisma. 

      

The title screen and character creation in Zapata's "plain" version.

     

You then purchase equipment from a shop of 15 items, including such adventuring staples as rope, spikes, flasks of oil, and rations. There don't seem to be any class restrictions on armor based on class. If you screw up and type the wrong number while shopping, you get booted out of the shop and into the dungeon. When you're done, it's off to the dungeon. I forget to mention that earlier in the game, you've selected the dungeon number you want to explore from, I guess, 1 to 6. Those numbers are supposed to access dungeon files that no longer existed by the time of the contest, so the contestants just invented their own dungeon layouts.

      

The equipment list.

     

Once in the dungeon, gameplay is quite a bit like the later Wizard's Castle (1980) line. The character is in a gridded dungeon in which numbers represent the character, floors, walls, doors, enemies, and gold. You input numbers from 1 to 11 to act, with the numbers corresponding to commands like move, open a door, search for traps and treasure, use a weapon, fight, look, cast a spell, save the game, buy a spell, and buy hit points (I don't know who you're buying them from). That the save game feature actually works was a big surprise given how much of a house of cards the rest of the code is.

      

The dungeon. "9" is me; 6s are treasure; 5s are enemies; 1s are walls.

       

Combat is fought by trading blows with a list of 10 enemies, including goblins, trolls, skeletons, gnomes, and balrogs--the latter correctly spelled in this game. If you're a spellcaster, you're in for a tough time until you find some treasure, as spells have to be purchased individually and the cheapest is 75 gold pieces. Wizard spells seem to be "Push," three levels of "Magic Missile," "Kihl" (I don't know if that's an error or "phantasy spelling"), "Find Traps," "Find Secret Doors," "Teleport," and two spells to "change" what I assume are attributes. Clerics oddly get most of the same spells but in a different order, plus two levels of "Cure Light Wounds." 

       

I cracked up at "Good work you just killed a man."

     

A menu of available wizard spells.

        

I lost more characters to traps than anything else. You want to have a healthy supply of ropes and spikes, because falling in a trap requires one of each to get you out. 

      

Not once is "you're" spelled correctly in this game.

    

The game has no point beyond this. You don't earn experience for kills, though you do make money and can purchase extra hit points as a kind of "character development." There are no items to find in the dungeon. From inspecting the code, there's no winning condition. You can't leave the dungeon. When you inevitably die from combat or traps, you don't even get a score to compare with other players. The best that you can do, I believe, is kill all the monsters on a level, at which point the game says "All monsters dead" and "Reset," but then it just kicks you out. You have an option at the beginning of the game to set the "reset" to yes or no; I assume if you say "no," it just says "All monsters dead" and kicks you out.

      

Screw it. I'm calling this a win.

      

Although gameplay isn't much like Ultima or even Akalabeth, there are a number of things that foreshadow Garriott's commercial games. The first is the treatment of spells as purchased inventory items instead of innate abilities, a mechanic we saw through Ultima II. The second is a randomization of the player's experience based on a seed number that is otherwise meaningless to the player (this would be re-cast as the player's "lucky number" in Akalabeth). The third is the ability to purchase hit points directly with gold, although in later games, the player has to find the sovereign first. Fourth, although food doesn't seem to have any point here, it does exist in the game. Food remains crucial in all of Garriott's titles, all the way through the 1980s and 1990s, when most developers weren't including it as a mechanic. (It's not a "first," alas, as the PLATO Moria had hunger and food in 1975).

   

A GIMLET is rather pointless for this one, but the game does have a few RPG elements. It gets 0s for the backstory, NPCs, encounters, and graphics, sound, and interface, and 1s for everything else, giving it a final score of 6. But I can't leave it there because a 6 is what I gave Dungeon (1979) and The Devil's Dungeon (1978), and while neither of those were excellent games, they were at least finished programs and relatively bug free. Subtracting 2 points for bugs, spelling errors, unimplemented features, and forcing me to play a character named "Shavs," that puts us at 4 points, meaning Richard Garriott now has both the highest-rated and lowest-rated games on my list.

    

Check out Ahab's coverage for a few bugs and foibles that I didn't experience, and Nathan Mahney's coverage over at "CRPG Adventures," particularly notable because he played a version that is no longer online. The contestant seems to have added a few things. Starting characters get 1,000 gold pieces instead of a much lower random value, and "Mjolnir" is in the equipment shop. The dungeon is more interestingly represented with asterisks for walls, and your character sheet and inventory remain active. None of those features were in Garriott's original code. I should also mention that Zapata's "remake" is significantly cleaned up. You can give yourself any name; you select class before attributes; you can re-roll attributes; the dungeon map prints more like a roguelike; and various bugs and misspellings are corrected.

       

The dungeon map in Zapata's remake.

       

I don't mean any of this entry to sound like I'm bashing Garriott. He was 16 when he wrote this game, on less-than-ideal equipment, never intending it for publication. It's fun to see where a famed developer got his start. I think the contest was a fun idea. It's worth reading the comments on that page. There's a clear wheat-from-the-chaff separation going on there as some commenters complain about the code and the conditions and others just roll up their sleeves and get to work. I think I'm at the point where I could replicate this game in Python. Maybe I'll give it a try.