m199h: New Findings Both Solve and Deepen Mysteries

 

The best evidence we currently have on "m199h." This cover page comes from a sheaf of documents printed in 1976 or 1977 by a player who played "m199h."

         

This entry serves as an update to information that I previously offered in my entry "Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play."

   

Regular readers and aficionados of CRPG history know the basic backstory: The first known CRPGs were created on the PLATO educational platform hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They include The Dungeon ("pedit5"), The Game of Dungeons ("dnd"), Orthanc, Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar. The earliest of them started to appear within a year of the first tabletop edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974). These games were written furtively by students, using lesson names that disguised that they were games. When found, the earliest of them were mercilessly deleted by system administrators.

 

A screen shot from The Dungeon ("pedit5") which ultimately survived the purge.

        

For years, a game with the lesson name of "m199h" has been mentioned by various authors as the legendary lost "first" CRPG. The primary source seems to be Dirk Pellett's history of the PLATO RPGs on Cyber1: "It is 'common knowledge' that someone created the very first dungeon simulation game in a lesson called 'm199h.'" Similarly, Brian Dear wrote in The Friendly Orange Glow (2017), a history of PLATO: "Legend has it that an earlier gamer, with the equally obscure name of 'm119h' [sic], pre-dates Pedit5, but no one remembers who wrote it or when exactly it appeared."

    

Dirk Pellett's history of PLATO CRPGs. I now believe "common knowledge" is wrong.

          

Two major things happened over the summer:

   

• A PLATO developer who had played "m199h" sent me a handful of photographs related to the game.

• Rubén, our resident Explorador de RPG, launched an exhaustive search of the PLATO text files and did his best to track down every person mentioned in any of them.

       

The result of this new material can be summarized as follows: Despite what earlier sources have claimed, "m199h" is probably not the first CRPG; that honor almost certainly goes to Reginald Rutherford's The Dungeon ("pedit5"). Instead, "m199h" (which had the actual name of Dungeon) was likely a 1976 remake and expansion of "pedit5" that had lofty ambitions but was deleted before they were realized.

    

For evidence, we begin with documents shared with me by Don Gillies, a software engineer whose father, Donald Bruce Gillies, was a professor at the university. Don didn't attend the university until he went for graduate degrees in the late 1980s, but he had access to PLATO via terminals at Urbana High School. In 1977, he wrote Swords & Sorcery, which I covered a few years ago.

    

Once connected to the system, Gillies discovered "m199h" and loved it. Knowing that it was in danger of deletion, he printed as much of the documentation as he could and made graph paper drawings of monster images. He kept these documents for years and recently photographed them and shared those photographs with me. He has since also posted them in a comment on The Data-Driven Gamer blog.

      

Gillies' recreation of some of the graphics from "m199h."

        

You can see the full album of images here (I will repost them in my own album if that link goes down). If you enable comments, you can see my initial reactions to some of them and Gillies' reply. There are several problems with the album:

     

• The only evidence we have that any of them come from a game with the lesson name "m199h" is Gillies' own handwritten note on the cover page; however, this note was made in 1976 or 1977 and was thus unlikely to be completely inaccurate.

• Gillies' own notes say that some of the images are not from "m199h" but are from the also-lost "Think" series of games that inspired Gillies' own Swords & Sorcery. Some may also be from the lost Pits of Baradur.

• Many of the images specifically seem to duplicate maps and instructions from "pedit5" (The Dungeon).

      

The game's help file confirms its name as Dungeon.

         

That last point seems damning, and at first I thought that Gillies had simply mixed up the games. But over time, I became more persuaded that these images duplicate (or near-duplicate) The Dungeon precisely because "m199h" was a copy of The Dungeon. Specifically, I now believe the following about "m199h":

       

• The game's actual name was Dungeon.

• The game played like "pedit5." A single character entered a large dungeon, fought monsters, cast spells, and collected treasures.

• 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).

• The character would have been a combination fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief, just like "pedit5."

• Its spell list promised every spell available in the Greyhawk supplement (March 1975) to 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.

          

A spell list from the game that Gillies identifies as "m199h." These are identical to the Level 3 cleric and magic-user spells offered in the Greyhawk supplement to Dungeons & Dragons.

     

• "m199h" introduced teleporters and chest traps, both of which "pedit5" had lacked.

• "m199h" removed the framing backstory that "pedit5" had offered; the only goal is to collect treasures and experience and retire in the Hall of Fame.

      

The most compelling images are the monster lists and spell lists, neither of which precisely match any known PLATO game; Gillies insists that they both come from "m199h." Another good piece of evidence is the page titled "Helplesson for Dungeon," which I thought at first was an early version of "pedit5" but am now inclined to think is from "m199h" and is later rather than earlier, since the spell list is expanded and there are new mechanics mentioned in the instructions.

        

Beholders did not exist in "pedit5" but apparently did in "m199h."

       

The game's map remains a mystery. Gillies' album is full of maps that cannot possibly be from the same game. A couple, depicting a single-level dungeon, are identical to "pedit5" (one is rotated). One of them has a core identical to "pedit5" but different edges, as it shrinks "pedit5's" 30 x 30 dungeon into 20 x 20. Several of the maps depict multi-leveled dungeons with smaller levels. 

     

Perhaps the "m199h" map. The "pedit5" map was more than twice as large but featured many of the same room layouts.

            

I believe we are on firmer ground with the dates. All the existing stories about "m199h" say that it was quickly identified and deleted, suggesting that it existed for a blink in between the appearance of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and the release of "pedit5" in 1975. But whether Gillies is correct about all of the images or not, he clearly encountered "m199h" at a time he was interested in "remaking" it, and he is relatively sure that wouldn't have been until late 1976 or early 1977. Again, this timeline better supports the notion that "m199h" was intended as a follow-up to "pedit5."

 

Finally, we have a random collection of anecdotes. Josh Tabin, author of Camelot (1982), has always contended that "m199h" and "pedit5" were the same game; he reiterated this belief in a 3 September email to El Explorador. Don Gillies called around a bit after sharing the images with me and sent me opinions from several contemporary students that "pedit5" was the first PLATO CRPG.

     

After Don Gillies sent me the images, I shared them with El Explorador de RPG, Nathan Mahney at CRPG Adventures, Ahab at the Data-Driven Gamer, and RPG scholar Matt Barton, looking for confirmation of my initial reactions. Each had something to offer, but Rubén ("El Explorador") really took it and ran. He is planning a multi-part account of his process and findings on his own blog; suffice here to say that he mined the PLATO notes files for everything they had and embarked on a summer-long campaign to track down every PLATO game developer and player still on this Earth. In the process, he discovered the origins of a commonly-used graphics set, confirmed some important dates for games we already knew about, discovered tantalizing hints about additional CRPG authors, and conclusively dispelled some existing claims about the origins of both "pedit5" and "m199h." I'll let you read the rest of his fascinating coverage for more on his findings.

     

It was always too much to hope that we'd ever see "m199h" in action. I had hoped we could at least identify the author. It's not impossible that one of the many people that Rubén tried to reach will eventually get in touch. Until then, I am satisfied that the preponderance of the evidence grants the title of "first CRPG" to "pedit5."