The Wilderness
United States
Independently developed; published by CDC
Released 1985 for PLATO system
Date Started: 7 July 2024
Date Ended: 7 July 2024
Total Hours: 2
Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)
Over 522 previous titles, we've seen many that were "inspired" by others, a few remakes, a few games with multiple versions under the same title, and a few outright ripoffs. But even the ripoffs usually have something new to offer, if only cosmetic. This is the first time I can recall that literally the same game has been offered under a new name. [
Ed. Forgot about Rogue Clone
, which in some ways wasn't even a new name.]
The Wilderness is a shot-for-shot remake of Don Gillies'
Swords and Sorcery (1978),
which I covered in 2019. I struggled hard to find any difference between the two and came up with:
- They have different titles and title screens.
- The graphics are slightly different.
- Wilderness has the character name at the top of the screen while Sorcery does not.
- Wilderness displays your current arrow totals.
- The Wilderness character stands out with an icon colored differently from the enemies.
None of these change the game significantly, and thus I could just gesture to my entry on Sorcery and be done with it.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdts05wKWWRjpW5S1hGOp8m8BoMp-9RfZbdsq6V0al-dBfU22fHwQJpqCLUbqvKPtgzT0ae7OiWuy-sZtUwdTpipChnTjHwjpYRW0biGqfSb-SJjs7QubBtbGHQmMNItwfpyT_jYGBb9j94iZ1Nnl2BxG3twk_akRfPNBtZ8rQxsMDg5WuT_S-baXABFI/w400-h391/wildarrows.png) |
A shot from The Wilderness. My character (lower right) is trying to kill the dragon to the west of me with arrows before the wizard to my north gets too close.
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Both games were available on the PLATO system, but perhaps not at the same time or place. Regular readers will have heard about PLATO plenty of times by now, but
for the uninitiated, it was an educational mainframe system hosted at
the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign starting in 1960. Some of
the earliest computer games were written by students of the university
(and other institutions in the region that had access to the network),
including the earliest CRPGs. Of particular note are the CRPGs that
predate the first commercial CRPGs for the microcomputer; for an
introduction to those, see
this entry.
One of the earliest games for PLATO was called
Think2 (its name had nothing to do with the game; it was common practice in those days to hide games under generic-sounding academic program names so they wouldn't be deleted). Written by Jim Mayeda, it was based on Mike Mayfield's
Star Trek (1971), but with the action ported to a fantasy wilderness. It was deleted, and no longer survives, but we can sort of reconstruct it through the existence of games written by later authors using printouts of the
Think code: Kent Wendler's
The King's Mission Game (1977), Don Gillies'
Swords and Sorcery (1978), and now
The Wilderness. The Wilderness is a lot closer to
Sorcery than
Mission, making me think that
Sorcery was probably its source rather than yet another printout of the
Think code. For instance, Gillies tells me that he invented "adrenaline," which is in both
Sorcery and
Wilderness.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGj9T3mWTMD-s1TwB6SB2JedOepuzwuXzjrRq8_kTW5QHSdqosQ8EroijsqULIYnfpYMJcEbSlul2vMmf6glfkL0YNRzOmEwOT12t0s91rOhPWiK8dzDuvjvKS1RdNL1MSYOi7mBgCG0iUefI5bC6IRZIEH84e8tPjOdGfQLpZ6P-bNQBMlf90PcR5JL8/w400-h241/wildworldsize.png) |
Setting the size of the game world.
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The question is why a game nearly identical to
Swords and Sorcery would have been required on the same system as
Sorcery, and my best answer is that it probably wasn't on the same system. I suspect, rather, that author Michael Wei wrote it for one of the commercial implementations of PLATO by CDC. Our ability to access PLATO today goes back to its online resurrection by
Cyber1, whose code and database, as I understand it, were based on the last commercial release from CDC. The commercial release would not have included the amateur games written by university students; after Cyber1 appeared in 2004, those games had to be re-typed in. You can see this in the notes files for, say,
The Game of Dungeons ("dnd," 1975), which go back to 2015, or
Swords and Sorcery, which go back to 2009. The notes files for
The Wilderness, on the other hand, are all original, from the 1985-1989 period. This suggests
The Wilderness would have been available on commercial installations of PLATO where
Sorcery was not.
I have been unable to reach author Michael Wei to confirm any of this, nor to ask him why he wouldn't have credited Gillies or Mayeda (Gillies himself credited Mayeda) on the title screen or in the help documents. Wei also co-wrote
Labyrinth (1980) and is quoted in Brian Dear's history of PLATO,
The Friendly Orange Glow (1980), as being at the University of Illinois in the late 1970s. Even accounting for graduate school, 1985 would be pretty late for him to still be there, which jibes with my theory that
The Wilderness was a commercial release.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBoPBsHdItN3SoCYViu3R-Jtd7KEm7fjTQZZS5uulIw7GdCtHN95B220hf5zjr9JaRYAFrFI-JrU5F4R3cr65RFHdC8IGXRvOoyc7WYHv8Am0__uSou9N0Nf4OTub823QArohoN3bEI42UAh9-W9cuA7tT7B274mYYcAtqZVB4a3V8b7v_V9NfcyrwD88/w400-h371/wildimdeath.png) |
Until you get some experience, you can die just walking into things.
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Don Gillies told me that he had the opportunity to publish Swords and Sorcery with CDC; the process involved a little paperwork, some editing of the program to remove potentially offensive content, and disclaimers on the home page. One of his friends, a contributor to Avatar, went through the process and got a few dollars a month. Rusty Rutherford, author of The Dungeon (the first known CRPG), recently told me that he got either $0.25 or $0.32 for his efforts. Gillies chose not to go through the hassle. If he had, The Wilderness probably wouldn't exist.
So much for that. What about the game itself? You play an agent who takes missions from the king of an unnamed land. Each mission takes place on one or more maps of 10 x 10 squares, and you get to specify the number of maps (up to 100) and their arrangement in rows and columns (maximum is 10 x 10 or 100 x 1). The missions are always to collect a certain number of treasures, kill a certain number of monsters, or (for the first mission only, I think) chop down a certain number of trees. The specific numbers are tied to the size of the world that you create.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDNnC7i-f45i10JPqUI2MYFm65YzMVV976XVFAmnw6lDxpTqI3WG5FIG8BCLq6UUpKPSD_mculzF3gduF9sRW8dkQF8ZVEscxxae76RTkApki1pU98BvgPq-1hi1a7TpXg80h9_NpmjwIJ_dRugsq4jDIRtGgSu8ogMdP75Vui_dzTPI3CPgCJ1qu_Vmg/w400-h389/wildchoptrees.png) |
Getting the first mission.
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Once on the map, you are chased around mercilessly by (depending on your experience) goblins, skeletons, werewolves, wizards, dragons, and demons. Treasure chests dot the maps; trees line the edges and block your passage. Each screen has a fixed number of enemies, treasure chests, extra trees, and magic circles, but their specific positions are randomized every time you leave the screen and return. Enemies and chests do not respawn until you end a mission and start a new one.
What makes this series a bit unique is its movement system, adapted somewhat nonsensically from Star Trek. That game took place on a similar map of 8 x 8 "quadrants," each quadrant part of a 8 x 8 grid of "sectors." Each map was seeded with Klingon ships that you had to destroy. You moved by specifying a direction and speed for the ship, and the ship maintained that direction and speed as you fired phasers and photon torpedoes, changing only when the player used a round to type in a new heading and speed.
The same movement system is used here. You specify a direction and speed (the number of squares you move each round) from 0 to 3. If you find or buy adrenaline, you can increase that movement to 4. You keep going at that speed and direction even as you swing your sword or shoot your arrows unless you deliberately stop. If you run into an obstacle, you take damage.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTNOat5Bix9Q_-LabJG-qiJcmp7CIY6J1KOAoc4zwBZpgyeHFcsdx_1fwWNBI9JnKDj3-gTJdzoaU7El83np63fkgMROANAltdyfECU68IDRnFCgRIl7grzVWj_hue7yjx6I5dftKeT2rXLfoWSB3VzZNNHzBxkoQPqBchT_q6O0hS9j5lzaicEyShXGI/w400-h336/wildmoving.png) |
I need to get away from these dragons and demons, so I'm going to move west at a speed of 2, which will get me off the screen in two moves.
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The first mission can be relatively difficult because experience and hit points in this game are the same thing, and at the outset, you have 0. You die from anything, including accidentally walking into a tree. Thus, you want to create a small game world and hope for an easy quest like chopping down 20 trees. You then just have to stay away from enemies (who never have ranged attacks) until you get the requisite number. Once you get rewarded by the king from your first mission, you have enough hit points and money to take on much more complicated missions.
In your first mission, you just have a sword, lent to you by the king. Once you have some money, you can buy arrows at any one of several "magic circles" that are seeded into the game world. These magic circles are taking the place of starbases in Star Trek, and it's a little silly that the authors couldn't come up with another way to represent them, like towns, forts, or just shops. You can also buy replacement swords if your sword breaks, which happens often. Treasure chests occasionally have upgrades to magic swords plus other artifacts like magic boots.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUFmI4kyOAFGxQMKAD9OAO7rvVkD0ka2uYnE0eQCVhzsNdW7yNdEyEDLtUh2PJdg9NNIxAkPfCJOPU0PpVysuMRdhUOb-61k5ln8DsSH12DgOaUokMVWQwFh3ZFb-dT4sBLZ5H7_vagYdy6m4tkv8JwTCsV1fNdKniqBcixAZdW8cwWmLLvet8lb4X0pc/w395-h400/wildmagcir.png) |
Visiting a magic circle. My sword recently broke, so buying a new one is a priority.
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The game seems hard at first until you learn a few strategies. First, if you just straddle the border between two screens, you can avoid harm completely, since your character always goes first in a round. If too many enemies are too close, or treasure chests or magic circles are too far away, you just move to the next screen and hope for a better configuration when you get back. Using this strategy, you can usually pick off enemies one by one.
Another strategy is to get enemies to chase you. If they're alongside you, they can hit you on the diagonal after you move. That's no good. You want to avoid losing any experience/health if possible, since your experience is your power. Instead, you lure them into a configuration where they're persistently behind you. That way, you can swing your sword to your rear and then move out of the way before they get a return strike.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH350lQt2s1ZXnEhrKwGjlye1809q8HWwHI6Oor-dn5mwJDGqIXTy3Ff3otSmQNZ26fzF5-rBacobD9ttaK2nCJxU-vfgBhv-El8AIXevkYxW03x2erXTy60YO0HX68yJ6FjeG9oW0KQzswsrnR0Z-v0YxaR2JCpfKQX6aGORzErMDCxisysb_Feo5t8g/w400-h399/wildtactic.png) |
Attacking a werewolf as it chases me east across the top of the screen.
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Arrows make things a bit easier, too, although some enemies are immune to them. You can shoot arrows in the four cardinal directions but you can also type in a specific angle, including decimal places, from 0-12. (You can think of the numbers as a clock face or as simply dividing 360 degrees by 30.) With the right calculations, you can nail any enemy from any location on the map, then escape to the adjacent map before they get close enough to retaliate. Really, impatience and error are almost the only ways to lose this one until you get up to very high levels and start contending with invisible demons.
All of the missions are simply in the service of jockeying for a higher score on the leaderboard, which makes it too bad that the game doesn't present the data in descending order by your experience or gold. Instead, everyone is just there alphabetically.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5YYzWTiO1CTiNZ40-S9i5NfRW8asUiAoOwp4LOO9-1_lcAXw__hOfMmB_pp1flRKep_vQ9Tm6h7u7mlz-yLbbX-52LM-iO96RDAd9co_CR7330lXRJaLrKKwOZwFPQIV6oAD0jr5Wch5nPlNSe7tmHOG60AYPocsufXH6mIAfIwYIrRFEdk5eHrhqZI4/w400-h399/wildhof.png) |
A couple of the other players on this screen are impressive.
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The game doesn't offer much in the way of character development. It's perhaps a bit too stingy with both experience and gold during the missions and a bit too generous with both as mission rewards. For instance, on one character's first mission, I killed several goblins for 10 experience points each, and chests had around 50 gold pieces each. When I finished, I was rewarded with 1,558 experience and 2,598 gold. On my second mission, therefore, the king wanted me to kill 10 dragons. That escalated fast.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguRwsqDj2Jmf1nsgl-WrepbPsHyoSZBkHy3xqMKzqzLCV_fX7nyfFPS3QyiHHpTwbVAiz27cVv6IqtSxA1XA7vN8AnlTtmuyiJCSY-Re5YvZIGplu1N1RagDQhZWvFoHvINO7iwhY6bv8A-8v3u89WUd8tFKItftuJGtRgY5vHDol39iRqKAyLFe_MV8U/w400-h194/wildmission.png) |
End-of-mission rewards.
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I give The Wilderness an 18 on the GIMLET, the same score as Swords and Sorcery got; remember, the GIMLET awards the gameplay experience, not originality. It gets nothing for the game world or for NPCs, 1s-3s for everything else. Nothing really stands out, and it's not really an RPG, but it's reasonably fun as a kind of action-strategy game for a few missions.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijvZF2GYxmznPXrKWcL1b57f3Y96ASzOWALqwKYXBpFnzJlRWPMv4Y7CFkZPZ3BGPT7LV2qbD8fOSuQuLZN2M0gj1Kvkh1zW7N1BrKP2PukRxqwtOpXxe_MrPQY_8OU7nq090tUkowqYhYGhp6QjQb9TAF0al0HIhyphenhyphenK3QH3GO2v2dstznNlKXSKuLy2aU/w400-h238/pedit5hof.png) |
Back in the hall of fame for "pedit5!" About two people beat the game per month, so I should be there until November.
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Plus, while I was visiting PLATO, I took the opportunity to get myself back in the Hall of Fame for The Dungeon. So it wasn't a wasted trip.
I was confused and thought you found a way to call this game a CRPG, https://www.mobygames.com/game/5452/wilderness-a-survival-adventure/
ReplyDeleteFunny that one of the developers of that game is called Huntress - guess that's a useful skill / occupation for a wilderness survival adventure ;-).
DeleteFrom El Explorador de RPG's coverage both of this game as well as of Swords and Sorcery I understand you can "f"ly directly to other screens from a magic circle (which costs some gold). I guess that might be an inheritance from Star Trek, too (hyperspace jump?)?
ReplyDeleteAlso there is apparently the option to ask the king for help and get a sword from him in case you can't afford it which is something I don't recall having seen before, but my memory may be faulty there.
Based on his entries it seems staying in a magic circle (where you can't be hit) and attacking foes from there is another possible (partial) strategy.
There is a (relatively recently published) gameplay video online and as far as I can tell (unfortunately it's only a small screen within the video screen) the player character does not have a different colour in it. While I recall you saying you usually adapt the font to play, El Explorador has the same and the title screen also shows several different colours in both your coverages, but is uniformly in (the classic PLATO) orange font in the video. Was the version maybe changed inbetween? The video seems to have been recorded in 2018. [I assume in your version there were also characters on the title screen "talking" to you as in El Explorador's screenshot and the video.]
The corresponding channel 'Playthrough Archives' aims to preserve gameplay impressions of early video games and its videos include a couple PLATO examples, though they (as opposed to others, it seems) do suffer from the abovementioned screen size issue.
I'm not sure if PLATO itself ever had color support or if it's just something tacked on for more modern implementations. The terminals for it were generally orange monochrome, so the video is probably more accurate to what most people would have seen
DeleteIt seems to me that the color was added with cyber1 and its pterm terminal emulator, so I understand that someone must have modified the game in relatively modern times to add color. I think I've read someone in the notesfiles saying something about it, like that some authors had bothered to modify their games to give them a touch of color and others had preferred to keep them in a state as close to the original as possible.
DeleteI played them all with the color settings on, so it's easy to see which ones were changed. Those that were not, are seen only in black and white.
A curious case is that of Camelot, which I played in color and it still looks orange and black, so its author modified it so that the original PLATO colors were always shown, except for the objects at the end of the game, such as I see in Chet's screenshots, and that I never saw because if I remember correctly, I barely reached the second level of the dungeon.
I was wrong, I have looked at advertisements from 1982, when CDC marketed connections to PLATO through various microcomputers, and in the advertisement you see a color program for one of these microcomputers that supported it.
DeleteThat is to say, the creation or modification of color programs to offer them as part of a commercial product already occurred then, and this practically confirms Chet's theory regarding The Wilderness.
I assume that what I read in the notesfiles would only apply to non-commercial programs created before this time, which are the majority of CRPGs we have played.
Now this raises questions for me about the origin of crypt. It is a colorless game, but in theory from 1985. Perhaps it is earlier, or perhaps its author simply created it without the intention of offering it to the CDC.
I have no clue about these technical aspects, but I'd think there are two elements: which colours were (able to be) programmed into a game and how such game is then shown on screen, depending on the output elements (hard- and software).
DeleteAccording to Cyber1's page about pterm, the PLATO IV/V terminals had the classic monochromatic orange gas plasma display while I understand other/later ones (among them IST-I through -III) were able to show (more) colours with the earlier pterm versions 'mimicking' a PLATO V and pterm v6.0 and newer an IST-III.
At Cyber1 you can connect either on port 5004 for "classic" monochrome protocol or on ASCII port 8005 with faster perceived output and a wider range of terminal capabilities including paint (area fill), color, local fonts, and "fine grid touch" (no idea) as detailed by Joe Stanton of Cyber1 in a 2007 exchange with Matt Barton.
So maybe Chet and you just connected to port 8005 to play this while the video reflects a session through port 5004?
Of course, I'm sorry I didn't explain myself well, but I assumed Chet had explained that around here at some point.
DeleteWhen you connect to cyber1 with pterm you can use the classic connection, which shows everything in orange and black, or the ASCII connection, which shows colors in those games that have them programmed, or black and white in those that do not.
My mistake was thinking that this last type of connection had been introduced with pterm, when it turned out that it emulated old terminals that already used color, just like the microcomputers that were then also connected to PLATO used them.
So in the end we have games that were created without using colors because the authors did not use color terminals (because they did not exist yet, or because they did not have them within their reach), of which some have been later modified in cyber1 to show them, and games that were created directly with colors on more modern terminals, in some cases for commercial versions of PLATO.
Sorry I didn't get back here sooner, but El Explorador explained my thinking very well. If this game was part of CDC's commercial offerings, then the limitations of the original PLATO terminals wouldn't matter. People were hitting the PLATO mainframe from all kinds of computers, many of which would have been capable of interpreting other colors--at least as I understand it.
DeleteThe truth is that thanks to this entry I have discovered things about PLATO that I did not know, related to its second life as a commercial product.
DeleteNot only did it have color, but (at least initially) Micro PLATO, as it was apparently called, did not support multi-user connections to its lessons, so multiplayer games would not be possible. This would explain the existence of Labyrinth, another game by the same author as The Wilderness, and which coincidentally also features color and is single-player, when the previous dungeon games on PLATO were already multiplayer.
Everything seems to indicate that Wei was in charge of creating single-player commercial color versions of the PLATO games to offer them on Micro PLATO.
I don't know about Labyrinth. The notes files for that game are all from 2009 and beyond, so they were created after Cyber1 came online. A note on the title screen said that it had to be "recovered," and Wei would have still been a student (or close to it) when it was released. I suspect that it was in fact written at the university and the color was added by Jack Guinnip when he re-built it for Cyber1. I could be wrong, though. It might have been written for another commercial PLATO installation that wasn't part of the CDC release that Cyber1 obtained.
DeleteThere might be more clues in the notes files for Wilderness. When I add a note it appears from:
crpgaddict / tourist
"Tourist" is the group that Cyber1 assigned me. All modern notes just have the user name and group. But original notes (from the 1980s) have a third tag after the group. For instance, the first note for Wilderness comes from:
c shriver / kintonb / pca
Wei appears in these notes as:
mike wei / allenbl / pca
He was working full-time (according to his LInkedIn profile) for Allen-Bradley at the time, so I assume that the "group" is in fact the organization that the user works for and "pca" was the regional host for the PLATO mainframe? Not sure.
Either way, this raises the probability that Wei rebuilt the game not for commercial purposes but just to entertain his coworkers and colleagues sharing the same mainframe.
ALL of the notes for Wilderness have that third category as "pca," I should mention.
DeleteI'm trying to track down that "pca" group and found this:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1973_video_game)
Look at the caption of the single image.
I can't find anything on the internet related to that tournament, but maybe there is something on cyber1.
That's funny. I found the same page when I Googled "PLATO" and "PCA," but like you, I couldn't find anything else that explained what PCA was.
DeleteGot it, both "cerl" and "pca" in that context were referring to the various PLATO systems. CERL was in Champaign-Urbana, PCA according to the notesfiles was the CDC Central system.
DeleteOkay, great. So that suggests that the notes written in the notes file were from people all over the place, and not some local group. I'm back to thinking this was written for its commercial potential, then.
DeleteI think that too, if all its users were from that system, it could mean that The Wilderness was offered directly by CDC from its central system. Also in the notesfiles they said that "pca", "cerl" and a few others were among the last systems that remained online. After that, NovaNET (now closed) and Cyber1 appeared. According to wikipedia, NovaNET was developed using data from the Champaign-Urbana system ("cerl"), while Cyber1 used the latest CDC implementation, called CYBIS, which we now know at least in part contained the data from "pca", its central system.
DeleteRegarding Labyrinth, you are right, I did not remember that it was recovered, although it fit me as a commercial version for CDC's Micro PLATO given the author and that it was for one player, but the date seems to indicate that it was created in "cerl" before Michael Wei left university.
I've been digging a little deeper and it seems that Drygulch was also created in 1980 in a CDC system, but was still lost, so it can't be ruled out that the same thing happened with Labyrinth.
DeleteIn fact, it was almost certainly not created in "cerl", because this is what its author told Brian Dear, collected in the book The Friendly Orange Glow:
Mike Wei, a UI student at the time, is but one example of what might happen next. “In ’77-’78,” he says, “I was already selling my top items to the poor zbrats and ybrats who needed a leg up in the various dungeon games. “I do know that selling off all my chars and items as I left for the ‘professional world’ of programming at BYU in ’79 helped finance my relocation.”
That is, he created the game after leaving the University of Illinois, when he began his professional career as a programmer and was in need of money.
I think it pretty much fits me that he sold his games to CDC or directly created them for them, and the same with The Wilderness. On his LinkedIn there are no jobs prior to 1985, which he started at Bradley Allen, so it may be that he was partly dedicated to these things at that time.
At BYU they also had a connection to PLATO, although I don't know exactly through what system, but Labyrinth must have been created there.
DeleteBy the way, part of the information that is remembered about Drygulch is provided by Dr. Cat (David Shapiro, the creator of The Caverns of Freitag), who also participated in the Ultima series working for Origin Systems, and who created the DragonSpires graphic MUD, later converted into Furcadia. Well, in an interview about Furcadia (using the pseudonym Felorin), the author says that part of his inspiration to create it came from the first multiplayer dungeon games on PLATO, which he had access to because his mother was a professor at a university.
I find it incredible the number of authors who drank from PLATO, and how little recognition this platform had until not so long ago. We really owe PLATO the origin of the genre as we know it.
On a different note, great to hear it apparently worked out for you to get (put) in touch directly with Rutherford! Looking forward to any additional bits of information this might yield in a new entry or your coverage of early PLATO games so far.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, is there a possibility to know / be informed when an existing entry is updated or otherwise amended? As far as I understand, the RSS feeder only tells me about new ones published.