Just finished reading Playing at the World by Was a little miffed that he missed crediting the pedit5 PLATO program which my buddy Rusty Rutheford at University of Illinois wrote, and only mentions the PLATO DnD program (which sounds very much like pedit5) being observed by an anonymous source at Cornell instead. However that is price one pays for not writing stuff down. When I voiced my complaint on the blog of holding, I was surprised when the author of the book responded in person. He suggested an alternate book "Dungeons and Desktops" which might have more details, unfortunately in it pedit5 is dismissed as ephemeral and not well documented. However, after the publication of that book "Rusty" sent an email to author which is reproduced here
I actually played pedit5 a lot in fall of 1975 before being subverted to the face to face version of DnD. It played a lot like the much more modern Dungeon Hack with a single player wandering the dungeon facing a series of random monsters with random treasures. PLATO has has a long but ambiguous history with gaming. Being one of the first interactive terminal computers and having networking capability across the many University campuses, it foreshadowed many multiplayer online games we are familiar with today. It also had the ability to allow one to generate ones own fonts, which Rusty used in pedit5 by creating line art enclosing parts of a square to generate a top down view, as well as the sprites for the monsters. Those who are looking for more graphical representation have only to look at the thin wall 20x20, 30x30, and 20x20 with a 10x10' extension rooms in my old school dungeon which was influenced by the style of pedit5. However, the academics at the University who had created PLATO as an Educational tool highly frowned on its use for games (I had to use it for freshman physics homework, dull as dishwater). Being 17 and on PLATO at the time I am well aware of the furtive nature of playing games on “Play-Toy”. About the time they gave me the boot for hijacking my fathers account I decided to quit wasting time on computer games and become an engineer instead.
Was in the same Boy Scout troop with Rusty’s sons and played DnD, Runequest, and Empire of the petal throne with him many times. Unfortunately the University of Illinois Conflict Simulation Society was not big on writing news letters (Some of members are still running Winter War an annual convention dating back from that time, although the club has been disbanded, most likely due the lack of a student to act as president, a role I fulfilled while attending graduate school at the University of Illinois in the mid 1980's), so the only documents I have from those times are a few issues of the Wurm Walder, the news letter of the local SCA chapter. I do remember playing many interesting variants of DnD (It seemed every DM I played with had his own rules). I suspect most of those are lost in the depths of time. And no I don't know "Rusty" actual first name, everyone just called him "Rusty" or in my case dependant on the situation Mr. Rutheford.
P.S. Here a link showing actual game play of pedit5 which is still playable on the cyber1 PLATO emulator here Someone with access could try cryo2 and see if my buddies magic fountain game (I loaned him the file space) is still there too!
Hello from Japan. Thanks for such a rare story. Did you also play some other DnD-based PLATO games prior to pedit5? Some people say there was a game called m199h at least.
ReplyDeleteNope pedit5 was the first DnD based game I played. A friend of mine was working on a game we called Magic Fountain which I let him store in my file cryo5. However, the University may have deleted it, when they kicked us off the computer for playing too many games with it.
ReplyDeleteOne more missing piece in the history of computer roleplaying game... that's more than interesting! Could you please let me know details about Magic Fountain as far as possible? Was that based on pedit5 ? Or much different game?
ReplyDeleteMuch different game. Worked a bit like the old, old Trek computer game. However instead of sectors we had walled gardens; instead of Klingons, werewolves; instead of photon torpedoes, arrows. One of the great things about the old Plato system it was build to handle foreign languages so had a pretty good font editor, so we made a font of monsters pictures to use in the game (actually I only did the troll). Afraid I gave up my game programming to focus on mechanical engineering, so I am just a rocket scientist, instead of some rock star game programmer. Not sure what happened to my friend.
ReplyDeleteInteresting... It must be the first fantasy strategy ever in the history of computer games. Did that game have level/experience system as well?
ReplyDeleteAlso may I ask one more thing? Mr.Rusty Rutherford stated "I wrote it all in about 4-6 weeks in the fall and winter of 1975" in his interview, but you " played pedit5 a lot in fall of 1975"... It's a bit confusing. Does that mean you played very early version of the game? Or the correct development period should be 1974 rather than 1975?
I suspect I was playing the early release version
ReplyDeleteHello, I think you are right about the date you played pedit5, and I think your friend is Don Gillies, and his game is now preserved as Swords and Sorcery in PLATO emulator Cyber1.
DeleteI think pedit5 was released in August 1975, so you remember well.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the Magic Fountain game is very reminiscent of Jim Mayeda's think2 from 1976 or Don Gillies' sorcery from 1978.
Could it be based on them?
Looking at Swords and Sorcery it is close but more evolved than Magic Fountain. When I was involved had to be 1976 since I did not do much on PLATO after that. I had the now outdated notion back then that I needed to stop playing games and get a serious career. Ended up in Mechanical Engineering.
ReplyDeleteThere was an intermediate version by an unknown author between Jim Mayeda's game and Don Gillies' Swords and Sorcery created between 1976 and 1977. Perhaps Magic Fountain was said version. The only thing known about is that it was in another of the "think" lessons associated with Uni High students.
ReplyDeleteMike Stecyk was a Uni High student and created a game in PLATO, Jon Sechrist is also associated with a game similar to Jim Mayeda's, and there are two other versions of the game: The King's Mission by Kent Wendler, and Wilderness by Michael Wei. I don't know if any of these authors sound familiar to you.
Regarding pedit5, I was recently researching its origins and derived games, and there are still some mysteries. We know that many graphics used in later dungeon games were by Mark Nakada, who created a "charset" called "gryhwk", after Greyhawk, perhaps for some game or for a monster graphics contest run by John Daleske, but we don't know whether Reginald Rutherford added any of these graphics in the latest versions of pedit5 or whether he kept his own original graphics.
We also don't know if when he dropped out of university, Reginald Rutherford left his game code in the hands of Paul Resch, one of the creators of the game orthanc, derived from pedit5, or if perhaps he left it to Mike O'Brien, a Chicago campus friend. by Paul Resch. And finally it remains unclear who created the later version of pedit5 called m199h.
I don't even know if any of this sounds familiar to you, but if you remember any details that help shed more light on the first role-playing video games in history, it would be appreciated.
Mike Stecyk is probably most likely being in High School at the time like me, but I confess I do not remember the name of whom I was working with. "Rusty" Rutherford is still alive but I do not know his contact information.
ReplyDelete