1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play | Hacker News Reader

1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play

crpgaddict.blogspot.com

279 pointsTomte90 comments

I would encourage anyone with a little extra time to read about the PLATO system. Truly ahead of its time, invented by an engineer at University of Illinois named Don Bitzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bitzer

I was fortunate to have a parent who worked for Dr. Bitzer and we had a PLATO terminal at home, hardwired in to the university mainframe at 1200 Bd. Played most of the games mentioned in the article along with Empire, a Star Trek-inspired multiplayer team game. Great memories.

http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ was amazing! Made me wish I'd been around to experience it.

Also "The Friendly Orange Glow" book (by Brian Dear) is outstanding.

That is exactly what the parent, to whom you responded, just linked.

I waited a long time for that to be published and oh boy was it amazing. Anyone interested in origins of computing will find it fascinating.

I would rank it #2 behind "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It's very well written and hard to put down.

My high school had one they left abandoned in an unused science classroom. Yours truly found many excuses for hanging out in there. When they found out I was actually using it, they left me alone.

This one was standalone, so a later model. Also the screen was bluish-white as opposed to the orange ones that I see photos of. All of the software was on floppies and much of it of the educational/industrial ilk. How to Not Kill Yourself With Chemicals, and So, You're a Sociopath. That sort of thing.

It was awesome.

I have to ask. /So, You're a Sociopath/ was a game, an educational/instructional program, or both?

It's a joke, of course. But there were a lot of "personality test" kind of things that were clearly meant for employer screenings. Hence, *So you're a Sociopath..."

TIL more about plasma displays. Thank you Mr. Bitzer for helping create the television I enjoy so much.

The early plasma displays were basically a big array of neon lamps. Coincident voltage on X and Y lines turned pixels on and off. A sustain voltage kept the lit pixels lit. The screen was thus its own memory.

IBM had big flat panel plasma displays in the early 1980s.[1] Early in the history of AutoCAD, a driver was written for one of those things interfaced to a PC. The slow update rate was a big problem for the cursor. Orange plasma displays struggled along for decades, but the slow refresh rate limited their usefulness.

[1] https://www.retropaq.com/the-miracle-of-gas-plasma/

I used Plato at udel , and had my first programming jobs there. It is hard to underestimate how far ahead they were, and that system influenced all my designs in my entire career.

Like realtime chat with any other user, character by character updates (what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!)

Friday afternoon dogfights used a lot of resources, but were super cool. Tens and maybe 100 users all in the same real time flight space, duking it out...

> what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!

Is that really good UX? I want to have a chance to fix my typos and other errors before sending.

I find it awkward as well, but Google Wave worked exactly like this, and people praised it for this feature.

Ahh the mountains of praise for Google Wave, I remember it well

It was ahead of its time.

I think ICQ used to work like this too, and I remember how impressed by it I was.

Back in the day, most hardware couldn’t send data without having the user press ‘send’.

A shared system that could survive being interrupted whenever any of its users pressed a key still was relatively rare.

So I guess this might ¿partly? Have been to show of the capabilities of the system. At 1200 or maybe even 300 baud, it may also be the better UX, but I wouldn’t know.

The most that you could have in the dogfights would have been around 30 (if =empire) or about 5? (if =dogfight), and the definition of 'real time' was 1 frame every few seconds, as one might expect when you are limited to 10 TIPS (thousand instructions per second).

Empire was built around a 10 second replot mechanic and you frequently used the STOP button to stop the screen from drawing so you could get interactivity back quickly.

Realtime chat was amazing, especially with the ability to move characters around/erase characters with the pixel addressable 512x512 plasma screens; people would draw art by using characters, then moving the cursor back over them, and then erasing, or drawing in another character. O shift-space * shift-space ? would be O, * and ? on top of each other, which kind of looked like a smiley face. Fun times.

I saw a demo of PLATO in the 1970s and it inspired me for years about what was possible with computers. On the hardware side, it had a touchscreen which was remarkable back then, as well as the high-resolution graphics and flat plasma display. The software was also amazingly interactive. This was the era of punch cards, or a Teletype if you were lucky, so seeing the PLATO was like a vision from the future.

PLATO was absurdly fun. Houston Independent School District had a single terminal at each high school I attended and screen time was highly coveted. To the point that a friend of mine would sneak into school early just to get on, which promoted the administration to put a lock on the phone. Undaunted and despite more than one '9' in the phone number, we learned to dial by rapidly flashing the switch hook to simulate a rotary phone dial.

Thematically the school administration putting in what seemed like arbitrary rules just inspired us to work even harder to get access.

HISD also locked down "author" mode which was required to write new programs (called lessons) in PLATO's programming language named tutor.

Someone eventually cracked the account owners password, which is how some people ended up with accounts with author rights. We ended up replacing the login program on HSEP's PDP 11/34 so we always had super user privileges and I managed to socially engineer privileged access to our CDC mainframe. My flashhook dialing buddy figured out the system operators had buried end of file characters in the system docs on the CDC mainframe and we were able to find lots of interesting new commands to run after that. Again, telling us we couldn't do something just inspired us more. OK, upon reflection we were just hacking anything we could get our hands on.

Frankly I couldn't tell you exactly how I socially engineered it any more but I managed to track down an oil company here in town that not only had a PLATO terminal but a printer and gained access to both over the summer. Needless to say this was an amazing coup for a high school kid who just wanted to do a little coding and play a few games, if I say so myself.

I no longer have the long rolls of yellow paper from playing TREK and other games on an ASR 33 connected to the CDC mainframe or indeed anything else from high school, but the PLATO dot matrix screen print of Labyrinth's start screen remains a treasured possession to this day.

Please do consider sharing what you remember about these games, maybe with the author linked.

At UofIowa we had two interesting home-grown RPGs. One was 'AG' which stood for the initials of the author Alan Guiles. It consisted of modules e.g. AgWild, AgTown, AgFt (fight) etc. Written in HP 2000 Acess BASIC. You had a small text grid printed with your location marked as a '*'. Each module had a different view. At any module you could meet a monster and end up in the 'fight' view, which was a linear scale beginning with the monster at the top and you at the bottom. You could advance, retreat, hit or fire an arrow or spell. The arrows and spells were ranged. You could also Evade and avoid the fight, which didn't always work. There were some other interesting modules like an Inn where you could gamble (blackjack, roulette...). It was single-player but everybody appeared on a top-score screen. It was a big deal to get on the 1st page! I did it once.

The other was called 'Wilder' and was done by Jon Sawyer. It stood for 'Wilderness' and was multi-player. You could Yell and Listen and communicate with other online players. Some kind of combat with monsters. I don't recall if you could fight P2P? Have to ask Jon about that.

Anyway there were quite a few 'mainframe' games written at about the same time at Iowa - a two-player war game WR12, a real-time Star Trek game labelled 'Begin' (because the login module was called 'Begin') with multiple fleets and three or four kinds of weapon. It still has a fan site! And smaller simple games like Trek3D, TREK1D (a joke), Combat, Patrol and several more.

It was a big deal, with students getting access to terminals for the first time and getting inventive.

It was 1981, and the first "Computer Age" shop had opened up in my town, a place called Claremont - more of a suburb, really, of Perth, Australia. A lucky place, for it meant there was .. inside an air-conditioned cube .. a row of Atari and Apple computers.

Two school-kids are sitting there, tapping away, at something from a magazine. It looks immensely interesting, but they scowl at me as I get closer as if not to interrupt. So I go poke on an Atari, and immediately dislike its membrane.

The sales guy, probably only a few years beyond his teens, unlike me not yet begun, grins and nods over at another Apple II machine, newly set up. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I bang away at it "HELLO" this and "dO somehting" this and whatever, until the sales guy swoops in, wangs in a floppy, hits the reset combo and lets me play SABOTAGE for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day, after an interminably long day at school, I arrive with a freshly purloined magazine of my own. The same kids from before are there, just minutes before me probably but seemingly there all night, and are having a blast. They proudly, this time, beckon me over to 'have a go' at their game, TREK, wherein I am an "+" and there are "*"'s and . and #'s all over the place.

After witnessing me fail miserably, yet nevertheless programmatically successfully, these older kids chortle themselves out into the heat .. and I stick around to learn how to copy it to another floppy disk. The sales guy obliges, and gives me my first 5.4" floppy disk to save things on, "as long as you come back tomorrow and type a few more programs in, from those magazines you kids have..."

So, I did. What a summer it was.

I'll never forget those older nerds.

What an awesome sales guy

Yeah, I guess they sold quite a few VERY expensive machines in that neighborhood, and there were raging arcade game controversies going along at the same time, so seeing kids do 'productive' things with computers - like program simulated galactic war games - seemed like a responsible thing to do.

In my case, that guy gave me a raging passion for computers that has led, 40 years later, to ridiculous things happening.

The "Computer Age" place stuck around for only a few years afterwards .. the cognescenti of my hacker club at school discovered TANDY and Dick Smith as places to test new hilarious routines .. and, meanwhile, some of us got modems.

Good times. I think my Mum still had that floppy disk around in her memoirs, somewhere. Something about how she righteously retrieved it from an old, much loathed, school principle, who had zero idea what it was, or what it would ever mean for the world that a 10 year old kid had simulated galactic war games on his person, in lieu of math homework, or so.

Anyway, yeah. Great sales guy, would time-travel and witness again.

It really was the best era, and lots that I can relate to in your story there, though I was on the far opposite side of the world in snowy cold Edmonton, Canada.

And re: the principal, here's a great quote from my grade 3 report card which I get a kick out of, and use to help my kids feel better about their report cards:

"XXX's work is very untidy. More work is needed in cursive writing. His journal entries are computer programs."

I wish I could find that teacher today and send her a copy of my job offer from Google from 10 years ago.

I was a teenager visiting Computer Age on the weekends at the same time. It was a time when computer access was still scarce and you hung around shops and went to conventions just to get access to one. Some friends used to go to the tandy store each afternoon after school and type in a lunar lander game they had written on the tandy 100 for sale. Each day the shop would turn of all the machines and wipe the game so they would go back up the next day and type it in again.

Wow that sounds very different to my experience back then. Nerdy kid trying to get time on a computer in a shop in Canberra - generally the sales dudes would chase you out of the shop. The "Computerland" store in Philip was the worst offender for that. The Microbee people were slightly better so I am pretty sure that's how we ended up with one (plus the Apple and Atari machines were insanely expensive back then, and the Commodores seemed like toys).

I think in this case, it was inevitable that the shop was going to be inundated with rich schoolkids from the neighborhood, and the sales guy as I remember him seemed to understand, intrinsically, that these computers were going to sell if the kids could convince their parents to buy it for them...

Not saying I didn't get chased out of the other computer shops of Perth in the 80's, but those are other tales of joyous mirth, for another time ..

There must have been multiple Star Trek games. This is the one I remember playing. Written by Mike Mayfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)

I have VERY fond memories of that game from 1986. My father who was teaching at a community college in Iowa had a copy of that game running on a VAX11. I recall that to play the game he had to walk to the data center and, inside a cabinet, physically unplug the cable for his terminal and plug it into another port. The connector on the cable looked like a large rectangular multi pin monster. Back at his desk, his green screen terminal was ready to play the game. I was 5, it was very awesome.

During college in 1976 I typed in Star Trek: APL using an IBM APL terminal with an APL Selectronic ball. I had a printout I think I paid $5 for and typed it character by character for some time (a couple weeks I think - this was my first experience with an APL hard copy terminal).

Boy I played that for a long time. Glad I didn't get billed for the paper I used. So much matrix math. 8-)

Wow you played begin too! I added multiplayer through DOSbox--

it was interesting that the AI craft were just like player craft but had a different controller. It was possible to splice in keyboard input for that. Then I wrote some screen scraping software to send the commands remotely.

Here's the software project http://begin2.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately the sourceforge matchmaking server has long gone offline, but you could connect direct to IP addresses too, so it should still be playable

Tom would be very interested in that! You should post something maybe on his site? https://www.starfleetproject.com/

Ya we briefly corresponded in a mailing list some time back... he liked the multiplayer version, but wasn't interested in opening the source code yet. Maybe one of these years he will--I should reach out again... until them I have some pretty well annotated IDA file

Wait! The multi-player game by Jon Sawyer was 'Wander'. Don't know how I forgot that.

I am a retro-computing fanboy and recently have been reliving the world of text adventure games on one of my most favoured "failed" computers of the 80's, the Oric-1/Atmos range of UK 8-bit machines.

https://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software

(Search for i.e. 'adventure')

The aesthetic is so pure, and in the context of oric.org, the titles are a testament to the spirit of an entirely different form of walled-garden/app-store.

I favour the Oric, and many of the great old architectures like it (Amstrad CPC6128!!) not for much more salient reason than it was my first 'real' computer, on which I first gained an immense amount of arcane knowledge that led me to an even more immense amount of arcana.

The adventure has been text since the very first day. A coders adventure game never STOP's.

*bonus edit: everything old is new again, and it is awesome:

https://defence-force.org/index.php?page=games&game=blakes7

I’m sure getting an Oric and Blake’s 7 reference in a single post qualifies for a special upvote around here! Thanks for sharing, both great sites. I’ll dig out that Atmos I have in the basement!

You most certainly will get a kick out of that Atmos if you get it booted up and functioning.

The Oric world didn't get much love in 1982/83/84, before the company fell apart completely - so there are many of us who would've felt particularly left-out, in terms of what 'could have been done', back then, with very little software. An Oric OG user had to write their own programs, while all the other machines got great stuff on the market.

Well, this is now resolved in the 21st Century, with 21st Century releases - titles still being produced by fans - which really, seriously push the limits of what you might've thought the Oric can do.

Get loaded up with some blakes7, space1999, pulsoids, l33t, or check out some of the new stuff being discussed on defence-force.org like a Wolfenstein-like mazerunner [1], or maybe a proper Loderunner [2] - if you're an Oric guy, this is going to be FUN for you. Finally.

[1] - https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2264 [2] - https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2282

I'm honored to see my blog appear here. I hope some of you pop over and comment, particularly if you have any additional information or intelligence on those old games!

--Chet Bolingbroke

Chet, I just discovered your blog today via this post. It’s going to take me a while to catch up on the last 11 years but I’ll give it a shot. Thank you so much for your amazing contributions and welcome to HN.

Recently an old text adventure game 'Castlequest' from 1980 was recovered (https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/03/09/castlequest/ ), and there are even some efforts to modernize it (https://gitlab.com/apthorpe/Castlequest).

Oh wow. As soon as I read the opening text I remembered playing that game. Also did not realize it had sprung forth from RPI.

For whoever is not familiar with CRPG Addict, let me tell you that please bookmard/rss his site and you will see a whole new world. This guy decided to play pretty much EVERY RPG he can find and he is already in year 1993.

The whole blog is a fantastic exercise in documenting the history of CRPGs, describing and evaluating each game, and analyzing how they all influence each other. He'll often put extra effort into tracking down copies of obscure games and contacting authors.

In some ways it reminds me of Jon Peterson's "Playing at the World", which thoroughly documents the origins and early history of D&D, which started the genre.

Exactly. This guy is amazing and his perservarance is beyond my understanding. I secretly wish someone had the courage to actually stream playing these games, would actually take less time as he doesn't need to summarize and write stuffs.

Maybe I'll do that when I'm semi-retired.

If you like reading about the history of CRPG's you'll love The Digital Antiquarian[1]

[1] - https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/

I second that. Crpgaddict's work ethic is beyond legendary, at times bordering on insanity. Honestly, I find Chet's blog to be one of the best and most valuable places on the internet these days (and I mean this literally). A modern day's monk, really.

Much later than these, but I remember quite fondly all the DOOR BBS RPGs and games on our local BBSes in the mid 90s. I would come home from school, grab the really long phone cable coiled up, and run it across the house to the kitchen so I could log on.

I absolutely loved DOOR games like Exitilus and Legend of the Red Dragon.

I'd written a couple of door games and shareware door software myself in Turkey. I had even developed my own door software engine on Turbo Pascal called OpenDoor :) Fun times.

I loved BBS games. I called multiple BBSes daily to play LoRD and a few other games. I ran a BBS in high school during the late 90's with LoRD and a handful of IGMs.

There's a browser-based adaptation of LORD:

http://lotgd.net/home.php

(not mine, no affiliation)

This article is the closest I'll ever come to posting this story on topic. Back in 1983 I was given a copy of a Wizardry prototype written in Applesoft BASIC. I don't know whether it was real, but it was a huge program and very detailed. Floppy disks were expensive, and I was already into the real Pascal-based Wizardry, so I foolishly deleted it a few weeks later.

Was this real? Does a copy still exist anywhere in the world? Andrew or Robert, are you out there?

According to wikipedia, it was probably real.

"It was initially coded in Applesoft BASIC, but Greenberg and Woodhead rewrote it in UCSD Pascal after BASIC proved too slow to be playable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_t...

I'm really fascinated by that era of computer gaming, well that era of computers in general. I've been following this blog about text games since I first seen it on HN.

https://if50.substack.com/

The earlier entries talk about some of the same stuff mentioned in this article.

Reading about these things, I dunno, it reminds me of the wild west or something.

All these university students and programmers writing illicit games like outlaws, hiding their games under simple file names that became almost memes for the ones in the know at the school.

It's really cool and those people are the reason why video games and computers became a thing.

Everytime I learn more about the early history of computers or even video games it always makes me happy. I dunno, to see how far it's all come, to have grown up watching a lot of it evolve.

It's just always great to read about.

Definitely second the recommendation for that substack.

If you're interested in the PLATO system, there's a public-access machine online at https://www.cyber1.org/index.asp

PLATO was a very interesting system that isn't as well known as it should be.

Sadly it's still in copyright/IP lockdown, even though most of the system was presumably developed by the University of Illinois and the largely defunct CDC. As a result the software is unavailable for emulation or study.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PLATO_Computer_...

On the other hand, having multiple users on the system makes it more realistic.

And you can play Moria.

What would happen if we decided to completely ignore these claims for this, which seems to be abandonware. Who would come after us? Could we claim fair use if we are attempting to reconstruct work and social interactions of the past, not unlike a renaissance fair or a historic battle reenactment?

I'd imagine the problem is more about obtaining documentation, ROMs, OS files etc. Emulators of questionable legality have always been around, for platforms more commercially interesting than this. But it's rarely lead to legal action.

It's actually up and running in an emulator on the above public access site. However, the tape dumps seem to be unavailable currently.

I wonder whether some Illinois/PLATO alumni and/or the Computer History Museum might be interested in making them more widely available.

Other sites presumably have the tapes as well.

There is some risk. Until someone proves ownership of the IP, nobody large enough to be worth suing can safely do it. The organisation who operates the emulator has a license.

The IP from CDC must have passed down to whatever companies purchased the company. I bet Illinois would slap down people also - nothing a university likes more than asserting their IP.

Also check out https://irata.online/ which has terminal clients for several 8-bit machines, like you can log in from your C-64 or NES.

This is an incredible site. I rarely feel so grateful to come across something on the web these days.

I'm writing a book about the experience of playing RuneScape - needless to say I'm fascinated by Why We Play.

We can no longer play the most influential game of the 2000s, FarmVille.

I played this extremely addictive Mud on MECC (a CDC machine) throughout the 70s. does anyone remember what it was called?

Scepter [of Goth]? Milieu?

Milleu! thank you.

Fun stuff, by the time I had access to Plato (1978) 'games' were just one of the category of thing you could do with the terminal (so 'sanctioned' activities). A roommate of mine got hooked on 'Dry Gulch' which was a fairly simple take your mule into the mine outside of town and blast away walls for ore, bring it in and refine it for gold. You could use gold to buy more mules, dynamite and mining tools. A very simple mechanic but quite addicting.

Drygulch is mentioned at the end of the article, along with notes that he can't seem to find any screenshots of it.

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.

In case you run across something you're fairly certain is an image of this game, I'm sure he would appreciate the authentication. :)

Every couple of years I get nostalgic and wish I could find the short text adventure CastleQuest, which existed on the CompuServe BBS but is otherwise afaik just gone ( http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/castle... ).

Ah well. Some things are just gone.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691788

Might be your lucky day. Just further down the thread Jabl posted:

> Recently an old text adventure game 'Castlequest' from 1980 was recovered (https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/03/09/castlequest/ ), and there are even some efforts to modernize it (https://gitlab.com/apthorpe/Castlequest).

I am a 3278 fanboy, but I have to admit PLATO is absolutely wonderful. The same applies to the underlying CDC systems and their graphical vector-based operator consoles.

It's interesting that, when you are so much ahead of your time, you end up as a kind of failure, without generating other generations downstream because, even though you were far ahead of everyone else, you were so far nobody would be able to follow your steps.

May be a myth as clarified somewhere else, it is important to run unix not Multics in pdp not mainframe. You do not simplify and dumb down, you cannot spread.

And Apple/Atari/… dominates and linux not unix …

To spread …

Buddhism says to be like this in its 5 cycles as well.

In the late 70s, or early 80s, I played Dungeon on one of the Caltech/JPL PDP-11s. My father brough home an accoustic-coupled terminal, and I went through a lot of paper. The version I played had been modified to take place in the Arroyo Seco up behind JPL. I wonder if whoever did that is still around?

God bless the people who write emulators. All of these lost forever - quite the tragedy.

Oubliette looks interesting and so raw!

Liberal Crime Squad is based on Oubliette and I believe some forks are still in active development.

http://www.bay12games.com/lcs/ http://lcs.wikidot.com/

It's available in the OpenBSD ports collection. I have no clue, though, how recent their version is. I never really got the hang of it, but it's a fun game.

I have a soft spot for these old games that are very primitive in the graphics and sound department (if there even is sound) but make up for in complex gameplay.

Not as old as the others in this thread, but Fire Emblem for the Gameboy Advance were so good. I never got to play them on the original console, only on an Android emulator.

Somehow, they're better than most modern RPGs. I can't explain it.

I like the storylines and somehow the visuals are great and it can all fit in a tiny amount of memory.

Completely offline, too, which is a rarity these days.

The GBA and later the DS are IMO some of the best platforms for RPGs.

The SNES is better. Today you can play these Japan only gems thanks to hacktranslated ROMs.

A 1970s version of Empire for the PDP-10:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10

There was a game called NUCDES by Erik Verheiden for the PDP-10. It was a fun multiplayer game. AFAIK, I'm the only one who remembers it :-(

I was fortunate to be at a university where a PLATO system was installed for e-learning - we found the games directory and SpaceWars.

Is there any RPG written in RPG?

On text games, I suggest you to try:

- Z Machine interpreter and Anchorhead, Vicyous Cycles, Enemies, All Thing Devours, Curses!, Jigsaw, and Heroine.

- BSD Games, ATC is addictive.

- Nethack/Slashem, DCSS. The first is lateral thinking oriented, the second one is combat oriented.

- Dopewars and it's fork Vaccinewars with, well, you guess which drugs are we using today.

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