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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Hah, I guessed "Niven's fantasy books" would be an important part of this story.

The back of my head is saying "but what about JRPGs using the term since forever" when he only discusses M:TG and Warcraft but I could be wrong.

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> but what about JRPGs using the term since forever

Before MTG though? I just remember magic depending on "MP" was "magic points/power" just like "HP" was "hit points" (i.e. 'life'). What's the earliest JRPG to call it 'mana?'

The article implies that Final Fantasy was inspired to use "MP" from Ultima III, which used it as an abbreviation of "magic points". The article then goes on to say that the first game to explicitly use "MP" to mean "mana points" was Dungeon Master, which came out the same year as Final Fantasy, but was not a JRPG.

I remember playing home-brew D&D games in the late seventies. MP were manna points.

Whether it mana from polynesia or manna from Exodus is was ambiguous for broadly but spottily educated seventeen year olds.

But yes, I am sure that any rigid tracing of the term in role playing to 2 or 5 sources is going to fail.

Squaresoft's Secret of Mana came out the same year at M:TG, 1993.

Here's the Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana. I never played the game myself, but the article mentions that mana was used as "spell points", and that

> The story takes place in a fictional world where mana represents an ethereal, but finite, energy source.

> Before MTG though?

Don't know about JRPGs, but at least some American tabletop RPGs used the term "mana" relating to magic earlier than M:tG -- e.g., GURPS used "mana levels" to describe the strength of the ambient magical field (not as "magic points") since at least the publication of the first edition of GURPS Fantasy in 1986.

JRPG are not that ancient. Akalabeth (running on a band of paper with holes!), Ultima on early computers are way before any JRPG came out.

DikuMUD came out before M:TG and had mana, and is the CRPG ancestor of World of Warcraft (by way of EverQuest).

Is there any source that says that it was specifically Diku that led to EverQuest? LPMud etc also dates from 1989/90 and also had mana, as had Populous as someone else mentions.

There must be a game before that that also used mana, I think GURPS is the most likely mentioned so far.

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