Want to see gaming’s past and future? Dive into the “educational” world of PLATO

In the days of mainframe computing, one system stood miles ahead of the rest. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) wasn't special for its power or speed or graphical prowess, though. It was remarkable for the ideas that drove its development and for the breadth of its impact—starting in the 1960s and accelerating through the '70s and '80s, PLATO terminals became omnipresent throughout schools, universities, and offices around the world.

The PLATO system was designed for education. It had a programming language called TUTOR that was simple enough for non-technical people to use for writing software; it also notably offered a social environment. It was an online community as much as it was a computing platform, and in this capacity it envisaged much of the future of communication. PLATO had chat rooms, message boards, touch panels built into the (flat, plasma) screens, emoticons, animations, virtual economies, and more.

But PLATO also had a less heralded but equally influential component. And even if history has glossed over this detail and neglected to celebrate it, PLATO's gaming archives remain unforgettable for anyone who was there to experience the platform. These "lessons" infuriated administrators, delighted students, and, importantly, pushed the system to its limits.

To the always-watching parents and teachers, games that had overtly educational components were welcomed. As for the rest… well, some were tolerated and allowed to remain as long as they didn't become too disruptive. Other titles were soon deleted. While there were perhaps as many as a thousand games made for the PLATO, only a hundred or so live on in Cyber1—the system on which you can access an emulated PLATO today.

The level of variety on display wasn't a match for the bedroom coding revolution that followed in the 1980s, but PLATO games still had much to offer. Many put you in three-dimensional worlds drawn by lines and devoid of color, with per-second frame rates in the single digits (possibly less than one) and an unwieldy mess of controls to master before you could accomplish anything. Some offered stripped-down renditions of popular sports or close replications of famous board games like Battleship and Boggle. There were simple maze games, mathematical puzzle games, text-only games, and more.

What follows is a somewhat brief history of the most significant PLATO games (so far as I could tell) across its three most popular genres—role-playing games, (3D) vehicle combat sims, and sports games.

Here be dragons

It's sadly impossible to piece together a complete and accurate timeline of PLATO games in retrospect, but one of the earliest known titles is certainly pedit5, aka The Dungeon. The name comes from PLATO's storage allocation. Programmer Rusty Rutherford worked in the PLATO population and energy group, which used only three of its allocated five program spaces. He siphoned off the two extras (pedit4 was used for the manual) to make a game based on tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons—which had only come out the previous year (January 1974) and was the hot thing on campus. Rutherford hoped the generic filename would conceal the fact pedit5 was a game, but admins soon found out and deleted it (then a cat and mouse game carried on for a while as Rutherford repeatedly figured out ways to get it back online as the local system admin kept deleting it).

Pedit5 was a dungeon crawler, with a labyrinthine single-level dungeon to explore and plunder and die in. Its 40 or 50 rooms and adjoining corridors were marked out by straight lines, while the player character and all monsters and objects were small, hand-drawn sprites. Cast as a "brave young fighter" with random values in the five attributes (strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity, and hit points), your job was to get in, get treasure, get 20,000 experience points from slaying monsters, and get back out alive. Even with liberal use of the powerful "Sleep" magic spell (one of 16 total spells in the game), it was easier said than done.

Pedit5 was maybe the first-ever computer role-playing game. Unfortunately, the historical record is sketchy on this point. Pedit5 may have been beaten to the punch by m199h, which also had an obscure title in an attempt to trick the admins. Or maybe m199h was second. Or, possibly, dnd could have been before either of them.

I asked the PLATO historian Brian Dear if he could provide clarification. He's spent the past 20 years researching and writing a book on PLATO's history, but even he's miffed about the specifics. He suggested the task of tracing these origins is harder than researching a Twitter hashtag from 2010 that flared out within eight hours (because that actually has some document record). His best guess is that there may have been two PLATO games given the dnd moniker. One was short-lived but lasted long enough to get the attention of Rutherford—who told games historian Matt Barton in 2008 that he started pedit5 because a program called DND "was reputedly in development, but never seemed likely to appear on the system." (That DND program may have been the mythical m199h, about which no information survives.) Then, Dear suggested, a second dnd came along that was inspired by pedit5.

In any case, Ray Wood and Gary Whisenhunt's (later also Dirk and his brother Flint Pellett's) dnd aka The Game of Dungeons was the superior game (especially after the Pellett brothers took over). Dnd was reviewed (in a public PLATO notesfile) as "myopic" by one player for its enormous character sprite relative to the dungeon. A warped appreciation for scale notwithstanding, dnd pioneered much of what we now expect from a computer RPG—dungeon crawlers especially—and even had the first boss fight (against a golden dragon that guarded an orb treasure at the very end of the final level of the dungeon).

Dnd allowed the player to traverse multiple dungeon levels, which got progressively harder. To travel between levels you stepped into a matter transporter, because stairs were too much of a hassle to program in, or you fell through a chute in the floor. You could also gain experience points that made your character stronger. Early versions of dnd were exploited on this front. Some determined players noticed they could thereby gain experience faster if they stepped in and grabbed something or killed a single monster, then stepped out and back in again. They'd grind away like this for hours. The developers retaliated by modifying the game such that anybody using the room-swapping exploit would be teleported to the bottom of the dungeon—where they'd be swiftly killed.

Many other PLATO dungeon crawlers followed, of which the most significant were Avatar (1979), Moria (1975), and Oubliette (1977). Jim Schwaiger's Oubliette notably inspired—or by some accounts was ripped off by—Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg's seminal 1981 RPG Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. (I'd say Wizardry added enough ideas of its own to get the benefit of the doubt.) But taken together these three PLATO RPGs were a huge early step for the genre.

Moria was the first to appropriate a wireframe, first-person 3D perspective for dungeon crawling. It's particularly interesting to play today as its creators Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin had not been influenced by Dungeons & Dragons—they hadn't played it, nor had they read The Lord of the Rings. They got the idea for Moria after hearing about the trials and tribulations of dnd's development, which explains why Moria played as though it was modeled after a vague recollection of a story about somebody's Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Moria was a big game. It had a town area from which you could access shops and guilds as well as a wilderness area and four huge dungeons you could explore either solo or with a party of other players. Your character could die of old age and leave their possessions to an heir, though they'd likely be killed before this happened. You could also tie a string to something in a room and then later follow the thread back—provided a monster didn't chew through it.

Moria was continuously updated for the better part of a decade and was very popular, but Avatar was the one that really hit the big time with PLATO users. It reportedly accounted for six percent of all time spent on the PLATO system (Brian Dear advised this may be a low estimate) between September 1978 and May 1985.

The initial version by Andrew Shapira, Bruce Maggs, and David Sides contained 15 dungeon levels each sized 30 by 30 spaces, with a town at the top that you could navigate only through a menu system. Like Oubliette before it, Avatar let you choose your alignment (good, neutral, or evil). And like both Oubliette and Moria, you could choose between a number of races and character classes and join a guild.

Avatar added some firsts of its own, though. You could choose your gender, for instance, as well as accept guild quests (now a staple of the genre). Monsters could perform special attacks (like poison or paralysis). And only in Avatar could you reasonably have described the experience as a virtual world—with not only persistence across sign-ons and multiple players sharing the world but also in-game chat and various other text-based communications.

It was common practice for Oubliette and especially Avatar players to get a second PLATO sign-on and play at two terminals simultaneously in order to lessen the problem of finding party members. (Some could play simultaneously with an even greater number of additional characters, but this was frowned upon because it reduced the sense of community in the game world.)