m199h

published by unknown in 1974, developed by University of Illinois, running on PLATO
type: role-play
genre: Fantasy, Dungeon Crawler
perspective: side view
player options: single player
languages: eng

Description

Was deleted for being an illicit game on a system designed solely for education.
followed by dnd

(Zerothis) - # 2006

News


m199h (1974 or 1975)

m199h is the "first" legendary lost CRPG, supposedly written on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. m199h was most likely the file name, but it almost certainly had a more colorful name, just as pedit5 was actually called The Dungeon and dnd was The Game of Dungeons. It was written in the place reserved for the Department of Foreign Languages.

Many websites and books mention this game, but almost all of them draw information from only two sources. The first is a file of notes about PLATO written by Dirk Pellett, one of the writers of The Game of Dungeons. It talks about the history of role-playing games on PLATO. Here's what he says:

"It is common knowledge that someone created the very first dungeon simulation game in a place designed for activities called "m199h", and it was not created by the account director for the sake of gamers playing games. When the game was found, it was removed. Unfortunately, little is known about the game's author or what the game was like; there is not a single known copy."


This appears to be Brian Deerop's source for a brief mention of this game, which he casually calls m119h, in The Friendly Orange Glow, the basis for numerous citations that follow. The second source is what I believe is a comment on my own blog. Many sites, including MobyGames, claim that the game was developed "in a place dedicated to learning foreign languages," a phrase I believe first appeared in this comment by Don Gillis. Gillies was a university student in the 1970s. He wrote the game Swords and Sorcery (1978) for PLATO.

Gillis believed that m199h was actually the third or fourth Dungeons & Dragons derivative written for PLATO. Most of the other authors claim that m199h was the first, but I believe they all cite Pellett, so what we end up with is one developer on PLATO claiming that this game was the first, and another who claims it wasn't . It is quite possible that neither of them is right, but each of them has a different method for determining the "dating" of the game.

In 2011, admin Cyber1, who once played m199h, recalled that it was at least partly based on a game called Monster Maze, written by Terry O'Brien on the CDC 6600. Gillis said that The Game of Dungeons and m199h "looked almost identical after the cutscene; if you were in a dungeon, you could hardly tell what game you were playing." This suggests that m199h was a top-down game in which the character explored a maze-like level, finding items and treasure, and fighting monsters. According to a lot of memories, it had good graphics, but they weren't as good as The Dungeon or The Game of Dungeons. There were no multiplayer options.

In 2016, one of my sources wrote to me that he had discovered, in some forgotten boxes, printouts of screenshots of all the spells and "characters" used in m199h, "including a very handsome character in a robe with a lantern who represents the player himself." For the past five years I've been constantly begging him to scan them and either send them to me or post them somewhere on the Internet. Of course I wanted the scoop, but I would have been happy for him to offer them to anyone just so we could see what the game looked like.

I've been putting off this article or one like it for years, hoping I could include a few of these screenshots. Alas, the man stopped answering my letters several years ago, and I believe that the matter is hopeless.

FROM : https://habr.com/ru/companies/skillfactory/articles/565588/
2023-09-10 21:22:20 - source

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zerothis
Becoro

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