Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n Wood kicks the story off for us, saying, \u201cTo go all the way back: there was a PLATO terminal on the first floor of Morris Library at SIU in Carbondale. One day, I looked in and there were a bunch of students huddled around it\u2026 probably six or so.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I got permission to use the system and log on, and I began playing around with it. The room was about eight by eight metres. In order to see the screen, the lights were turned off.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could only sign up for one hour a day. Whenever you used the terminal, two or three or more people would show up and sit in the room with you. Sometimes we would just shoot the s**t, or just talk about the programmes. There was a group of maybe 10 people who regularly used PLATO, so we got to know each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some games on it\u2026 MoonWar, Dogfight, and a few others. The PLATO rules were that you could only play games during \u2018non-business\u2019 hours \u2014 which was after 7pm and before 7am Monday through Friday. Also, games were given a low priority\u2026 so, users playing games were the first ones kicked off the system in times of heavy use.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor some reason, Gary Whisenhunt and I hit it off, and we developed a friendship, which still continues. I think the reason we get along is because we had interests outside of computers and engineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne day, a new game called PEDIT5 (written by Rusty Rutherford) became popular. PEDIT5, in modern lingo, is a God\u2019s eye view dungeon crawl.\u201d<\/p>
Whisenhunt takes over the story now, remembering the very first time he found that fateful computer: \u201cSometime in the fall of 1973 or the summer of 1974, I discovered the one PLATO terminal at the university. It was housed in the basement of the library \u2014 not many people knew of it, and it was more of an interesting oddity than something that was being used for actually teaching anything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was fascinated by it. I had always excelled at Math, but had never actually interacted with a computer \u2014 which were pretty rare prior to any type of personal computers existing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeyond that, PLATO was way ahead of its time, and represented what it would take many years for mainstream computing to accomplish \u2014 graphical interfaces, multimedia, interactive communication, touch screens, and more.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started playing with the PLATO terminal and taught myself how to programme it. The thought of creating a programme was actually kind of exotic at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe PLATO terminal was housed in a small room and you could sign up for time in one-hour blocks, no more than one hour a day. There were several other students there who were also intrigued by PLATO as well \u2014 people would often hang around the room looking for extra free time as I sometimes did. One of those people was Ray Wood. He and I became good friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, given the graphical and interactive nature of the PLATO system, it was a great platform for games. Games were generally frowned upon, especially up at the PLATO home at the University of Illinois. However, the system was perfect for gaming and of course people started writing them.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeveral of us in Southern Illinois University would sometimes play some of these games: Airfight, Empire, etc. Around that time, there was a dungeon game called PEDIT5 which had been created. Ray and I had played that, it was loosely based on similar concepts of the Dungeons & Dragons paper game that had recently come out.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, PEDIT5 would occasionally be deleted \u2014 games were seen as an illicit use of the PLATO computer in some places. Ray and I had done some PLATO programming before that, but had never written a game \u2014 no one at Southern Illinois had ever written a game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe decided that we should try and write our own dungeon game, and we were pretty sure that it wouldn\u2019t get deleted because the person that oversaw the PLATO terminal really knew nothing about it and it was just something else he was supposed to manage. He\u2019d never even know of its existence.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo Ray and I set about writing the game. We would meet at different places when we had open times between classes \u2014 usually on the steps of the library, weather permitting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would talk about what we wanted to accomplish and how the game would work. Then we would kind of divide up the programming tasks and each spend our allotted time on the one terminal to enter and debug the code.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n Wood picks up the thread again here: \u201cThe problem with PEDIT5 is that you couldn\u2019t play it during \u2018work\u2019 hours. So, all the guys at SIU complained about it. The other thing, which is going to sound crazy to people now, is that the university admins thought games were a waste of valuable computer time, and thus would regularly delete the game from the system. So, it would disappear for weeks at a time.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing the devious college students we were, Gary and I became the system administrators for the SIU Plato site. Thus, we were in control of the programming space at SIU. So, no one could delete computer programmes but us.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyway, Gary and I decided we would write our own dungeon crawl. Since we were SysAdmins, the game wouldn\u2019t be deleted, we could play the game during normal hours, and all the guys at SIU could play the game whenever they wanted. So, everyone was happy. So, we started writing a version of PEDIT5.<\/p>\n
\u201cPEDIT5 had some severe limitations. The biggest one was that a user couldn\u2019t save a game. If you logged off PLATO or were kicked out of PEDIT5, your game disappeared. You had to restart from the beginning. So, no matter what items you found in the dungeon, they always disappeared in a few hours. None of that seemed particularly fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wood wants to stress an important point, for the record, at this moment in the story: \u201cGary and I worked together. DND was a joint creation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wood continues: \u201cSince at SIU we were limited to one hour on PLATO, the first thing Gary and I implemented was a SAVE GAME function so you could return to the game without losing your gold, weapons and levels. This made the game an actual RPG (Role Playing Game). In some ways, the save function made DND the very first real RPG.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had some fun with the game, trying to introduce some cheeky humour into it. We even patterned one of the monsters in the dungeon after a particularly obnoxious student.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn order to programme better, Gary and I would try to sign up for PLATO so that our times were next to each other. That way, we had a block of two hours to work on it together. We usually did it on Saturday morning. We would show up at the library and go to work.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne Saturday after we finished programming, we decided to go out for a burger at a local greasy spoon. It was next to the train station in downtown Carbondale. They had a couple of pinball machine games there, so we started playing them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pinball machines had a high score function. If you had one of the top 10 scores, you could enter your initials.<\/p>\n
\u201cGary and I started playing. Gary, being the guy with good eye-hand coordination, got a high score. I started playing, and unbelievably, I beat Gary and got the top score. This was the first and only time I ever got a high score on a pinball game. I was, to be honest, pretty excited.<\/p>\n
\u201cGary and I started talking about how neat it would be to have a high score for DND where people could put in their name. But, the question came up, \u2018What does a high score mean in a video game?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause DND had a save game function, a person could simply play the game and get a new high score every time s\/he played. So, it wouldn\u2019t have any meaning. We said, \u2018What if we put an ending on the game, you know, where the game stopped?\u2019 If a player ends the game, then he gets to put his high score up, but his character gets deleted.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe came up with the idea of the players going into the Elysian Fields, the mythical place where Roman heroes resided after their death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wood highlights a second important point here: \u201cNo video game in existence ended other than by the player getting killed or quitting.\u201d<\/p>\n
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