The Codex - Entry 0001: m199h (aka Dungeon) (Mid-1970s)
An inauspicious start to our survey of RPG video game history that shows precisely why tracking this history is necessary
Game: m199h (aka Dungeon)
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: Mid-1970s
The PLATO was one of the earliest mainframe computers available at colleges and universities across the United States—particularly in the Midwest. Though this system’s giant, touch-screen-enabled monitors were designed with education in mind, it didn’t take long for the teenage and twenty-something students on these campuses to discover that they could use the powerful machine for recreation as well.
The earliest games developed for PLATO in the 1970s mostly fell into two categories: spaceship shooters inspired by Star Trek and dungeon crawls inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. These were some of the first video games ever created and, as far as we know, absolutely the first role-playing video games ever. Unfortunately, they were also created in an atmosphere that didn’t recognize or appreciate how groundbreaking they were—and indeed, pushed back against their very existence.
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Early game developers on PLATO—mostly college students and a handful of high-school-age kids—often found themselves in a constant back-and-forth struggle with system administrators. One or two students would code and publish a game, hiding it within a lesson directory. Then word of the game would spread around to other students, and it would grow in popularity until, inevitably, an admin discovered and deleted the rogue “lesson.” In the best cases, students had a backup and were able to get the program up and running again. In nightmare scenarios, they had nothing, and these early video games were lost forever.
Such is the case with m199h, possibly the earliest known video game incarnation of the RPG. The program was coded by someone accessing the PLATO IV hardware located on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. If the title sounds strange, it’s because it was formatted in the style of lessons on the PLATO system. By making it sound like any other utility that students could access on PLATO, m199h was essentially able to hide in plain sight, masquerading as a lesson while providing hours of illicit gaming to those in the know.
Some sources report that m199h also went under the generic (and regularly reused, as we’ll discover in later entries) name of Dungeon. It’s possible that m199h was the program title in PLATO and thus used by one-time students reminiscing about it, while Dungeon was what players were presented with on the title screen.
That’s not to say that it hid particularly well, however. According to the accounts of some students and budding game developers there at the time, m199h first popped into existence on PLATO in 1974, not long after the release of the original version of Dungeons & Dragons. That pen-and-paper role-playing game was a massive success amongst the PLATO-savvy crowd at the university, so when word spread of a computer game fulfilling a similar fantasy niche, students flocked to it. It was only a matter of time before an ornery administrator noticed and deleted the program for not being an actual academic tool.
No solid record exists of who created m199h, nor how the game worked exactly. It’s possible that the game was developed (and subsequently destroyed) before game programmers realized that they need to keep backups of their code. Or maybe the mind(s) behind m199h just decided to devote their time to something else entirely. Maybe they flunked out of college after spending too much time basking in the eerie orange glow of the PLATO monitors; that wasn’t an unheard-of fate among students discovering the future of technology at that time.
It’s worth noting, as well, that there is some debate over whether pedit5—a game we’ll discuss in an upcoming entry—actually came out before m199h. It was broadly accepted in the limited historical data available for the past twenty years that m199h was first, but more recent online discussion has called that into question. Some sources recall m199h releasing as late as 1976 and being a remake of pedit5.
Since the game itself no longer exists, and the records and recollections of the time are limited at best, this debate isn’t likely to be settled any time soon, if ever.
That said, I must give a special shout-out to Chester Bolingbroke (aka CRPG Addict), who has done some of the most impressive and thorough digging into this lost game. Most recently, he was sent photos related to m199h from someone who claimed to have played it. You can read about this compelling new information on CRPG Addict.
Here is what little I’ve been able to discern about m199h: It was a single-player dungeon crawl type game. It represented monsters in the game using special character sets, some of which were fairly advanced for the time. Mechanically, it was reportedly very similar to dnd, another PLATO RPG that we will discuss in the next entry.
And...that’s it. That is the full extent of general knowledge still available about what was quite possibly the first role-playing video game ever created. While the program itself was almost certainly primitive, the lack of information about it—never mind the inability to actually play it—is a frustrating blow to our historical understanding of the genre and how it has evolved. Luckily, most of the RPGs that followed on the PLATO were preserved, with several of them remaining playable via emulation to this day.
If you’d like to check out what the PLATO mainframe was like for yourself and possibly check out some of the ancient games I’ll be writing about soon, take a look at the Cyber1 website. It’s got a bit of a sign-up process, but I’m so grateful that there are people dedicated to keeping this historical resource available. I’ll be making a lot of use of it in the weeks and months to come.
Sources for this entry
Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “BRIEF: Everything We Know about 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play.” June 30, 2021. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/06/brief-everything-we-know-about-1970s.html.
Bolingbroke, Chester. CRPG Addict. “m199h: New Findings Both Solve and Deepen Mysteries.” October 11, 2023. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2023/10/m199h-new-findings-both-solve-and.html.
Dear, Brian. 2017. The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. New York: Vintage Books.
Moby Games. “m199h (Terminal).” Last modified October 27, 2023. Last accessed April 5, 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/game/m199h.