m199h

m199h is one of very earliest CRPGs on the PLATO system. Unfortunately it’s also a lost game, it was deleted shortly after it’s creation and there’s little information about it.

About 2.5 years ago, I exchanged e-mails with Donald Gillies, who wrote Swords & Sorcery on PLATO. On 28 December 2016, he wrote to me: “Last weekend, I started dumping out boxes of junk . . . Among these pages, I found a FULL PRINTOUT (screen captures) of all the spells in m199h and several of the graphics characters used in m199h.” […] but I guess he never got around to scanning the documents.

Anyway, Don also commented on my blog as “SystemBuilder” and mentioned that he thinks m199h actually POST-dated The Dungeon (pedit5), which would make it less of a landmark game than most of the histories have it.

Most of the information about m199h comes from comments on CRPG Addict’s blog written by Donald Gilles, the creator of the PLATO game sorcery. Apparently m199h was similar to dnd, a later PLATO RPG.

dnd and m199h looked ALMOST exactly the same after the splash screen; if you were in the dungeon you could hardly tell which game you were playing.

Another very popular dungeon, probably the 3rd or 4th dungeon written on PLATO, is m199h. The strange lesson names came from the courses (m199h was a course from the foreign languages department). It had some of the best charsets and originated a flying dragon picture used in many subsequent dungeons, I believe.

Intriguingly this quote suggests there were other games apart from The Dungeon prior to m199h but I haven’t found any information about those games or what they were like.