1974

• The original D&D set is published, though it had been well-distributed prior to this.

• Somewhere in here, Mines of Moria (it had 248 mazes, according to Antic magazine in 1984) on PLATO.

• Empire : multiplayer space empire game on PLATO supporting 32 players.

  " Empire was a MIND-BLOWING game. It had three million contact hours before 1980. Think about it. PLATO only had 1,000 terminals. So, there were only something like 9M contact hours in a PLATO-year."

  ” Don Gillies

• D&D (Avatar) existed by now, according to Steve Gray, who was 11 at the time and writing code for PLATO. D&D was apparently the command-line name , and Avatar the game name. Dr. Cat says that Wizardry ("one of the first PC RPGs" ”JMM) was directly based on Avatar , down to the spell names .

  " D&D, by Flint and Dirk Pellett, predates Avatar . So does Orthanc , by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and myself , and done about the same time. Both have overhead 3x3 views. Orthanc allowed players to meet and talk in the dungeon , but otherwise was a single-player game. This is 1973."

  ” Eric Hagstrom

• According to Peter Zelchenko, the original authors of D&D were Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood; Flint and Dirk Pellet were subsequent authors.

• Notes files created on PLATO, the first bulletin-board systems (BBSes), almost exactly like today's Usenet. Also, around now Xerox visits PLATO and they trade ideas, according to Doug Jones.

  "Actually, the first version of PLATO Notes opened in August 1973. Personal Notes (email) came along about a year later in 1974. Group Notes, the new version of PLATO Notes that allowed anyone to create a Notes file, came out in January 1976."

  ” David Woolley

• Somewhere in here, DECWAR was created. It was Star Trek -based also ”perhaps a relationship to the Empire game on PLATO?

  "That was called DECWAR . Yes, it ran on VAX/VMS. We used to play it on a PDP-10. It used shared memory to communicate, not files, which was one of the ways the sys admins could detect it. We generally played 5+ players per side. It had a lot of intelligent multiplayer design considerations."

  ” S. Patrick Gallaty

• The first first-person shooter? Dave Lebling and Greg Thompson write a multiplayer first-person maze for the Imlac PDS-1, with PDP-10 as a server. It supported up to eight players, chat, and bots.

• Star Trader is written by Dave Kaufman.

  "People's Computer Company ( PCC ), a company that is still around today and who brought us Dr. Dobb's Journal among other things, publishes Volume 2, Number 3 of its newsletter in January. In this publication is BASIC source code for Star Trader by Dave Kaufman. This game outlined the general details of a sector-based game with ports and a player moving between sectors trading three basic products (fuel, organics, and equipment) to earn credits."

  ” John Pritchett's History of Tradewars 2002