1980

• Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Expert Dungeons & Dragons are published.

  "This publication marks a split between D&D and AD&D, as TSR modifies the rules of BD&D to be less like AD&D . The split was made for legal reasons ”David Arneson, the co-creator of D&D , had left TSR and sued for royalties from D&D . TSR maintained that AD&D was a different game, and they therefore should not have to pay royalties to Arneson on it or its products. Maintaining this, however, required that they not replace D&D with AD&D , as had been their original intent. For this reason, TSR continued to produce both D&D and AD&D , and to change the two game lines to be different from each other, into the early 1990s."

  ” Travis S. Casey

• Empire introduces annual tournaments.

• Final version of MUD1 completed by Richard Bartle. Essex goes on the ARPANet, resulting in Internet MUDs!

• Steve Jackson releases Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard , along with In The Labyrinth . The changes made from previous versions make the games into a role-playing system.

• Drygulch exists on PLATO by now.

  "Another PLATO game existing at that time (around 1980) was Panzerkrieg . You and an opponent would carry out extended campaigns against each other in a WWII simulation. Another was Wolfpack (German, American, and British multiplayer subs vs. destroyers)."

  ” Mike Lindeland

• Kelton Flinn and John Taylor write Dungeons of Kesmai . It used ASCII graphics.

  "The summer of 1980, we wrote the game that became Dungeons of Kesmai , which supported six users on a souped-up Z-80."

  ” Kelton Flinn

  "They didn't know about MUD at the time. No. The fantasy Lineage started with the single-player fantasy game written for the HP-2000 in BASIC during 1979 “1980, basically extending a maze combat program I wrote earlier in 1979, to see if I could capture some of the essence of D&D . That game was rewritten in UCSD Pascal for the Z-80 running CPM, and as I mentioned, at that point became a six- user multiplayer. Dungeons was the cut-down single-player version of that game, still Pascal because CompuServe had a compiler. There was a TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC version in there also. At that time, I hadn't even heard of Adventure yet. Of course, by the time we were doing the Island late in 1980, I had seen Adventure and Zork , but we were heading off in our own direction by that time, a lot more action-oriented and very little puzzle-solving."

  ” Kelton Flinn