The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  “Did it work!?!”

  “It seemed to weaken!!!!”

  Multiteam collaboration in Empire? Never. But sure enough, all the players were now working together, a first, all of them converged on it, that thing that might have looked like a ridiculous orange carrot on a PLATO screen to a passerby but brought sheer terror to Empire players, and then they discovered it appeared that it could not be destroyed. The combined phasers and torps from every single player in the game were flat-out useless against the orange monster. It just kept eating everything in sight.

  Finally, someone remembered the Star Trek episode. Yes, of course. Brilliant. Little eureka light bulbs went off in everyone’s heads—the orange killer carrot was the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek. Of course—followed by echoes of dialogue from the show:

  SPOCK: Captain, you’re getting dangerously close to the planet killer.

  KIRK: I intend to get a lot closer: I’m going to ram her right down that thing’s throat.

  SPOCK: Jim, you’ll be killed, just like Decker.

  KIRK: No, no, I don’t intend to die, Mr. Spock. We’ve rigged a delay detonation device, you’ll have thirty seconds to beam me aboard the Enterprise before the Constellation’s impulse engines blow.

  Everyone lined up their ships—thirty ships all in single file, a level of cooperation unprecedented in the history of Empire—and they proceeded, one by one, to fly right into the giant death maw of the Doomsday Machine. Not recklessly like Commodore Decker, but with the smooth confidence of Captain Kirk—each ship captain ramming their ship right down this thing’s throat, initiating the game’s SHIFT-q ten-second self-destruct sequence juuussstt so. This was Star Trek all over again—if the PLATO terminals could have piped in music right then, it would have been Sol Kaplan’s unforgettable Doomsday Machine Death March from the original Trek episode’s soundtrack, blaring away at full volume: DUH nuh DUH nuh DUH nuh DUH nuh! One by one, the Empire ships marched in, and one by one they were destroyed, each player gulped up by the indestructible Doomsday Machine, each captain’s goal to ram this ship right down that thing’s throat. Each player trying desperately to time their self-destruct sequence juuusst so. That was the theory, anyway: if you timed your ship to explode at the right exact spot…KABOOM—at least in theory. But, try as they might, the Doomsday Machine lived on, while each self-destructing ship was destroyed in turn. Players would die, and then quickly reenter the game—a game with fewer and fewer planets as the minutes went by—and fly their ships over to where the Doomsday Machine was, line up in front of it like lemmings at a cliff’s edge, and if they didn’t die right away, once again try to self-destruct juuuuust so, over and over again. Some people trying, dying, reentering, dying, reentering, dying, over and over dozens of times.

  And then, after much carnage and insane self-destruction, a UI student named Brian Gilomen (his player name, amazingly, “Commodore”—named after Decker?) managed to time his destruct sequence exactly right—a tiny, exact window of time, and exactly at the right spot at the entrance to the maw of the beast—and it was destroyed.

  There was much rejoicing.

  Gilomen recalls that everyone was “scurrying around in terror that night.” He had remembered the TV show and then it dawned on him: “If the programmers had derived their design from that Star Trek episode, there was a good chance that they would let the beast be killed the same way. I didn’t want to do it, because I had a goodly number of kills that night, and I felt there was an excellent chance that I’d just go up in smoke and have to start my kill list from scratch. But I finally decided to go for broke. I was flying as a Fed, had my shields up as much as possible, and headed right towards its maw.” Moments later the screen changed to some sort of “You Won!” message. The game restarted for everyone, and Gilomen was rewarded with a large number of kills.

  Gary Fritz, to his eternal regret, missed out on the entire episode—he’d gone home for Christmas break. “We gave it parameters that were similar to the show,” Chuck Miller says of the Doomsday Machine. “You had to be pretty much right in the mouth.” In fact, a successful Doomsday Machine opponent had to be within fifty units of the Doomsday Machine’s x, y coordinates at the exact moment of your ship’s self-destruction—a near-impossible feat, considering that your ship was moving, the Doomsday Machine was moving, and while you were in the self-destruct sequence, you had absolutely no control over your ship whatsoever; you merely watched a countdown and crossed your fingers.

  The players congratulated Gilomen and then teams were teams again, armies were armies, planets were friendly or they were hostile, and everyone began duking it out once more. Or so they thought. Suddenly the Doomsday Machine came back, and the mayhem started all over again.

  It reappeared four or five more times—one of these times it was destroyed by a ten-year-old kid, much to the consternation and embarrassment of the Empire elite. The bright orange killer carrot known as the Doomsday Machine only stuck around for about a week and then it vanished. Players knew how to kill it, word traveled quickly, and that meant it wasn’t as much fun anymore. It would never make another appearance, and the monster would become a legend, passed down from one player to the next, for decades to come.

  —

  It became a tradition that the Federation team players, after another all-nighter playing Empire at CERL, would head over to Sambo’s, a twenty-four-hour diner, after PLATO’s “non-prime-time” ended sometime around six in the morning. Biologically, this was supposed to be “breakfast,” but “after being up all night,” says Patrick Clifford, “the breakfasts ordered tended to look more like dinner fare than breakfasts, with steak sandwiches, fried shrimp, and other such heavy stuff predominating….We used to drive the chefs nuts.” The Feds would gather in a corner booth and begin “debriefing” what had occurred during the night’s Empire run.

  One early morning, Sambo’s was surprisingly busy, but the Feds still managed to file in and take their corner booth and begin the debrief. They’d been assaulted by Romulans who outnumbered them all night. “We held them off all evening and when the system went down….We still held Earth and the Fed system,” says Clifford. “The discussion became particularly spirited with comments like ‘I thought they had Earth when they cleaned us all off of Earth, but Jerry cloak-hypered in on them and dusted them off before they could beam down armies!’ and ‘There were at least six Roms headed straight for Earth and Funke suicide-hypered on them and got all of them and only brought down his shields to 30 percent!’ This had been going on for about an hour when this little old lady—had to be at least eighty!—who had been eating breakfast with her husband, walked over and said in all sincerity, ‘I don’t understand what you guys were doing, but I want to thank you for saving Earth!’ We all looked at each other and burst out laughing.”

  * * *

  *1Given the severely constrained memory resources on PLATO, TUTOR programmers had no choice but to treat every literal bit of memory as sacred. A byte of memory in CYBER was six bits, not eight like most computers have today. If you could store meaningful information in less than six bits, you could use the remaining bits for something else. Today, a program like Microsoft Word uses more memory than all PLATO systems in history combined. In the 1970s, programmers did not have the luxury of cheap, plentiful memory.

  *2If a player were a fast typist like Andrew Shapira, he might attempt to flood others in the game with messages, often very brief ones. Each message would be handled as a separate message by the game, forcing recipients to take time to read them all. An alternate strategy involved flooding other players with empty messages simply to “flush the buffer” clean of other meaningful messages the player might have—a sort of “denial of service attack” on an opponent’s list of messages.

  16

  Into the Dungeon

  You have just left the Wilderness. You are now in the City, where, unlike the Wilderness, it is safe to be alone and unarmed. In the Wilderness there be monsters, though they are
annoyances, for the most part. After wandering around out there for a while and defeating the occasional goblin, you now have over $3,000 worth of gold. There is only one thing to do with gold in the City: spend it. If only you could find the Weapons Store.

  To delve deep into the Wilderness is one thing; to go beyond, deeper, into the Forest or further terrains, it’s much too dangerous without some weapons and supplies. Now, where is that Weapons Store? The corridors and rooms in the City all look similar. You don’t have a map handy, which means you have to roam the maze and hope you find it by accident. Forward you propel yourself, forward, forward, right, forward, through a door, forward through another door, forward, left, forward, door, forward, onward, ever onward. You come across a Water Store. Not what you want. Then, right nearby, you find a Magic Shop, but it will only let you sell things, not buy (what kind of shop is that?), and you have no spells to sell. Then you find an entrance to the Wilderness, which means you’ve either retraced your steps in the maze or found a different Wilderness entrance—word has it there are a few of them around the City. You haven’t been careful to map your way around, so you are not sure which Wilderness entrance this is. Oh well. Forward, you keep moving forward, forward, onward, and bump into the same Water Store and Magic Shop and entrance to the Wilderness. You are going in circles.

  Then you remember. Someone told you once that you have to look for hidden doors. Walls that look solid sometimes aren’t. So you begin to push your way against walls, and eventually, sure enough, one gives way, and you find yourself somewhere new, a new hall. Forward, forward, left, forward, right, through a door, into a room with numerous doors in the distance. You run over to one of them, you find the Weapons Shop. Finally.

  “Welcome, Sire,” says the shopkeeper as you enter the shop. Unlike most shops, this shop somehow already knows how much money you have in your pocket, and of course it is intent on taking all of it. You can buy, sell, price, or simply get information on the weapons. Unfortunately, unlike any normal store, you cannot see what is for sale in this store. You have to know what you want before you enter the store. Or you’d have to go to the HELP lesson and print out what you see there or write it down, and then come back to the store. A hassle. So you stay in the store and try for two common items you remember everybody starts out with.

  “Which item, Sire?” the shopkeeper asks you, once you’ve indicated you’re ready to buy.

  “Sword,” you say.

  “Buying, eh, Sire? Well, how’s about $134?”

  “$40,” you say.

  “$40? Can’t accept that! How’s about $128?”

  It was worth a try. At least the shopkeeper’s willing to haggle.

  “$90.”

  “Deal at $90, then?”

  You feel like a fool. Clearly you could have gone lower. You try to.

  “$70.”

  “Offer is too low, Sire!”

  No matter what you offer below $90, the offer’s always too low. Defeated, you say, “$90.”

  “Deal at $90, then?”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “What a bargain, Sire!”

  The empty “WEAPONS/ITEMS” column on the left side of your screen suddenly shows “Sword” in it. You own it. The amount of gold you have drops by $90.

  You still have a lot of gold, so you decide to buy a mace.

  “Make it $1,297?”

  “$400.”

  “$400? I’ll go broke! How about more like $1,135?”

  “$700.”

  “$700!? I have children! Make it $760?”

  “$750.”

  “Deal at $750 then?”

  “Yep.”

  “What a bargain, Sire!”

  You now own a sword and a mace and the shop owns $840 of your gold.

  —

  The conversation above comes from an actual experience in the PLATO dungeon game Moria, created by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin at Iowa State University in 1976. The conversation exemplifies the kinds of rich approximations of natural-language interactions possible on PLATO thanks to the TUTOR language. A clever programmer could create seemingly natural and effortless interactions between user and program, not just for games, but for educational lessons as well.

  Upon close inspection, note that in the Moria shopkeeper’s conversation with the player, each of the buyer’s responses boils down to three typical types. There’s some form of positive word uttered, perhaps a “yep” or “yeah,” or negative such as “no” or “nah,” or a monetary amount given. Experienced Moria hands would sometimes tell newcomers that as long as your response started with a “y,” Moria interpreted that as affirmative, while starting with an “n” indicated negative. Battin and Duncombe spent a lot of time working on the TUTOR code that ran the Weapons Shop. Says Duncombe, “That was very sophisticated answer-judging stuff using hundreds of -concept- statements and every reasonable answer we could think of. You could type fairly complex expressions that did not contain ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but indicated assent or dissent and have it match, but eventually people would get bored with that feature, like real quick, and get down to just wanting to type ‘y’ and ‘n’, so eventually we had to add ‘y’ and ‘n’ as yes and no synonyms to the concepts.”

  Duncombe had started out as an electrical engineering major in 1974 at Iowa State, but along the way took a computer graphics class. “At the time,” he says, “the PLATO terminals were the hot ticket for doing graphics at Iowa State….I got my first taste of PLATO through this class and the classwork, and it came with an author signon because we had to write some graphics programs, so that got me my first taste there, and I was quickly hooked. It was a very addictive system, especially when you had the run of the system with an author signon.”

  Duncombe quickly discovered the games PLATO offered, including Airfight and early dungeons and dragons games like Pedit5 and Dnd. Each game had a distinct personality of its own, reflecting the idiosyncratic sense of design, humor, and mischief of its authors. In one dungeon game, if you encountered a monster but chose to flee rather than fight, your little graphical on-screen character was turned into a chicken.

  Over the course of long days and nights in one of the few PLATO rooms on campus, Duncombe would bump into the whole crew of fellow enthusiasts, including Jim Battin, Chuck Miller, Gary Fritz, and John Daleske. A group called “ames” (named after the town Iowa State University was situated in) had been created on the system for volunteers willing to code TUTOR lessons for Iowa State professors. Naturally, this crew of self-described “addicts” all signed up to be in it. A more advanced authoring group, named “amesrad” for Ames R&D, was eventually created, and most of the same crew graduated to that more prestigious group. The advantage of being in “amesrad,” says Duncombe, was that “you didn’t really have a lot of deadlines or a lot of projects that had to be met, it was mostly just fiddling around with research & development.”

  The “research & development” for Daleske, Fritz, and Miller was Empire. For Battin and Duncombe, the R&D took a different form: the Tolkien-influenced game of Moria. Moria arose, as did so many games, as a reaction to what its authors saw as deficiencies in previous games, in this case one called Orthanc (another reference lifted from Tolkien). “A bunch of people were working on it,” says Duncombe, “having a lot of trouble getting it to work properly, had a lot of bugs in it. I was just not understanding why it was so hard to write one of these games, it didn’t strike me as a terribly difficult thing.” Other PLATO dungeon games up to that time typically relied on TUTOR’s -randu- command to randomly generate numbers that the game authors then used to generate the different levels of the dungeon. Then each would have to be stored in a data file, and data files on PLATO were expensive and rare. Duncombe wondered if it were possible to instead randomly generate the maze but not store it: it was generated on the fly. He showed a prototype to Jim Battin. “He thought it was kind of cool,” says Duncombe, “and we started fleshing it out into a game.”

  They
worked in the tiny room, no larger than a closet, that had two terminals in it: the same room that Empire’s authors were using. Things got pretty cozy. “We were all competing for terminals, but it wasn’t cutthroat competition. Typically, Jim and I could be working on one terminal, and Gary and Chuck would be working on the other. So we’d be sitting side by side up there in the author room, working away on our games, occasionally bouncing ideas around. There’s some of Fritz’s code in Moria and there’s some of Battin’s code in Empire. Not a whole lot, but there was definitely cross-fertilization among the game authors there. Those two terminals turned out to be the most heavily used on the entire CERL system.”

  Duncombe claims that neither Tolkien nor any other published materials influenced the creation of the game. “It was all strictly based on the predecessor games of PLATO and fairy tales and our imaginations and whatnot,” he says. “When we finally got something that was playable, that we were going to release, we started asking around, the other guys in the area there, and Dirk Pellett [another Iowa State student] actually came up with name. He was a big Tolkien fan and suggested that ‘The Mines of Moria’ was a good name for the dungeon. So we grabbed it.”

  Moria took off. “We started getting more and more hooked and adding more and more features,” says Duncombe. “Hacking away at all hours.” Moria, one of the first multiuser dungeon games on a computer, went on to become one of the greatest games on PLATO with fans around the world. Like nearly every PLATO game, it offered a detailed “help lesson,” itself a massive labor of love, introducing newcomers to everything about the game, which it described as a “world of underground rooms and corridors where the characters in the game will spend their entire life trying to survive.” You started out in the Wilderness, near the City of shops and shopkeepers. As you ventured out beyond the Wilderness, you could find sixty levels of Cave, sixty levels of Mountain, of Forest, and Desert. (Sixty levels of an extremely hard-to-find secret Ocean level was also added but rarely found.) The authors created a “Group” feature enabling up to ten players to travel together, one of the players designated the “guide.” Key to Moria, like most other multiplayer PLATO games, were ways to communicate with other players, including “whispering” within the room you might be in. “Guilds” were another feature of the game. Each Guild had special powers. If you were in The Brotherhood you could raise the vitality of an entire group of players who might be facing ferocious monsters. The Circle of Wizards could teleport an entire group back to the City. The Union of Knights members were more resistant to damage and could behead monsters. The Thieves Guild could find additional items in treasure chests that other players might miss. Over time players would accumulate gold, weapons, spells, and other magical items throughout their adventures. They could give them to other players, sell them back in the City, or trade them for things they didn’t have.