I heard back from Doug Jones. Quotes below are from him.
I never got into PC gaming, I guess I played enough games on Plato to satisfy my need for games. It's interesting how games on one system can inspire people to develop clones of those games on other systems and, and it's interesting how these games evolve as they pass from developer to developer. There's good coverage of this in the book The Friendly Orange Glow, by Brian Dear -- the book is a history of the Plato system with some pretty good coverage of the evolution of some of the games on that system.
I picked up a copy of this book. It seems interesting.
Re me mentioning HiVolts not being a port:
Porting things to or from PLATO was never easy because PLATO was totally incompatible. It used a character set based on CDC's 6-bit encoding, no relationship to ASCII. It used a programming language called TUTOR, no relationship to the programming languages used by the rest of the world. We had 512x512 pixel flat plasma panels, with operations that didn't match the graphics operations of the video displays of the era. So, very little code was ported to or from PLATO, it was always a matter of reimplementing things based on ideas from PLATO.
Re me asking, "
you did mention that there was some similar game on Unix at the time that Greg Chesson demoed. Do you remember the name of the game or any details?"
I recall no details. Greg gave a demo shortly after getting the U of Illinois Unix license number 1, showing the CS department what Unix could do, and also talking about the technolgy inside Unix. The game demos occupied no more than 5 minutes of the 40 minute talk, and he just went rapidly through them to show the variety. The best way to research what games he might have demoed would be to find an archival Unix distribution from the era when Greg got the U of I a license and see what games were included. There most definitely were games in all the early Unix distributions. The folks at Bell Labs learned the same lesson that we learned on the PLATO system: Games and a community of gamers are a very strong test of a system.
For me, I should note, developing HiVolts was paid work. My job was to explore PLATO and its TUTOR language in enough detail that I could clone it from the CDC 6600 world where it was developed onto a minicomputer. So HiVolts began as an exploration of the PLATO system and then I immediately ported it to my implementation of TUTOR on the Modcomp IV computer, from which a second evolutionary path took it through Global Informatioin Systems Technology and a sequence of other computer-based education companies to the version that Flint Pellett translated back into PLATO TUTOR to run on the Cyber1.org historical recreation of the PLATO system.
Cool.
I liked the part about games being a good stress test. Although, I like to think that there were a bunch of coders that just wanted to make games because they are fun. And they convinced the suits to indulge them by making a stress-testing argument.
From the above account, it seems fair to credit Doug with an original design. He didn't make the HiVolts while directly referencing another work. But it does make me wonder what the game was in that super-early version of Unix.
And what if... we track down the author of that game and he says something like... "
Well, there was this one fella that had some circuit diagrams for a game like Robots, but he was waiting for us to invent a computer..."
I cling to the idea that when computers were so new, it would be especially possible to have original ideas for computer games that are not incrementally created from earlier games. But maybe that's wrong. It wouldn't be too shocking to find a book somewhere describing how Robots could be played on a chessboard.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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