Richard Garriott’s D&D #1 Contest!

[krusader74]

Richard Garriott (aka Lord British), the video game designer of Akalabeth, Ultima, etc., etc., is having a contest to resurrect his first video game, DND-1, a program he originally wrote in 1977 in BASIC for the PDP-11. I'd call it a roguelike game, except that rogue didn't exist until 1980. The game is basically an interpreter and editor for a 25x25 ASCII map that describes a dungeon: 0 = empty space, 1 = wall, 2 = trap, 3 = secret door, 4 = door, 5 = monster, 6 = gold, etc. You can play a fighter, cleric or wizard. You can take simple actions like move, fight, use magic, search for secret doors, etc. The interpreter knows about 10 kinds of monsters.

The goal of the contest is to get this program running in either Unity or as a plugin-free browser app. There are prizes for the winner and runner-up in both unity and browser categories. The contest already started; it runs April 15 to May 15. Contest rules and details are here: Richard Garriott’s D&D #1 Contest!

Someone has transcribed the BASIC code for DND-1 on github. There's also a remastered PDF version of the original scans here.

And there is a discussion of this contest on hacker news.

[krusader74]

The Electric Eye

Richard Garriott's DND-1 BASIC program listing reminded me of Mark Herro's column in Dragon Magazine called "The Electric Eye," where he often presented BASIC programs to help run D&D games.

For example, in Dragon Magazine #41 in September 1980, "The Electric Eye" presents three BASIC programs:

• Time Keeper - tracks "dungeon time" and makes wandering monster checks for dungeon levels 1-6
• Town - randomly generates an entire medieval town
• Royals - rolls up a feudal hierarchy about the size of the feudal system in old France

The Random Wizard's blog has a post fondly remembering "The Electric Eye" along with a reconstruction of one of Mark Herro's BASIC programs.

The Dragon Magazine Index lists the following installments of "The Electric Eye":

Subject Title Author Location System
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dice "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 45(56) --
Dungeon Master utilities "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 41(44) D&D
"Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 49(76) D&D
Glossary of terms "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 39(40) --
Home "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 46(70) --
Programming: BASIC "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 40(46) --
Purchasing "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 50(70) --
Quiz "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 54(74) --
 Answers "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 55(48) --
Software "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 36(62) --
SPACE GAMES-3 "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 43(70) --
Sports games "Electric Eye, The" Mark Herro 47(70) --

There's more info about "The Electric Eye" in the Game Index at RPG.net.

[krusader74]

50th anniversary of BASIC on May 1, 2014

The year 2014 not only celebrates the 40th anniversary of D&D, it's also sees the 50th birthday of the BASIC programming language. There is a long, in-depth article about it in TIME magazine:

Invented by [two math professors] John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 years ago this week–at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, to be precise.

Given how ubiquitous BASIC was on all the PCs (Apple’s Apple II, Commodore’s PET 2001, Radio Shack’s TRS-80, IBM's PC) of the late 1970s and 1980s, did anyone here on odd74 ever write or use a BASIC program as a D&D aid?