# Avatar - Work: Computer RPG - Date: 1979 (PLATO) - Platforms: PLATO, NovaNET, Cyber1 - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/works/avatar-plato/ > PLATO's most popular game: a multiplayer, first-person dungeon crawl begun by two junior-high students, where parties explored together, chatted in real time and logged more than a million hours. **Why it matters:** Avatar was one of the first online multiplayer role-playing games with graphics and group play, reportedly the most-played game on PLATO, and a direct forerunner of the party-based online worlds that followed. ## Quick answers **When was Avatar first released?** Avatar was first released in 1979 (PLATO). **What kind of work is Avatar?** Avatar is a computer RPG in the First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers'), Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) and MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) tradition, released for PLATO, NovaNET and Cyber1. **Why is Avatar important?** Avatar was one of the first online multiplayer role-playing games with graphics and group play, reportedly the most-played game on PLATO, and a direct forerunner of the party-based online worlds that followed. ## Overview By the late 1970s the [PLATO](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/plato-system/) network had become a laboratory for games that could not exist anywhere else: real-time, graphical and shared among dozens of terminals. Its dungeon games had evolved quickly, from the overhead mazes of [*pedit5*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pedit5/) and [*dnd*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-plato/) to first-person corridors viewed through PLATO's orange plasma screens. The summit of that evolution was *Avatar*, released on PLATO in 1979. Players built characters, formed groups, and descended together into a wireframe dungeon, talking to one another in chat-style text as they fought. It became the most popular game on the system. ## Origins *Avatar* grew out of two earlier PLATO games. *Moria* (begun around 1975–76), by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin, is often cited as the first first-person dungeon RPG. *Oubliette* (1977), by Jim Schwaiger, took the idea further and was so hard that players could survive only by exploring in groups. Around 1976 or 1977, two junior high school students, Bruce Maggs and Andrew Shapira, began building their own successor on the University of Illinois' PLATO system; David Sides, a university student, soon joined them, and later contributors included Tom Kirchman, Greg Janusz and Mark Eastom. The first version was released in 1979. It followed [*Dungeons & Dragons*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/) more closely than its predecessors and kept being refined for years, with versions such as *Avatar 84*, *Avatar 90* and *Avatar 95*. ## How it plays *Avatar* combines a small first-person view of the dungeon, drawn in grid-based wireframe on PLATO's 512-by-512 screen, with icons, a status display and running text for combat and conversation. Characters are created and advanced along *D&D* lines, gaining experience and power as they survive. The heart of the game was the [The party](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/party/): groups of players traveling together, coordinating spells and blows, and talking in real time. Monsters sometimes offered to join a group as companions. A semi-procedural quest system sent players to find and kill particular creatures. Hazards were inventive; the game may be the first RPG to simulate drowning, and struggling free of quicksand could cost a character items. Number keys loaded a prepared spell or item for quick use, a primitive hotbar. ## Reception & impact On PLATO, *Avatar* was a phenomenon. Richard Bartle, in *Designing Virtual Worlds* (2003), cites a figure that it accounted for 6 percent of all hours spent on the system between September 1978 and May 1985, by that measure the most-played game in PLATO's history; later accounts credit it, like the space game *Empire*, with more than a million contact hours on the original University of Illinois system. Players remember it chiefly for its community: the friendships, rivalries and shared stories that formed among regular groups. Brian Dear's history of PLATO, *The Friendly Orange Glow* (2017), recounts its creation among the network's teenage programmers. Its ideas traveled with PLATO's alumni. The first-person party dungeon crawl of *Oubliette* and its successors fed directly into [*Wizardry*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/wizardry/), whose co-author [Robert Woodhead](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-woodhead/) was a PLATO veteran, and PLATO's multiplayer games are often counted, with [*MUD1*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/) in England, among the ancestors of today's [MMORPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mmorpg/). The game's very name anticipated, by six years, [*Ultima IV*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-iv/)'s use of "avatar" for a player's presence in a virtual world. ## Legacy *Avatar* outlived PLATO itself. The NovaNET network hosted original versions of *Avatar 90* and *Avatar 95*, along with older data running on the later engine, until it shut down in November 2015. Classic and modified versions of *Avatar 84* still run on Cyber1, a volunteer revival of the CDC PLATO system, where regulars continue to log in, and a Java simulation called *Javatar* has also been made. Of its creators, Bruce Maggs went on to a doctorate at MIT, professorships at Carnegie Mellon and Duke, and a founding role in engineering at Akamai Technologies, a career in the networks that games like his had helped imagine. ## Facts - Bruce Maggs and Andrew Shapira started it as junior high school students; University of Illinois student David Sides soon joined them. - Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds reports that it took 6 percent of all hours spent on PLATO between September 1978 and May 1985. - It is credited with more than a million contact hours on the original University of Illinois PLATO system. - Wandering monsters could offer to 'join' a party and fight as companions. - It may be the first RPG to simulate drowning; quicksand could also strip characters of items. - Its name anticipated by six years Ultima IV's use of 'avatar' for the player's self. - Co-creator Bruce Maggs later became a computer science professor and a founding engineer at Akamai Technologies. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(1979_video_game)) - [How to Make an RPG: Avatar](https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/avatar.html) - [Cyber1 (revived PLATO)](https://www.cyber1.org/) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.