1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play
At UofIowa we had two interesting home-grown RPGs. One was &#x27;AG&#x27; which stood for the initials of the author Alan Guiles. It consisted of modules e.g. AgWild, AgTown, AgFt (fight) etc. Written in HP 2000 Acess BASIC. You had a small text grid printed with your location marked as a &#x27;*&#x27;. Each module had a different view. At any module you could meet a monster and end up in the &#x27;fight&#x27; view, which was a linear scale beginning with the monster at the top and you at the bottom. You could advance, retreat, hit or fire an arrow or spell. The arrows and spells were ranged. You could also Evade and avoid the fight, which didn&#x27;t always work.
There were some other interesting modules like an Inn where you could gamble (blackjack, roulette...).
It was single-player but everybody appeared on a top-score screen. It was a big deal to get on the 1st page! I did it once.<p>The other was called &#x27;Wilder&#x27; and was done by Jon Sawyer. It stood for &#x27;Wilderness&#x27; and was multi-player. You could Yell and Listen and communicate with other online players. Some kind of combat with monsters. I don&#x27;t recall if you could fight P2P? Have to ask Jon about that.<p>Anyway there were quite a few &#x27;mainframe&#x27; games written at about the same time at Iowa - a two-player war game WR12, a real-time Star Trek game labelled &#x27;Begin&#x27; (because the login module was called &#x27;Begin&#x27;) with multiple fleets and three or four kinds of weapon. It still has a fan site! And smaller simple games like Trek3D, TREK1D (a joke), Combat, Patrol and several more.<p>It was a big deal, with students getting access to terminals for the first time and getting inventive.