BRIEF: Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play

A PLATO terminal in a museum case at the University of Illinois; photo taken by the author in 2013. This entry summarizes a series of 1970s mainframe games that have been so lost we don't even have screenshots. I also asked several dozen PLATO authors, administrators, and former CRPG Addict contributors--everyone I could find--for any additional recollections about the games. I stopped only when I was confident there was nothing left to learn. If you have any new or conflicting information about any of the games below, I welcome your comments below or an e-mail to crpgaddict@gmail.com. I will update the information below with any new material discovered. However, please do not take it upon yourself to try to track down and contact any of the people listed here on my behalf; it is likely that I have already reached out and they either declined to respond or already told me all they could. Except for Don Daglow's Dungeon, all the games listed below were written in a language called TUTOR for the PLATO educational mainframe hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Many of the games written on this system have been preserved and are playable today at Cyber1.