All The Adventures?

This is a good point in the Complete Timeline to take a sideways look at what lies beyond one of the boundaries of my search.

At the time D&D was first published, mostly due to trouble finding local players to game with, Play-By-Mail (PBM) was very popular in the wargame community. This was particularly true with Diplomacy, which was popular as PBM long before D&D and remained so for a long time afterwards. It isn't surprising therefore that PBM for D&D was suggested almost as soon as it was published, and you can see play by mail campaigns being played/advertised in fanzines and magazines. Whereas Diplomacy is suited to PBM with hardly any adaptation required - you simply do one turn per month - for D&D a dungeon crawl where every decision was by mail would take an extraordinarily long time.

As revealed at PlayingAtTheWorld, in Midgard Sword & Shield (1974.10) there was a report of a suggestion of Gary Gygax as to how to run D&D dungeon-crawls postally:

In a parallel world, in 1972 the PBM firm Flying Buffalo (later of Tunnels & Trolls fame) run by Rick Loomis and Steve Macgregor had purchased a Ratheon 704 minicomputer so that they could offer computer moderation for games.

In Jan 1975 in A&E #7 Mark Leymaster combined these two ideas (though he may have come up with them independently) and developed a computer program to provide "the opportunity for a sealed-envelope system for choice in a play-by-mail game." It was a simple printout (which presumably you sent to players) which described a dungeon crawl with various combats that you had to roll for, and at the end you got a choice - it isn't clear but it sounds as if the outcomes of those choices would be further printouts in sealed envelopes.

Mark suggested that it might also be used for solo play "an 'automatic' random dungeon system" (for people who had access to a computer), thus making this program perhaps the first RPG computer game (there is one, called Wander, that might be earlier). Barry Gold (who typed it up) interprets it primarily in this mode - for solo play, commenting that the program should do all the rolling for you, and that you should get more choices. That of course would make it entirely unsuitable for its original intended PBM purpose, but it would have turned it into a playable solo dungeon crawl.

This shows the grey-area between Dungeon scenarios and Computer games. A program that prints out a random dungeon for D&D play is clearly in scope, but computer game dungeon crawls are clearly out-of-scope - and this program is simultaneously both.

In 1975 the computer Text Adventure that kicked off the genre, Adventure, was invented, inspired by D&D as you can see here (having played D&D, Will Crowther's group soon found they preferred the puzzle aspects, and he tried to recreate this in a computer game). So having drawn this dividing line, what about those of you who wish to look beyond it?

In stark contrast to D&D where the earliest adventures are highly sought collectible items, often never reprinted, very hard to find, some commanding prices of several thousands of pounds - all the early computer games are freely available for anyone to play.

This isn't even one of the expensive items!

This means that when I searched for a timeline of computer text adventures, I was pleasantly surprised to find a parallel project for Text Adventure games at Renga in Blue called All the Adventures. In it Jason Dyer not only lists every text adventure game from 1974 through to 1981 (and counting), he has played and reviewed every one, and you can too.

Of course, shortly after D&D-inspired Text Adventures started, D&D inspired graphical Dungeon Crawl games were invented - starting with pedit5 and dnd in late 1975 as can be seen here. I haven't found an equiavlent timeline for these, so if you know of one please put it in the comments.

This leads to an observation that people looking into D&D history have found lots of information somewhere they might not expect to find it - early Diplomacy fanzines. This is a reasonably easy area to investigate since so many of the Dip zines have been put up on the web for free (and no-one seems to mind). In contrast people looking into early computer game history won't find references in D&D fanzines as they're extremely difficult to find. This is a loss not just for fans of D&D, but fans in related fields also.

Fortunately this particular fanzine, A&E, is available to purchase for quite a small price, and they're well worth it - I only wish more were.