1979 · Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, Dave Sides
Avatar
The most-played game of the PLATO era.
The PLATO dungeon, perfected
Avatar was the last and grandest of the great PLATO RPGs. Built from 1977 by a team including Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, and Dave Sides, it set out to absorb the best ideas from dnd, Moria, and Oubliette into a single multiplayer dungeon — and succeeded so completely that it reportedly accounted for around 6% of all hours spent on the PLATO system between 1978 and 1985.
Players explored a shared first-person dungeon, formed parties, and competed and cooperated in a persistent online world — a scale of communal play that makes Avatar a direct ancestor of the graphical MMORPG. Several of its developers carried that lineage forward into the commercial games industry.
As with its PLATO predecessors, Avatar was an unlicensed computer realisation of Dungeons & Dragons, which is why it sits in this section rather than the main catalog despite its enormous historical footprint.
Screenshots
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