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Earliest first-person view multi-player computer game? Question
Today we take multi-player first-person view computer games for granted, but what was the first one? When was that? What did it run on? Who were the players? What was it like? Any interesting technical details?
I recently found that I may have created the first one, and would love to know if that is really true. Unfortunately I can't prove a negative (that nobody else created one earlier), so I'm hoping people will list the earliest such games they know about. I'll describe mine in an answer so it can be ranked with all the others.
1 answer
Tankwar, 1978
I created Tankwar in 1978 at the RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York) Interactive Computer Graphics Center (ICGC). The ICGC had two Prime 750 computers, each with 18(?) Imlac graphics terminals.
Background
The computer games I'd seen at the time were mostly text-based. The most popular one we had was like that, called Adventure if I remember right (I may not). You'd navigate thru a cavern with simple commands like N, S, E, W. You could pick up objects and sometimes use them, all to eventually fulfill your quest. One of the memorable parts was a section you could get trapped in where "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all looking alike". It was a popular game at the time, and reasonably state of the art. After all, by far the most common user interface to a computer was a teletype.
There were a few 2D games that were single-player that did use graphics, but of course those were highly specific to not only the computer they ran on, but the display hardware. As a result, they were pretty rare.
Motivation
I thought that with all that compute power and graphics display capability, it would be cool to have your terminal be a view into a gaming world, with other people also into it looking via their own views on their own terminals. Although I had not seen nor heard of something like that, it felt like an obvious evolution to me at the time.
Game description
The Tankwar world was a 2D maze with walls (or not) on a regular grid structure. Something like a 10x10 grid of squares with walls between some and not between others was a normal size. The point was that there were enough walls so that you couldn't see too far, but few enough that there were several ways to get to most spots.
You were in a tank driving around the maze, and you could see the tanks of other players over a limited angle out the front of your tank. The object was to shoot as many of the other tanks as possible, while not getting shot yourself.
The main display showed a 3D view of the maze and other tanks in your field of view. There was also a graticule, like a heads-up display, helping you know where a shot would go if you fired now.
There was a 2D top-down map of the whole maze in the top left corner. It showed your tank, but not any of the others. You knew where you were, but you didn't know where anyone else was unless they were in your direct frontal view. However, whenever anyone fired their gun, a marker would show up in the map at that location, and a bright line would be shown in your view (to the extent it wasn't hidden by walls), like it was a tracer round. That created a downside to firing your gun, so you had to think about when it was worth it to reveal your position. Of course you could fire and skedaddle, but by moving around you risk others seeing you before you see them.
The top right corner showed the list of players, sorted by their score. The score was based on the ratio of kills to getting killed, normalized to roughly the 0-100 range. Good players were usually around 80 if I remember right.
Another feature was the spotting plane. People quickly discovered that you could back into a dead end, then wait for others to happen by. It was easy to shoot them before they could line up on you, or realize you were there at all. To get around that, I added the spotting plane. If you sat within some radius for too long, you'd get a message that you were spotted by enemy aircraft. If you stayed much longer, you'd be bombed and killed. This feature had the desired effect.
The Imlac graphics terminals were vector, not raster like we take for granted today. You would only see the outlines of the walls. To show tanks with the limited computing power and simple graphics, they were only shown as 2D objects on the floor of the maze. Your eye view was up a bit, so you would look down at these objects moving around on the floor, each labeled with the player's name.
The graphics terminals had no joysticks, so moving was done with arrow keys. You could move a certain increment each iteration, which was from a bit less than a second to several seconds, depending on how loaded the machine was. Lots of players slowed down the game.
Software design
Multiple players communicated via shared memory and semiphores, since they all ran on the same machine. There was a master process that kept track of what all the players were doing, with each player being a separate process that checked in with the master twice per iteration. The player processes did all the displaying and handled the user inputs and communicated things like desired movement and gun firing to the master process. The master process computed the movements of each tank, and decided whether any gun firings resulted in kills.
All the player processes knew the location of all the tanks, since they were responsible for rendering the out-the-window view.
Game reception
The game was really popular, to the point it was eventually banned for taking too much CPU time, except for some wee hours in the morning. It was generally realized how powerful a concept first-person view multi-player games were.
The inspiration for Battle Zone?
Corporate visits to the ICGC were frequent. Prof Wozny was always looking for funding, and companies were looking for technology. I remember Atari coming thru. Usually we'd hide frivolous stuff like Tankwar during a corporate demo, but for Atari we featured it. They were quite impressed.
Atari came out with the Battle Zone arcade game a year or two later. It had a 3D view out of a tank in the middle, and a map of the world in one corner. As far as I know, Atari never acknowledged that it was inspired by Tankwar, and I don't know for sure if it was. If anyone knows more about this, please tell us.
Response to comments
Do you have any other sources or mentions of this, that can verify or otherwise provide more context?
My source is that I personally wrote Tankwar, and definitely remember doing it and some of what I was thinking at the time. Unless you think I'm outright lying, personal statements from the author should be reasonably definitive.
Tankwar was hardly a secret. Pretty much anyone who was involved with the RPI Interactive Computer Graphics Center from 1978 to 1980 would have known about it, and likely played it at some point. I left there in 1980 when I got my masters degree, and don't know what happened to the game after that.
I don't know if professor Wozny is still around, but some of the other students surely are, although I have no idea how to contact them. Prof William Randolph Franklin retired a few years ago, and I'm sure would remember Tankwar. Some other names I remember are Al Barr, Bruce Edwards, Gray Lorig, Bill Yerazunis, Charles Durst, and Don Meagher. Any of them would certainly remember Tankwar, and might have some cute anecdotes.
I ran into Bill maybe 20 years ago. At the time he was working for MERL (Mitsubishi Electronics Research Lab) in Cambridge MA, and lived in Sudbury MA. You might know him as "Crash" from the NERDS team on the Junkyard Wars TV show.
Charles Durst briefly worked for my company around 2003 or so. At the time he lived in Arlington MA.
I just dug around in a dusty box and found this old 9-track mag tape:
The RPI label is quite faded, so here is an enhanced scan of it:
I left there in May of 1980, but I would occasionally come back and visit the ICGC. This archive must have been made on one of those visits. That's my writing on the label. "UFD" was Primos' name for what is now generally known as a "directory" or "folder".
I have no means to read a 9-track tape today, nor would I know how to decode the Primos Magsave format. After 44 years, the data is quite likely unrecoverable anyway. I guess that saves me from being embarrassed at the quality of the old crufty Fortran code.
Added
I dug around on the 'net and found some of the people that would surely remember Tankwar:
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