HD: When you began playing and working on Oubliette, as a college student back in 1977, video games were mostly arcade-style games. A thinking-man’s game like oubliette would seem rather novel. What were your first impressions of it?
JG: For arcade games, you’d go physically to the arcade to play, however, at this time arcade games were not much past Pong. (Note from HD You can still sample the original Oubliette on a PLATO emulator). Oubliette was multiplayer which meant you could play with other real people which was almost unheard of at that time. We had a 3-D plotter and you could walk through halls and doors. They were all very primitive graphics by today’s standards but it was cutting edge back then. I created the plotter, but Jim S. is the one who originally created the game. He had a 2-D plotter and when I came and worked on it with him, I created the 3-D plotter and a number of other pieces.
HD: What parts of the first Oubliette did you work on?
Gaby: I was intrigued by the concept of doing a multiplayer game. I wasn’t a Dungeons and Dragons fan. I was interested in the programming aspects of it. That’s how I got involved. It was originally Jim S.‘s idea that would let him play D & D without all of the headaches.
HD: What was it like to play the game back then?
Gaby: We played it a bit but we spent more time working on it than playing it. We never really got that good at it. People would play it all night long and day after day, I never really quite understood it. They could only get access at night. They’d stay up all night playing.
The developers didn’t play it nearly as much as those who were addicted to it. We would work on (PLATO) after 6 or 7 pm. In the daytime it was used for education. We’d work on it for a couple of hours. We would also play some during that time. I didn’t stay up all night and play it.
HD: To what degree is your modern Android version of Oubliette like the original? In what ways does it resemble Jim Schwaiger’s 1983 version? What aspects of Jim’s version did you change when you created this latest iteration?
JG: The user interface is completely different. The whole user interface had to be changed to work on a small touch screen device.
HD: What role did Schwaiger play in the Android version?
JG: He gave me advice and he play tested it. He didn’t do any of the coding. Jim S. is now a radiologist. We’ve been in touch all these years but he’s in South Dakota. He still fancies programming and he does a lot of programming on the side. He was skeptical that Oubliette could be successful but after I got it basically working he thought it was kind of exciting. I think that he liked to see it come back to life. It mostly resembles the single player DOS version and which had a lot of elements pulled from the multiplayer PLATO version. He had added some things that we didn’t have in the PLATO version. For example, the old version had one type of monster per encounter. He also added multiple group types and some other things. His DOS game was very hard and very unforgiving, much like the PLATO version. If you died and fail raise, then you were dead and there was no recourse. We put in a mechanism which allowed you to save the state of the game and allows you to restore the game back to that saved state. It’s kind of a mulligan – a do over. You have to think ahead, though, because if you don’t have a game saved and something bad happens, then you are out of luck.
HD: Oubliette has been largely well-received, earning a 4 ½ out of 5 stars on Google Play, but we imagine there have been some bumps along the road. What were some of the persistent complaints about earlier versions of the game? How and to what degree do you engage with players who are having problems with the game?
JG: Well, I found some Beta testers before I released it and part of the feedback was from that. For example, I didn’t provide them with maps originally. I thought that it would be part of the fun to figure that out. I also found that I had to give them a way to find their way out of the dungeon and introduced the ‘Cartographer’s’ scrolls. The feedback I received was, “This is just too hard.” After I released the first version, I still got some feedback that it was too hard. In the second version I put some things in to make it easier so new users didn’t get too frustrated. I changed the game so that the beginning part of the game is easier to play than it was previously. If it’s too hard and you get turned off in the first 10 minutes then you’re going to go away and never come back.
HD: To what degree is your modern Android version of Oubliette like the original? In what ways does it resemble Jim Schwaiger’s 1983 version? What aspects of Jim’s version did you change when you created this latest iteration?
Gaby: It evolved over time based on the feedback we received about what people liked and disliked. It was a very hard game which was one of the things that appealed to me. Games nowadays are often very repetitive. The original Oubliette was very hard, but the Android version is a much easier game. The feedback we received was that it couldn’t be as unforgiving as the original Oubliette was. Yet I still get complaints from people that it’s too hard. In my mind it’s a real easy game but then again I know how to play it.
HD: The history of these first CRPGs is a little murky, what seems to be clear is that Pedit 5 in 1974 was first, but part of the reason it’s murky is because they were non-commercial and shared. To what degree was the impetus of the first oubliette influenced by the other early mainframe CRPGS like Pedit 5 and dnd or Moria? Had you or Jim or Mike played them?
Gaby: We were the first multiplayer dungeon game on PLATO. There were some single player dungeon games, there was one called DnD and a few others and the game play for those influenced the game some, but mostly it was influenced by the board game D&D. Of course, the Android version isn’t multiplayer and as such, it’s a much less interesting game. Pedit5 was named for someone’s workspace. It was a single player game and also predated Oubliette.
More of Jeanne Devoe’s interview with John Gaby…
