My first brush with D&D (the game) and the Internet (before there really was one) was in the mid-1970s, at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. At that time, the state-run universities had interlinked terminals in a system known as PLATO. There were tutorials, there was reference information, and that was all well and good. But you don't need to ask what was the feature that would have kept the lines tied up 24 hours a day: a multi-user version of D&D. Graphics were, simply, nonexistant--a wall was represented by a row of asterisks, a person by a letter of the alphabet--but there simply was no precedent for fighting monsters in tandem with someone hundreds of miles away.

Between PLATO, the TSR game and "Star Wars" (which recycled a lot of Arthurian themes in hi-tech), a minor wave of sword-and-sorcery started up. It lasted about a decade, and didn't leave much of lasting interest. My personal favorites from this era include Stephen R. Donaldson's first trilogy about Thomas Covenant, the film "Ladyhawke" and (of course) this CBS series, which still outshines most of the stuff on Saturday morning.

HOME