I started at ISU in fall 1974, and discovered PLATO in early 1975. I hooked up with John and we became close friends and collaborators.As I recall it, John handed the Empire mantle over to Chuck in early 1976, while I was gone for a while. Chuck and Mike Rodby had been fooling with it a bit but hadn't gotten very far. I think Chuck had fairly recently gotten involved with PLATO -- at least, I didn't know him. At this time I was in Florida for 6 months in a summer-intern program, writing FORTRAN for NASA to monitor Atlas and Titan rockets before takeoff. (Dream check: the prior person in that position at NASA was Mike Rodby. :-)
When I got back, John got Chuck and me together and told us to go nuts with Empire. He was involved at first but he left in 1977 (?) or so for Minneapolis. Chuck and I spent a few thousand hours over the next few years creating Empire IV, the version that went on to be the most popular game on PLATO at the time. For quite a while, the only program that logged more hours than Empire was Edit. And a lot of those Edit hours were probably empty terminals sitting at the Author Mode "Choose your lesson" page!
Meanwhile there were several D&D games popping out of Ames. The first one I know of was dnd, by Dirk & Flint Pellett. I forget when they came up with that, but it was early, maybe 1974. (Hm, I just discovered from http://www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/computergamingh istory/index5-2.shtml that Dirk and Flint actually ported dnd from a game on a DEC system, written by another guy in 1972. Looks like they drew on your history quite a bit.) [dirk.pellett@comcast.net emailed me to say "dnd was written by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, expanded by Dirk and Flint Pellett" -- JAB 5/5/2005]
Jim Battin and Kevet Duncombe hung around with Chuck and me in 76-77 or so, and THEY were the main ones who did Moria. I don't remember Chuck being all that involved with Moria, other than the late-night BS and brainstorming sessions we all had. We were too busy with Empire for him to work on Moria.
Then in 1978 or so Chuck went to Minneapolis to work for CDC. I kept tweaking Empire a bit, but it was pretty much complete. I graduated in 1979, moved to Colorado, and pretty much lost touch with PLATOland. Steve Peltz at UIUC got a copy of the Empire source (with Chuck's blessing, I think) and made some additional mods to support tournament play.
BTW at the PLATO reunion in 1997, we organized an Empire-a- thon at UIUC. They still had PLATO (NOVAnet) running on DEC Alphas, with PLATO terminal emulators on PC's. It was tres bizarre to see, 20 years after Empire's heyday, a room full of 30 people banging away on the keyboards, blowing each other away with abandon. We had a blast!
Wild days...
Gary