Simon Dally (1953-1989) and Richard Bartle, by James O'Fee

Yesterday I introduced Simon Dally (1953-89) and Richard Bartle, both games enthusiasts, in this blog . Simon is dead and I haven't been in touch with Richard since the late 1970s, when I played Diplomacy in Richard's games zine 'Sauce of the Nile'.

Through the wonder of an Internet search, we're back in touch again! Richard now has an entry on Wikipedia here, which begins -

Richard Allan Bartle (born January 10, 1960, in England) is a British writer and game researcher, best known for being the co-author of MUD, the first multi-user dungeon. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry.

Bartle received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Essex, which is where he created MUD along with Roy Trubshaw, in 1978.

He lectured at Essex until 1987, when he left to work full time on MUD (known as MUD2 in its present version). Recently he has returned to the university as a part-time professor and teaching fellow in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, supervising courses on computer game design as part of the department's degree course on computer game development.

Richard remains on the staff of Essex University (see here) and is a fellow-blogger - see here.

Richard Sharp - author of 'The Game of Diplomacy' (London, 1978) and guru of the game in England - once observed, in the early days of post-codes, that I (James O'Fee) had 'proved' that post-codes slowed the mail. This, by writing one letter to the Bartle household in North Humberside (or East Yorks to you and me) WITH the post-cade; and then another later the same day WITHOUT the post-code. The later letter WITHOUT the post-code arrived the day before the letter with the post-code. That's the sort of thing we used to do in the postal diplomacy hobby. Today, of course, there's e-mail.

Yesterday I remarked "No doubt, Richard [i.e. Bartle] has now made a fortune in computer games". To which Richard has replied - "I have, but sadly not for me...".

Richard wrote the below to me yesterday regarding Simon Dally -

'With Simon Dally and the Henry Root letters, Simon once explained that to me. He received a letter from this Henry Root character, and he immediately realised it was a hoax. He therefore wrote a reply in the same vein.

By return of post, he received a stack of letters and replies that William Donaldson had received from celebrities. He said that Simon was the first publisher to realise that it was a hoax, therefore he deserved to get to publish it. The result was a best-seller.

Simon's letter appears in the version of The Henry Root Letters I have, as the very first entry; I'd have to go to the attic to find it, though... Simon told me that there had been lots of letter scammers in the past, but the way that Donaldson's version differed was that he sent money, which meant the victims had to reply - if only to hand back the money.

As for Jimmy Greaves, I was in Simon's London flat once and saw a framed £1 note on the wall. Written on it was something like "here's a £1 note with blood on it! Jimmy Greaves". Simon said he'd been a bit of a hard negotiator wih Jimmy, but they got on well together and the blood-stained ?1 note was Jimmy's way of saying no hard feelings.

Simon had a run of successes in publishing, and it went to his head, leading to a bout of manic depression. He was over it when I knew him, but then it came back with a vengeance. While manic, he stole £800,000 of antiquarian books and stored them in left luggage lockers at Gatwick.

When he went depressive, he could barely read a newspaper headline without crying. When he returned briefly to normal, coming out of the depression and knowing he was about to go manic, he committed suicide. This was despite speaking to his mother - a trained psychiatrist (who died earlier this year, by the way) some 2 minutes before he did it.

His younger brother, Adam, later died of AIDS. Their sister, Emma Dally, wrote a book, "Dying Twice", mainly about Adam but also mentioning Simon occasionally. She says she kept a fragment of his skull that she found on the lawn.

I liked Simon.'

I've turned up the file I kept on Simon Dally and will write more on Simon RIP later this week.

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