Decades before tactical armored combat simulations like World of Tanks, War Thunder, and Atari's Battlezone brought 3D vehicular warfare to life, university programmers John Daleske and Bruce Parrello created Panther in 1975 on the PLATO IV mainframe. It stands as the world's first multiplayer 3D wireframe tank combat simulator.
Deliberate tactical positioning, ballistic range estimation, and tense multiplayer ambush strikes.
๐ฏ Performance & Launch Trajectory
A crowning mainframe triumph that gave birth to the 3D first-person armored combat simulation genre.
Panther, a battle tank-driving simulation named after the Panther tank, was one of a handful of early first-person computer games developed by John Edo Haefeli and Nelson Bridwell in 1975 at Northwestern University. The game was developed for the multi-user interactive computer-based education PLATO system and programmed in the TUTOR programming language and utilized scalable vector graphics called linesets. A 1977 development of Panther, with more refined graphics, was named Panzer, the German word for armour and tank.
Version A (1975) of Panther has been restored to active status on the Cyber1 CYBIS-based (a PLATO descendant) system, with direct permission of the developer.
