When was the first version of the OHRRPGCE compiled?
The very first version of the OHRRPGCE was compiled sometime in late 1997 by James Paige. None of the earliest versions were publicly released.
The first public release of the OHRRPGCE was sometime in 1998. It was crippled to only allow the user to create a maximum of four maps, because James originally planned to sell it (this was around the same time that he and Brian Fisher were selling the Games of the Hamster Republic CD)
James then decided to give an un-crippled version away to anyone who mailed him a game that he thought was "cool".
After a few months of being bombarded with e-mails, James realized the folly of setting him self up as the arbitrator of "cool" and eventually he released an un-crippled version. At the time, that meant a maximum of 20 maps. (map support was later raised to 100, and has recently been raised to 32767)
A few copies of the old 4-map version are floating around on the internet, but it is hard to say which is the oldest without finding them all and comparing date-stamps. Early versions did not use codenames, but did use datestamps as version numbers. A copy of 19981005 and some other old versions are preserved in the archives