pedit5

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pedit5 was the first dungeon crawl computer game. It was written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford for the PLATO system.

In the game, a character would wander within a dungeon accumulating treasure and killing monsters. When a character encountered a monster, he could use one of several spells. A character could be saved from session to session.

The game was executed on a mainframe computer, but played on terminals located away from the mainframe.

The name pedit5 refers to programming workspace on the PLATO system, and deliberately intended to disguise that the program was actually a game. This was a common practice for game designers on university mainframes during the 1970s, since the academic institutions often regarded games as frivolous (at best) and wasteful of computing time. If system operators detected that games were being played, they would terminate the job and unceremoniously log off the user, and often delete the file as well. Days and weeks of work could be lost by student designers in the process.

It is likely that the game was written without approval from the owner of the space, as the program was soon deleted a few weeks after it appeared. It was resurrected as orthanc, named after a tower in The Lord of the Rings books. Orthanc was eventually deleted as well.

Even though the game was short-lived, it was very popular. The unreliable accessibility of the game resulted in the creation of dnd.

For the terminally curious, the game still exists, and may be played on a live PLATO (Cybis) system connected to the Internet. For details, see http://www.cyber1.org.