pedit5

pedit5 was the first dungeon crawl computer game, written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford for the PLATO system. The game was executed on a mainframe computer, but played on terminals located elsewhere.

In the game, the player guides a character who wanders a dungeon accumulating treasure and killing monsters. When a player encounters a monster, he or she could use one of several spells. Characters can be saved from one play session to the next.

The name pedit5 refers to the programming workspace on the PLATO system, deliberately intended to disguise that the program was a game. This was a common practice for game designers on university mainframes during the 1970s, since academic institutions often regarded games as frivolous and wasteful of computing time. pedit5 was soon discovered for what it was and deleted a few weeks after it first appeared. It was resurrected as orthanc, named after a tower in The Lord of the Rings, but that version 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. dnd still exists, and may be played on a PLATO (Cybis) system connected to the Internet. For details, see www.cyber1.org.