Pedit5

pedit5, alternately called The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network by Rusty Rutherford. In it, the player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure. When they encounter a monster, they can fight the monster with a weapon or spells, or attempt to flee. Characters can be saved between sessions. Rutherford developed the game over four to six weeks in late 1975 as a computerized take on the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game; it was named pedit5 as it was stored in the fifth "pedit" slot his school group had available. It is considered to be the first example of a dungeon crawl video game and one of the first computer role-playing games. An improved version was later created on the PLATO network as orthanc. pedit5 is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game, in which the player guides a character who wanders a single-level dungeon accumulating treasure and killing monsters. When a player encounters a monster, they can use one of several spells. Characters can be saved from one play session to the next. The dungeon is rendered in a two-dimensional overhead view using on-screen character graphics, and controlled via keyboard commands. The dungeon has a fixed layout, but the monster encounters and treasure are randomly generated. They are generated whenever a new character was created, and saved with the character. When the player encounters a monster, they can choose to fight, cast a spell, or run; if the player does not immediately defeat or flee the monster, the player-character and monster fight to the death in a battle controlled by the game without further player input. The game was developed by Rusty Rutherford over four to six weeks in late 1975 for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network, which by the 1970s supported several thousand graphical terminals distributed worldwide, running processes on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers.