Pedit5

Pedit5, also known as The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl developed for the PLATO? computer network at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign by Rusty Rutherford, and is the earliest surviving — and a leading contender for the first — computer role-playing game.¹⁷¹⁰ The player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly generated monster encounters and treasure, fighting monsters with weapons or spells or attempting to flee.¹⁹ The game is one of two early PLATO titles — alongside dnd — to which the history of the computer role-playing game is conventionally traced.¹⁰

The name derives from PLATO’s storage allocation system.³ Rutherford worked as a PLATO programmer for the Population and Energy Group at the university, under the direction of Dr. Paul Handler, and his group was assigned the file spaces pedit1 through pedit5.¹⁶ The first three were used to develop the group’s programs, while pedit4 and pedit5 were surplus; Rutherford appropriated them, using pedit4 for an instruction manual and pedit5 for the game itself.³⁶ He hoped the generic filename would conceal the fact that it was a game, but administrators determined that gameplay was an inappropriate use of the space and repeatedly deleted it, leading to a prolonged cat-and-mouse contest as Rutherford restored it.¹³ Because terminal time was scarce on the shared system, games were typically played late at night when terminals were freely available, often in semi-public computer labs before an audience offering advice.⁹

Background and origins

Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game released by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in January 1974, was the direct inspiration; it had become the hot pastime on the Champaign-Urbana campus.¹³ Rutherford recalled beginning to play tabletop D&D with friends “about the spring and summer of ‘75” and writing his game “in about 4-6 weeks in the fall and winter of 1975”.⁶¹⁰ He undertook the project because a program called DND “was reputedly in development, but never seemed likely to appear on the system,” so he decided to try his own hand at it.⁶ PLATO, launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and initially running on the ILLIAC I computer, was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system; by 1975 it was accessible from roughly 150 remote terminals, and its TUTOR authoring language let users create new lessons that ranged widely in academic subject and scope.¹ By the mid-1970s nearly a thousand PLATO terminals were in use in and around the university, and the system had developed an online community with message boards, chat, and animations well ahead of its time.³⁹

By his own account, Rutherford carried over the basic features of D&D as faithfully as the medium allowed: hit points, monster levels, and experience and treasure awards.⁶⁹ Because the promised multiplayer feature was never implemented, he wrote a solitaire game.⁶ The available storage permitted only a single-level dungeon of 40 to 50 rooms, with the dungeon layout identical for every user but the monsters and treasures generated randomly at the same time as a new character and stored with that character’s record.³⁶ Only about 20 characters could be saved, which became a real inconvenience once the game grew popular.⁶⁹ The character was a combined fighter, magic user, and cleric, with random values assigned across five attributes — strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity, and hit points — and no option to reroll.³⁹¹¹ The stat list followed D&D directly, dropping Wisdom and Charisma from the original six.⁹ Commentators have observed that the game’s combat appears to simulate the simultaneous melee resolution of the earliest D&D rules rather than the strict alternating turns common to later games, and that counting gold and treasure toward experience points was likewise an early D&D convention.¹¹

Gameplay

The player is cast as a “brave young fighter” whose goal is to enter the dungeon, gather treasure, accumulate 20,000 experience points by slaying monsters, and escape alive.³ The dungeon’s rooms and adjoining corridors are marked out by straight lines, while the player character and all monsters and objects are small, hand-drawn sprites shown from a top-down perspective.³⁹ Movement is grid-based, the character jumping one grid space at a time in the direction of the arrow keys with no intervening animation, and a rudimentary line-of-sight system reveals only the tiles directly adjacent to the player.⁹ In a monster encounter the character may fight (F), cast a spell (S), or run (R); if the monster is neither defeated nor avoided, combat proceeds to the finish under computer control.⁶⁹ The game offered 16 spells in total, among them a powerful “Sleep” spell, and included secret doors found at a one-in-six chance drawn directly from the tabletop rules.³¹¹ Characters could be saved between sessions, and the game refreshed spell points and awarded levels when the player left the dungeon, allowing a single delve to be resumed over several days.⁹ A character screen combined a list of other players’ saved games with a high-score table, each entry protected by a password, an artifact of PLATO’s centralized multi-user design.⁹ PLATO’s flat plasma display gave the visuals a tension that observers found surprisingly addictive.⁶

The dating of pedit5 has been a matter of dispute among historians. Both it and dnd have often been dated to 1974, but researcher Aaron A. Reed argues for a date of Fall 1975, noting that the first reference to pedit5 by name in the archived PLATO Notes Files — an archive of posts running from October 1972 to June 1976 — is a message from October 17, 1975.¹⁰ PLATO historian Brian Dear, who spent some twenty years researching the system’s history for a book on it, has described the task of establishing a precise origin order among pedit5, dnd, and the otherwise undocumented program m199h as exceptionally difficult.³ Dear has suggested there may have been two PLATO games bearing the dnd name: a short-lived early one that came to Rutherford’s attention, and a later one inspired by pedit5 itself.³

Influence and legacy

Southern Illinois University students Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood? played pedit5 and built their own game by improving and expanding its concepts, releasing dnd, also called The Game of Dungeons, in early 1976.¹³ Dnd retained pedit5‘s graphical interface but expanded interaction with the dungeon, adding a more complex combat and spell system, more items, multiple progressively harder dungeon levels reached via matter transporters or floor chutes, and what has been described as the first boss fight — against a golden dragon guarding an orb at the end of the final level.¹³ The game was later extended by Dirk and Flint Pellett, who took over its development.³⁴

Both pedit5 and dnd inspired many further role-playing games on PLATO, including orthanc (1978) and the first-person multiplayer titles avatar (1977) and moria (1978), both of which retained active online communities decades later.¹ Commentators have traced traits first expressed in pedit5 — among them the high-score table, extensive in-game documentation, and the core loop of exploring an authored dungeon turn by turn — through to computer role-playing games made half a century later.⁹¹¹ Rutherford left the Population and Energy Group in early 1976, leaving the program to others; he later believed it had been archived and transferred to the ownership of 3M when that company took over the PLATO system.⁶ The game survives in playable form through Cyber1, a preservation project that maintains an emulated PLATO system on which only about a hundred of perhaps a thousand PLATO games endure.³¹³