pedit5

Overview

In the mid-1970s the most exciting computer network in the world was not the ARPANET but PLATO, the University of Illinois' educational system of plasma-screen terminals linked to Control Data mainframes. It was built for lessons in chemistry and reading. Its users, many of them students, used it for games. Late in 1975 a PLATO user at the University of Illinois, Rusty Rutherford, used it to build a dungeon.

The program he wrote, known by its filename pedit5 and titled The Dungeon on screen, is one of the first computer role-playing games and is often called the earliest to survive. A lone adventurer descends into a single fixed dungeon of 40 to 50 rooms, meets randomly placed monsters and treasure, fights with a weapon or spells, and tries to live long enough to earn 20,000 experience points and get out.

Origins

Rutherford had been playing Dungeons & Dragons, published by TSR in 1974, since around the spring and summer of 1975. He knew another PLATO group was working on a computer version, the game that became dnd, but it was unfinished and had promised a multiplayer mode it never delivered. So he wrote his own, single-player, over roughly four to six weeks in the fall and winter of 1975, borrowing as much of the tabletop game as the machine allowed: hit points, levels, experience, and treasure as a reward for defeating monsters. The hero was a combined fighter, magic user and cleric.

The name was camouflage and bookkeeping at once. PLATO assigned each group a limited number of program slots, called lessons. Rutherford belonged to the Population and Energy group, whose slots ran from pedit1 to pedit5; the first three were in use, so the game went into the fifth and the manual into pedit4. A dull filename also helped, because administrators considered games an improper use of an expensive teaching system. Accounts agree that pedit5 was deleted more than once and that Rutherford kept restoring it. Which of the two came first is debated; accounts differ, and both games are sometimes dated to 1974.

How it plays

The screen shows the dungeon from above, drawn with PLATO's character graphics, and the player moves with keyboard commands. Characters are rolled once, with strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity and random hit points, and there is no re-rolling, so the dice at the start matter enormously. The layout never changes, but monsters and treasure are generated when a character is created and saved with that character, so each adventurer sees a different dungeon.

Twenty-five monster types, drawn with five icons, range from level-one kobolds with one to three hit points, worth 10 experience, up to dragons with 6 to 36 hit points, worth 840. When one appears the player can fight, cast a spell or run; sixteen spells are split between mage and cleric lists, including sleep, magic missile, cure and hold person. If the first exchange does not settle matters, the character and monster fight to the death automatically. Characters can be saved between sessions, a significant feature in 1975, but the system could hold only twenty at once, which became a real constraint when the game grew popular.

Reception & impact

The game's reception is recorded mostly in the memories of PLATO users and the persistence of its code. Its popularity was enough to cause the storage problem and to make administrators hostile. Its influence is clearer: Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood are reported to have been spurred to finish dnd partly by pedit5's success and its repeated deletions, and dnd went on to shape a family of later dungeon games. Historians identify pedit5 as the first example of the dungeon crawl on a computer, and its random placement of monsters and loot makes it a distant ancestor of the Roguelikes genre that Rogue would name in 1980.

Reviewing it decades later, the CRPG Addict blog was impressed by its scope, noting that it offered more monster variety, encounter types and spells than Richard Garriott's commercial Akalabeth several years afterward.

Legacy

After pedit5 was finally deleted, other PLATO programmers produced an expanded version called orthanc, after the tower in The Lord of the Rings, and a copy of Rutherford's game survived as orthanc1. Both remained on PLATO. Today they run on Cyber1, a volunteer-maintained revival of the CDC PLATO system, where anyone with the free terminal emulator can still roll a character, curse the dice, and take the first steps down one of the oldest dungeons in computing.

With dnd, the first-person Moria and Oubliette, and later Avatar, pedit5 shows the computer RPG was not invented once but many times over on a single network within a few years of D&D's publication.