pedit5 was perhaps the first dungeon crawl

Dungeon crawl

A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters, and looting any treasure they may find...

 video game (predated only by m199h, a "lost game" about which little is known), written in 1975

1975 in video gaming

-Events:*In Fall, Magnavox discontinues the original Odyssey video game console.-Notable releases:*Atari and Tele-Games release the first official home version of Pong through Sears department stores....

 by Rusty Rutherford for the PLATO system. Like all PLATO software, the game was executed on a mainframe computer

Mainframe computer

Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...

, but played on terminals located elsewhere.

In the game, the player guides a character

Player character

A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...

 who wanders a single-level dungeon

Dungeon

A dungeon is a room or cell in which prisoners are held, especially underground. Dungeons are generally associated with medieval castles, though their association with torture probably belongs more to the Renaissance period...

 accumulating treasure

Treasure

Treasure is a concentration of riches, often one which is considered lost or forgotten until being rediscovered...

 and killing monster

Monster

A monster is any fictional creature, usually found in legends or horror fiction, that is somewhat hideous and may produce physical harm or mental fear by either its appearance or its actions...

s. When a player encounters a monster, he can 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, Pedit5 was eventually deleted. A new version of the game, based on the original work but significantly improved, was written by three other programmers as orthanc, named after a tower in The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

. The original version of pedit5 was resurrected as orthanc1. Both orthanc and orthanc1 remained on the PLATO system.

Even though the game was short-lived, it was very popular. The games mentioned here still exist and may be played on a PLATO (Cybis) system, or an emulator

Emulator

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

 of it, connected to the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

External links

• cyber1.org, website dedicated to PLATO, with emulators for a variety of operating systems