The Dungeon

a.k.a. Pedit5

published by University of Illinois in 1974, developed by author, running on PLATO
type: role-play
genre: Fantasy, Multiplayer, Dungeon Crawler
perspective: bird's-eye
player options: single player
languages: eng
4.1/5

Personal reviews (2)

https://ocean-of-games.com/game/29799/pedit5/


# 2023-09-10 19:23:38
Can apparently still be played (somehow) at www.cyber1.org/.

# 2008-06-26 13:50:03

Descriptions (2)

The Dungeon
United States
Independently developed in 1975 on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois
PLATO lesson name pedit5 is sometimes given as the name of the game
Date Started: 28 December 2011
Date Ended: 4 January 2019
Total Hours: 11
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 14
Ranking at Time of Posting: 28/316 (9%)

Well, it's no longer a source of shame to me that I failed to win the first extant role-playing game. A few more hours invested in The Dungeon, also known by its lesson name, pedit5, produced a winning screen and an entry in the "Hall of Fame."

Becoro # 2023-09-10 22:32:57 - source
Actually for the PLATO mainframe.
Never 'published'.
The first dungeon crawl. Wander through a dungeon killing monsters and collecting treasure. Use several spells in battle. Save your character to play later.
[Zerothis, description]

Pedit5 is the name of a programming workspace on the PLATO. Games were strictly forbidden by administrators and the title was deliberately misleading in order to hide it. Furthermore, the actual owner of the Pedit5 workspace was not aware of the game. It ran on the mainframe but was played via a terminal in another room. When discovered, the Pedit5 game was unceremoniously deleted. Months of work and the worlds first dungeon crawl was lost. An attempt to reimplement the game was called orthanc. orthanc was deleted as well. Pedit5/orthanc was short-lived but extremely popular. Lessons learned from the programming and deletion of Pedit5 would lead to programmers printing source code for the future project, dnd, and eventually gaining permission to keep and play it on the PLATO system.

Zerothis, history - # 2006

Technical specs

hardware: Keyboard,
display: text

Authors / Staff

author

Rusty Rutherford (author)

Tags (9)

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Contributors (4)

AndreaD
zerothis
Sanguine
Becoro

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The Dungeon in-game screen.
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