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| Dungeon | |
|---|---|
| Developer | Don Daglow |
| Platform | PDP-10 |
| Release | 1975 or 1976 |
| Genre | Role-playing |
Dungeon was one of the earliestrole-playing video games, running onPDP-10mainframe computers manufactured byDigital Equipment Corporation.
Dungeon was written in either 1975 or 1976 byDon Daglow, then a student at Claremont University Center (since renamedClaremont Graduate University). The game was an unlicensed implementation of the newtabletop role-playing gameDungeons & Dragons (D&D) and described the movements of a multi-player party through amonster-inhabited dungeon. Players chose what actions to take in combat and where to move each character in the party, which made the game very slow to play by today's standards. Characters earnedexperience points and gained skills as their "level" grew, as inD&D, and most of the basic tenets ofD&D were reflected.
Daglow wrote in 1988, "In the mid-seventies I had a fully functioning fantasy role-playing game on the PDP-10, with both ranged andmelee combat,lines of sight,auto-mapping andNPC's with discrete AI."[1] Although the game was nominally played entirely in text, it was also the first game to employ line of sight graphics displays. Its use ofcomputer graphics consisted of top-down dungeon maps that showed the portions of the playfield the party had seen, allowing for light or darkness, the different "infravision" abilities ofelves,dwarves, etc.
This advancement was possible because many university computer terminals had switched by the mid-1970s toCRT screens, which could be refreshed with text in a few seconds instead of a minute or more. Earlier games printed game status for the player onTeletype machines or aline printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second.
WhileDungeon was widely available viaDECUS, it was picked up by fewer universities and systems in the mid-1970s than Daglow's earlierStar Trek video game had been in 1971, primarily because it took a then-significant 36K of systemRAM versus 32K forStar Trek. Many schools viewed games as gimmicks to interest students in computers, but wanted only small, fast-play examples to minimize games' actual use to reserve time for math and science research and student use. As a result, the early-1970s' maximum size of 32K that many schools set as a limit on games had been downgraded on some campuses to as little as 16K.
Years later (ca. 1980)[2] DECUS distributed another game namedDungeon, that was in fact a version ofZork, a text adventure game that would later become the model for earlyMUDs.[3]
A third game calledDungeon was released onPLATO in 1975, by John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jan Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada.[4]