pedit5

pedit5, alternately called The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network by Rusty Rutherford. In it, the player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure. When they encounter a monster, they can fight the monster with a weapon or spells, or attempt to flee. Characters can be saved between sessions. Rutherford developed the game over four to six weeks in late 1975 as a computerized take on the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game; it was named pedit5 as it was stored in the fifth "pedit" slot his school group had available. It is considered to be the first example of a dungeon crawl video game and one of the first computer role-playing games. An improved version was later created on the PLATO network as orthanc.