Dungeon
Dungeon was one of the earliest computer role-playing games, and ran on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computers. more...
Home
*Best Sellers
Accessories
Genre
Action, Adventure
Arcade
Board, Card Game
Family
Fighting
Other
Racing
Role Playing
Akalabeth
Albion
Alternate Reality
Anachronox
Angband
Arcanum
Baldur Gate Series
Bard Tale
Champions of Krynn
City of Heroes
Crystalis
Digital Devil Story
dnd
Dungeon
Dungeon Hack
Dungeon Master
Dungeon Siege
Dungeon Siege II
EarthBound
EverQuest
EverQuest II
Eye of the Beholder
Eye of the Beholder II
Eye of the Beholder III
Fallout
Freedom Force
Gothic
Hard Nova
Lagrange Point
Lands of Lore
Might and Magic
Moria
Mother
Phantasie
Planescape
Pool of Radiance
Questron
Rogue
RuneScape
Sentinel Worlds I
Septerra Core
Skies of Arcadia
Starflight
Starflight 2
Suikoden
Suikoden II
Suikoden III
Suikoden IV
Suikoden Tactics
System Shock
The Elder Scrolls
The Elder Scrolls II
The Elder Scrolls III
The Matrix Online
Tunnels and Trolls
Tunnels of Doom
Ultima
Ultima III
Ultima Online
Ultima VI
Vampire
Wasteland
Wizardry
Ys
Shooter
Simulation
Sports
Strategy
Internet Games
Others
Platform
Systems
Vintage Games
Wholesale Lots
Dungeon was written in 1975 or 1976 by Don Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and described the movements of a multi-player party through a monster-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 earned experience points and gained skills as their "level" grew, as in D&D, and most of the basic tenets of D&D were reflected.
Although the game was nominally played entirely in text, it was also the first game to use line of sight graphics displays. In this case the graphics consisted of top-down dungeon maps that showed the portions of the playfield that the party had seen, allowing for light or darkness, the different "infravision" abilities of elves, dwarves, etc.
This advancement was possible because earlier games printed game status for the player on teletype machines or a line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By the mid-1970s many university computer terminals had switched to CRT screens, which could be refreshed with text in a few seconds instead of a minute or more.
While Dungeon was widely available via DECUS, it was picked up by fewer universities and systems in the mid-1970s than Daglow's earlier Star Trek computer game had been in 1971, primarily because it took a then-huge 36K of system RAM vs. 32K for Star Trek. Many schools viewed games as gimmicks to interest students in computers, but wanted only small, fast-play samples 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 wanted as a limit on games had been downgraded some places to as little as 16K.
Years later, DECUS distributed another game named "Dungeon", a version of Zork.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
|