Dungeon

Dungeon was one of the earliest computer role-playing games, and ran on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computers. more...

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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