1975 · Don Daglow
Dungeon
Among the first computer RPGs — and now lost to time.
A mainframe dungeon, written from the table up
Dungeon is one of the earliest computer role-playing games — written around 1975 by Don Daglow on a DEC PDP-10 mainframe while he was a student at Claremont Graduate University. Like its PLATO contemporaries pedit5 and dnd, it was a direct, unlicensed translation of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons onto a computer, years before any license to make one existed.
For its era it was strikingly ambitious. Daglow’s Dungeon let the player control a party of up to six adventurers rather than a lone hero, and it modelled things most games wouldn’t attempt for years: line-of-sight so you only saw what your characters could see, both melee and ranged combat, an auto-mapping system that drew the dungeon as you explored, and non-player characters with their own rudimentary behaviour. It implemented D&D’s classes, levels, and combat math because that was simply the game Daglow knew.
Daglow went on to a long career as a designer and producer — Utopia, Neverwinter Nights (the 1991 AOL online game), baseball and Tony La Russa sims — but this early mainframe dungeon sits at the very root of the genre this catalog documents, which is why it belongs on the unofficial, foundational shelf alongside pedit5 and dnd.
No image exists. Dungeon ran on time-shared PDP-10 hardware and was never commercially packaged; no copy of the program survives and there are no known screenshots. Everything we know comes from later interviews and histories — hence the placeholder in place of cover art.
