pedit5

Where the CRPG begins

pedit5 — usually called The Dungeon — is the earliest surviving computer role-playing game. It was written in 1975 by Rusty Rutherford on the PLATO time-sharing system at the University of Illinois, and it is the point most historians mark as the moment tabletop Dungeons & Dragons first crossed onto a computer screen.

The odd name is an accident of the mainframe. Rutherford belonged to UIUC’s Population and Energy Group, which was allotted a handful of program slots named pedit1 through pedit5; the first three were taken, so his dungeon game went into the fifth. Disguising a game as a “lesson editor” also helped it survive — PLATO administrators routinely deleted games to reclaim resources.

The game itself is a single-player dungeon crawl drawn straight from D&D: you roll a character, descend into a single sprawling dungeon level, fight its monsters with melee and a small spell list, manage hit points, and try to haul treasure back out alive. There were no D&D licenses to obtain in 1975 — Rutherford was simply translating the game he played at the table — which is exactly why it sits at the head of this unofficial list rather than the main catalog.

Dating note: contemporaries often remember pedit5 and dnd as 1974 projects, but the earliest firm reference to pedit5 by name is from October 1975.