The Earliest CRPGs

The welcome screen of Dungeon, a 1975 PLATO CRPG.

Note: This entry was originally published on 24 December 2011, but was updated on 8 April 2024.

Jazz vies with CRPGs as the great passion of my life. My favorite jazz recording is the 1927 of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, and Jimmy Dorsey playing "Singin' the Blues" (there's a slightly-bad YouTube version here). The piece is notable as a transition point in jazz, between the joyous, polyphonic cacophony of New Orleans-style jazz and the era of great soloists, and between the carefully-orchestrated pseudo-improvisation (on recordings, at least) of Dixieland and the actual improvisation of the forthcoming bebop era.

What's particularly notable about the performance is that the band never states the melody. From the moment that Trumbauer swoops in with his C-melody saxophone, it's all improvisation. If you had the lyrics in front of you, you'd still have trouble singing along, just like you would with Coleman Hawkins's 1939 recording of "Body and Soul." But you don't have the lyrics in front of you, no matter what a host of web sites tell you; you can't, because we don't really know what they were. I've never even been able to find a "straight" version of the melody. All we can do is try to reconstruct it from the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer performance.

There's a lot about the history of jazz that's like this. We're not really sure where the term came from. We don't know what early jazz bands sounded like because they weren't recorded until 1917, and even then they were crammed into three minutes.. Of perhaps the first great jazz soloist, New Orleans's Buddy Bolden, we have no recordings and only one scratchy photograph. We're not sure who played the trombone on "Singin' the Blues" or some of the instruments on many of Louis Armstrong's early recordings. Much of the history of jazz is simply lost.

Thankfully, the same doesn't have to be true of CRPGs. Unlike jazz, whose antecedents trace to the antebellum south, we can fix the earliest possible origin of CRPGs. Computing power didn't exist to create them until the 1970s and, a few quasi-CRPG precursors aside, they couldn't have been created earlier than the first commercial non-computer RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, came out in 1974. Thus, to search for the earliest CRPGs, we need go no further than the early 1970s which, while almost 40 years ago, was only 40 years ago. Plenty of the first CRPG developers and players are still around. Much of the source code still exists.

In Dungeons and Desktops (2008), Matt Barton calls the 1970s the "Dark Age" of CRPGs, but he does his best to sort through some of the gloom. His account generally matches, but in a few notable cases conflicts, with the recollections of Dirk Pellett, an early CRPG contributor who wrote a history of early CRPGs in an introduction to dnd on Cyber1's PLATO mainframe. Pellett's history, unfortunately not accessible from the Internet, appeared in 2010.

Both trace the first CRPGs to 1974, almost immediately after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Pellett gives the "first" CRPG as a file called "m199h," which was deleted soon after its creation by someone on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since the mainframe was intended for "serious academic study and coursework," administrators were quick to delete game programs, and one suspects that there were any number of CRPGs created and deleted while in various stages of development during this era. [Ed. Many years after I originally published this, new information came to light suggesting that "m199h" is not in fact the first of the PLATO RPGs.]

The earliest surviving CRPG seems to be a 1975 game called The Dungeon by Reginald "Rusty" Rutherford, who was studying in Urbana. He titled the file "pedit5" (which some sources give as the name of the game) to keep it from being deleted as an obvious game. This didn't save it, but somehow the source code got preserved, and it's available on Cyber1 now.

Likely the earliest computer role-playing game.

The game uses an iconographic perspective with surprisingly good icons.

The original dnd (properly titled The Game of Dungeons) by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood came out the same year, and some sources put it earlier than The Dungeon. The game underwent several versions, and this is the one that Dirk Pellett and his brother Flint Pellett are credited with contributing to. It also uses an iconographic perspective, and its random encounters with creatures and treasure show it as the obvious precursor to the DND/Telengard line of games by Daniel Lawrence.

The odd thing is that most histories insist that Daniel Lawrence's DND is "not to be confused" with the original dnd, but to me it's obvious that the former is a descendant of the latter, and indeed, Dirk Pellett claims quite bluntly that Lawrence plagiarized his DND (which he commercialized as Telengard) from the original Whisenhunt/Wood dnd. Lawrence, says Pellett, had been attending Purdue University, and:

At some point, he made a blatant copy of dnd on a DEC computer at Purdue, without the knowledge or permission of any of dnd's original authors. It become popular...and spread to other places with DEC computers, always with the 'author' credited as Daniel Lawrence. He later created and successfully marketed Telengard based on the ideas in dnd, without the knowledge or permission of dnd's authors, and without sharing with them any of the money he got from it.

[Later note: In an e-mail to me after this posting was originally published, Dirk Pellet indicated that after he had written this article on the PLATO system, he had a chance to view the source code of Lawrence's DND, and he admits to being less certain that Lawrence directly plagiarized dnd in developing his own game. I'll post more about this when I cover dnd in an upcoming posting.]

Pellett's claims of plagiarism don't stop there. He also says that dnd was plagiarized by a PLATO user nicknamed "Balsabrain," who turned it into an identical game called Sorcery. When the administrators discovered it:

The copy was promptly deleted, and Balsabrain learned that if he wanted to plagiarize PLATO games, he would have to do it OFF of PLATO. He put that lesson to use by plagiarizing Oubliette when he 'created' 'his' game of Wizardry and began to market it.

"Balsabrain," you see, is none other than Robert Woodhead. I played a version of Oubliette in 2010, and I noted the game's obvious influence on Wizardry, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to accuse Woodhead and Greenberg of plagiarizing it. I took a look at the original (1977) Oubliette, and while it does use the same set of attributes, the same first-person perspective, and the same wire-frame dungeon as Wizardry, the original version seems to have only supported a single character. I don't know whether that's enough. There's a fine line between plagiarism and homage.

Other PLATO CRPGs of the 1970s and early 1980s include:

[Ed. Links are provided on the list below to the games that I originally covered; for others, see this article.]

• Dungeon (1975), by John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jon Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada, which I haven't been able to get to run yet.

• Moria (1975), by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin, the first known first-person RPG, an inspiration for the later Oubliette and, from there, the commercial Wizardry.

• Orthanc (1975), by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, Eric Hagstrom, and Mark Nakada, which appears to be an advanced version of The Dungeon/pedit5. This makes sense, as a number of sources say that when "pedit5" was saved, it was renamed "orthanc1."

Orthanc seems to be The Dungeon but with more options and instructions.

• The Think series of games (1975-1977) by Jim Mayeda, an adaptation of Mike Mayfield's Star Trek (1971) to a fantasy setting. Though lost, it was the inspiration for The King's Mission Game (1977) and Swords and Sorcery (1978); see below. 

• DND World (1976), a lost party-based outdoor game by Fred Banks.

• Dungeon (1976), a lost adaptation of The Dungeon ("pedit5") that most histories give by its file name ("m199h").

• Pits of Baradur (1976 or 1977), a lost top-down game in the vein of The Dungeon.

• Futurewar (1977), a first-person shooter with RPG elements.

• The King's Mission Game (1977), an adaptation of the Think series by Kent Wendler, in which you kill goblins for a king on a customizable map.

        

Killing goblins in The King's Mission Game.

       

• Oubliette (1977), a first-person, multi-character game that was inspired by Moria and itself heavily inspired Wizardry (1981) as well as Alternate Reality: The City (1985), which in turn inspired Legends of Valour (1992) and the later Elder Scrolls series.
  

• Bugs 'N Drugs (1978), an adaptation of The Game of Dungeons for medical students, in which you "slay" viruses through your knowledge of pharmacology.  

• Swords and Sorcery (1978), a version of the Think games by Don Gillies, very similar to The King's Mission Game.

• Avatar (1979), by Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, David Sides, Tom Kirchman, Greg Janusz, and Mark Eastom, which offers a tiny first-person wireframe dungeon but also additional icons.

An Avatar screen shot.

      

• Emprise (1980), a lost first-person dungeon crawler inspired by Avatar. 

• Tunnels and Trolls (1980), a lost game inspired by Oubliette. 

• Labyrinth (1980), another first-person game, but this time for a single character.

• The Mystical World of Paradigms! (1980), a very odd game that is unfortunately broken today.

• Camelot (1982), a first-person dungeon crawler with one character and very different rules than the games that came before.

• Crypt (1985), an attempt to bring Rogue (1980) to PLATO.

     

My quick review of these games seems to support a couple of conclusions. First of all, the earliest CRPGs were quickly divided into the top-down/iconographic branch and the first-person branch. The former started with The Dungeon and/or dnd and gave rise to the family of difficult dungeon-crawls filled with random encounters that we saw in Telengard, Caverns of Zoarre, CaveQuest, and DND. Roguelikes also seem to have developed from this branch.

The second branch, starting with Moria, spawned (through adaptation or plagiarism) Wizardry and, from there, The Bard's Tale,  Might & Magic, and a host of other imitators. Richard Garriott, in the meantime, synthesized the two branches in the Ultima series (starting with Akalabeth) by mixing iconographic outdoor exploration with first-person dungeon exploration.

     

To those of us who grew up with single-player commercial RPGs and saw the advent of MMORPGs as an unwelcome offshoot, it may be surprising to learn that the first RPGs were, fundamentally, multi-player. In the context of the time, it makes sense: Tabletop RPGs were a group experience, and the PLATO system was meant to facilitate communication and collaboration. Even the top-down, single-character games had a chat function and allowed various PCs to interact with each other, and the first-person games (Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar) were explicitly meant to be played with a party--to the extent that I found them mostly unsurvivable as a single character. It's amazing to me how fast this functionality appeared.

Now that the good folks at Cyber1 have lent me an account, I feel compelled to play and report on some of the earliest CRPGs, so I'll start with The Dungeon and let you know how it goes. In the meantime, in the event that I've gotten something wrong or I missed a major point here, I encourage anyone with more detailed knowledge of CRPG history to comment.