Dungeon (video game)

Dungeon was mid-1970 one of the earliest computer role-playing games and one of the earliest software adaptations of the roleplaying rules Dungeons & Dragons (D & D). It was developed by the U.S. game designer Don Daglow in the university environment for mainframe -type PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation.

Description

The information on the publication period of Dungeon are contradictory. It was written either in 1975 or 1976 by Don Daglow, then a student at Claremont University Center (now Claremont Graduate University ). During this period, just the earliest edition of the roleplaying rules Dungeons & Dragons to the U.S. universities began to spread. But many in 1975 had completed their studies of Daglows friends and it was difficult to organize a game round. Daglow therefore attempted to transfer the gameplay to the computer, so a person could play alone. The software implementation of the rules was made without license of the manufacturer TSR, however, was detailed. It was about the progressive exploration of a peopled with monsters Dungeons by a six-member group of heroes. The player is given the positions and actions of the game characters in battle, which is why the flow of the game was rather sluggish. The figures accumulated experience and learned how in D & D with each new level new talent added.

Daglow himself wrote in 1988 about this: "In the mid seventies I had a fully functional fantasy role-playing game on the PDP -10, both distant and close combat, Lines of Sight, auto-mapping and NPCs with independent AI. " Though the game is nominally in text form was played, it was also the first game that used the line-of- sight graphics. The Heldengrruppe could therefore only see the areas that were in their sight. This was visualized in the form of the dungeon, which represented only the visible sections of the playfield overview map. The system calculated for playback while also light and darkness, and the various night-vision capabilities ( infravision ) of the various D & D races ( elves, dwarves ) a.

This progress was thus possible that many universities had switched mid-1970s for their computer terminals on CRT screens, on which the text shown could be replaced instead after only a few seconds after a minute or more. Earlier games, however, printed the score for player on teletype or line printer, with a large noise level and with speeds of 10 and 30 characters per second.

Dissemination

Although Dungeon was nationally available via the user group Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society ( DECUS ), it was significantly less taken up by universities and systems as Daglows earlier game Star Trek from 1971. Was mainly due to the significantly higher for its time, memory consumption of 36K, compared to the beginning of the 1970s spread to many schools limit for programs of 32K, which was respected by Star Trek. The educational institutions saw in games primarily a gimmick to attract students to computer. However, they only wanted a small, fast -to-play sample programs to limit the time consumption of games and instead to have more time for math, scientific research and student use. Some facilities had the ceiling therefore in the meantime reduced to a mere 16K.

Same name game

Approximately 1980 common DECUS another game titled Dungeon, in which it was a version of Zork, a text adventure, the later model for the early Multi-User Dungeons.

A third game called Dungeon was published in 1975 by John Daleske, Gary Fritz Jan Good, Bill Gammel and Mark Nakada on the PLATO.