The computer role-playing game, most widely known as the RPG, turns 50 today! Well, as close as we can pin it, anyway. Happy birthday, RPGs!
In 1974, the year Dungeons & Dragons began publication, a couple of guys at Southern Illinois University called Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood became interested in programming in the TUTOR language for the educational computer system PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations). PLATO was kind of extraordinary: a network of around a dozen mainframe computers running processes for several thousand terminals around the world. And like all educational devices, the University of Illinois’ PLATO was frequently misused by students, in this case to create a role-playing game on that proto-internet. That game was to be The Game of Dungeons, more commonly known—because of its filename—as dnd.
In 1975, a University of Illinois resident called Rusty Rutherford—aware of the as-yet unfinished dnd but not involved—spent a handful of weeks creating his own RPG for PLATO. His was called The Dungeon, but again due to filenames became known as pedit5. Due to the speed with which Rutherford worked, pedit5 would release first, and as such take the mantle of the first-ever RPG.
Meanwhile, at the Claremont University Center in California, student Don Daglow (the person responsible for the first-ever baseball game in 1971, Baseball, and the first-ever RTS game in 1981, Utopia) worked on a game for the DEC mainframe computer, the PDP-10, also based on 1974’s breakout pen-and-paper hit Dungeons & Dragons. It was called—wait for it—Dungeon. According to Wikipedia, it’s unknown whether the game released in 1975 or 1976, but given Daglow’s propensity for being first to genres, the former seems more likely. (He also made the first MMO in 1991, Neverwinter Nights.)
Oh, and on November 4, 1975, another PLATO-based RPG—this time multiplayer—was released by John D. Daleske and Gary Fritz among others, with the groundbreaking title of…Dungeon.
So whether The Game of Dungeons, The Dungeon, Dungeon, or Dungeon was first, what we know for sure is that they appeared in 1975, 50 years ago, and one of them on this exact day. Which is plenty of reason to mark today as the day to celebrate the birth of the genre.
It seems to be generally accepted that Rutherford’s pedit5 was the very first of them all, a game about wandering through a single floor of a dungeon while doing the two most important RPG things: killing monsters and collecting treasure. There were spells to cast, with randomly generated enemies and loot, and a battle and leveling system based on the rules of the brand new D&D. It was all there, albeit limited to around 50 rooms and only 20 stored characters across the whole network, due to the hefty limitations of the system. That name, pedit5, came from the area in which the code was stored, sectioned off for Rutherford’s department of the Population and Energy Group. The group had five slots, the first three used for relevant programming, while the fifth stored The Dungeon and the fourth contained its manual. As a result, the university naturally deleted this frippery to make room for “proper” programs, but Rutherford persistently re-added it.
dnd, meanwhile, was a story as old as time: a game with large ambitions that was thus delayed and scaled back before eventually being “released.” The intention had been for the game to be a graphical multi-user dungeon (MUD), but this was never achieved, and the game eventually emerged as a more complex version of pedit5. From my reading, there appears to be a fair amount of confusion over whether developers Whisenhunt and Wood created their game contemporaneously with pedit5, or whether it eventually became an embellished version of the earlier game. Either way, dnd offered a multi-layer dungeon called Whisenwood, in which players sought a mystical Grail and Orb. Once again, it merrily ripped off Dungeons & Dragons‘ core rules, leveling and spells, although didn’t feature pedit5‘s randomization. But it also boasts two extremely important firsts of its very own.
The first first for dnd is nonlinearity: Players were able to return to previously explored levels, approaching the game in their own preferred order, relying on the fixed position of enemies and items to let the computer network to store all that data. The second first, and perhaps the more significant, is that this was the first game to feature a boss encounter. Heck, this post could easily have been titled “Happy 50th Birthday, Boss Fights.” Each dungeon’s exit was guarded by a high-level monster, including the Golden Dragon that protected the Orb.
Then, come November 4, we get the release of the PLATO network’s Dungeon which, according to Mobygames, is considered one of the first-ever MUD games. However, there’s a weirdly small amount of information out there about this one other than that, none of which supports its being multiplayer. The wonderful obsessives over at CRPG Adventures have been similarly stumped, unable to get it running at all. CRPG Addict also had no joy, finding the game missing from many retrospectives, but noting that it was marked by co-creator Daleske as “incomplete,” and also as a “predecessor to Moria.” That would appear to be 1975’s PLATO Moria by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin, yet another RPG from that year, but this one able to have ten players joining in together. It was played in the most basic form of first-person you can imagine, but that’s enough for it to claim the title of first 3D RPG! All in that same year!
Obviously none of these games were technically “released,” instead being stored on university servers and spread by word-of-mouth among students and staff. This had been the case since the early 1970s, with text-based adventures already proving popular on the same systems. Others took over development of some of the games mentioned above, elaborating on them through the late ’70s as the technology improved, but it wouldn’t be until 1980 and the arrival of Rogue as a commercial product that anything like an RPG could be considered as becoming mainstream as opposed to mainframe.
But it remains undeniable that 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the RPG as a computer game, and with Dungeon (PLATO)’s November 4 release, today as good as any date on which to recognize it.
Happy birthday, RPGs! 50 years old and still one of the most popular types of games on the planet. From dnd to Baldur’s Gate 3, the impact of the D&D-inspired genre on video games cannot be overstated.
