Dungeon (video game)

Lore & Background

Dungeon was written by Don Daglow, then a student at Claremont University Center, in either 1975 or 1976. It was an unlicensed implementation of the new tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, describing the movements of a multi-player party through a monster-inhabited dungeon. Players chose actions in combat and where to move each character, making the game very slow by modern standards. Characters earned experience points and gained skills as their level grew, reflecting most basic tenets of D&D.

Reader's Guide

Dungeon holds significance as one of the earliest role-playing video games and the first to incorporate line-of-sight graphics displays. Its use of top-down dungeon maps that revealed only areas the party had seen, including effects for light, darkness, and infravision abilities of different races, was a pioneering advancement. This was made possible by the mid-1970s switch to CRT screens, which could refresh text in seconds rather than the minute or more required by earlier Teletype machines. Although widely available via DECUS, Dungeon was adopted by fewer universities than Daglow's earlier Star Trek game, primarily because it required 36K of system RAM versus 32K for Star Trek, exceeding the 32K limit many schools set on games. Some campuses had even reduced limits to 16K. The game's legacy is also complicated by a later (ca. 1980) DECUS-distributed game also named Dungeon, which was actually a version of Zork, and a separate 1975 PLATO game called Dungeon by John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jan Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada.

Did You Know?

• Dungeon was written in either 1975 or 1976 by Don Daglow, then a student at Claremont University Center.
• It was the first game to employ line-of-sight graphics displays, using top-down dungeon maps.
• The game required 36K of system RAM, which limited its adoption compared to Daglow's earlier Star Trek game.
• A later game also named Dungeon, distributed by DECUS around 1980, was actually a version of Zork.