On the dating of two early CRPGs: pedit5 and dnd

Aaron A. Reed
5 min readFeb 3, 2021

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The history of computer roleplaying games is often traced back to two early titles for the PLATO system: pedit5 (also known as The Dungeon) by Rusty Rutherford, and dnd (also known as The Game of Dungeons) originally by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, later extended by many others. Both games are often dated to 1974, but I’m claiming a date of Fall 1975 for them in this week’s 50 Years of Text Games installment, and I wanted to show my work for why I think the commonly cited year is too early.

From pedit5 (The Dungeon), 1975… I think.

The fall ‘74 figure comes from multiple interviews with dnd’s creators, such as this one from 2012. Dating events by memory from decades ago is obviously tricky, but it can get even trickier when there are tons of similar games with similar names that all came out within a short time frame, and the question of who gets to claim first dibs is historically significant. Tracing who copied who and which ideas were borrowed from what game can get complex and even emotional. An additional complication here is that the creators of pedit5 and dnd have both said at times that they were inspired by the other game’s release. I wanted to take a look at what facts can be definitively pinned down to specific dates, rather than relying on memories, and see what kind of picture emerged.

The tabletop Dungeons & Dragons was not released until January 1974, putting an absolute earliest possible date on games directly inspired by it (both lift stats, magic spells, etc. verbatim from the tabletop game). D&D didn’t really explode in popularity until August 1974 at Gen Con, held in the same Midwest region where the PLATO authors lived. For instance, the game didn’t sell out its initial print run of 1000 copies until three months after that Gen Con. I find it very unlikely the digital versions would have appeared before August ‘74.

One helpful resource is an archive of PLATO Notes Files, some of the earliest non-specialist electronic message boards. The archive includes posts between October 1972 and June 1976. It doesn’t cover private communications or other kinds of backchannel, and may not be a complete archive of every message on the system; but searching it for relevant terms provides some interesting baselines. The first reference by name to pedit5 is from October 17, 1975:

does anyone know who wrote pedit5
I would like to talk to him
nuuts

There are several other references to the game over the following weeks, indicating a spike of interest at this point. Looking for other related search terms shows Rutherford mentioning “the dungeon program” on October 10th, referring to a program of his own that would be affected by a proposed change to system behavior. Even earlier, there’s a reference to “dragons” in a charming anti-gamer rant from August 20th, which quotes a noisy player in the lab shouting “aieee I have a level six dragon…help…help.” The quotation from the annoyed poster may not be verbatim, but it’s interesting to note that pedit5 does indeed have a dragon enemy, and also that ranked monsters in the game max out at Level 6. (I really love the idea that this is an exact quote which got stuck in the head of this poor infuriated professor…)

At any rate, it seems pretty likely that pedit5 existed in some form by August 1975 and was being played enthusiastically between then and October. This jives with Rutherford’s recollections that he got into tabletop D&D “about the spring and summer of ‘75” (quoted in Brian Dear’s book The Friendly Orange Glow) and wrote his game “in about 4–6 weeks in the fall and winter of 1975” (quoted in Dungeons & Desktops by Matt Barton).

The word “dnd” doesn’t appear in the Notes Files archive at all, and “Dungeons” appears only in reference to the tabletop D&D game. This could mean the Whisenhunt/Wood game hadn’t appeared yet by June ’76 when the archive ends; more likely it’s a clue that the archive is incomplete. The authors of dnd have mentioned they have several dated source code printouts, the earliest from May 1976 and a second, labelled version 2.0, from August 1976. This would also suggest a later date for the game’s appearance. But later contributer Dirk Pellett has a directory of recovered dnd files from the PLATO filesystem where the oldest timestamp is much earlier: March 4 1975. This is less definitive than it might seem: it doesn’t necessarily provide an earliest possible dating for dnd, since an earlier file could have just been copied or moved on that date, and it also might not prove the game had been started by then, since PLATO users with limited space were often in the habit of repurposing old files for new projects.

But the chronology of inspiration provides a useful missing hint. dnd’s authors have said they were inspired to release their game by the fact that Rutherford’s pedit5 kept getting deleted, and Rutherford recalls that his game came about because “the program DND was reputedly in development, but never seemed likely to appear on the system” (also from Barton). The PLATO Notes Files archive also contains a number of posts from Whisenhunt and Wood’s accounts during summer 1975 asking for coding tips, suggesting they were working on a big project during this time.

So I think a pretty plausible timeline, backed up by available evidence, is that Whisenhunt and Wood had started working on dnd by spring ’75, made a lot of progress over the summer break between classes, and then perhaps got distracted by coursework as fall term began. Rutherford, who had heard about the game’s development, got sick of waiting for it to be finished and started his own version near the end of summer, releasing it by August. Folks were playing it sporadically between then and October — we know at least one person was pissed off about it enough by August to push for a deletion. Somewhere in there Whisenhunt and Wood decided to finish up their version, which might have appeared anytime between fall ’75 and May ’76 — but almost certainly towards the earlier end of that range, since by early ’76 other games were appearing that were clearly inspired by features in dnd. The creators have speculated that the May ’76 printout may commemorate what they considered the “finished” version of the program at that point, as the school year was ending, but it had likely been playable and evolving for months by that point. Dirk Pellett and his brother Flint began to get involved in 1976, and the 2.0 version from that August may represent the sum of their contributions from over the summer.

For much more on the complex history of early CRPGs, check out the books Dungeons & Desktops and The Friendly Orange Glow, as well as the CRPG Addict blog. Also check out my 50 Years of Text Games series if you’re interested in more text game history!

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