General News - The CRPG Addict: back to the 70's

The CRPG Addict takes us down to memory lane (for those that remember those days) to look at the RPGs of the 70's.

The earliest surviving CRPG seems to be a 1974 or 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.
The original dnd 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 that I wrote about in July 2010.

Thanks HiidenX.
More information.

I'm 43 years old and started with C64 gaming in the early 80s. I missed the games of the 70s. My first contact was a Telengard game many years later.

These games were fun and some interfaces are much easier to use than some unsuccessful ergonomic attempts in the last years.

Telengard Remake

Wikipedia

Box and Manual

Telengard was one of the very first CRPGs I ever played (preceded only by a crappy little title I bought mail-order called - I think - Dungeons of Magdarr. Or Dungeons of Death. Lost in ancient history…).

Maybe I'm just weird this way, but I totally geek out on the history of RPGs like this. I'm fascinated by it. Might be why I'm such a fan of Barton's book.

Talk about a blast from the past. I'm going on 64 and worked for Control Data Corp. from late '79 through late '86 in Minneapolis. I worked on CDC's PLATO system during that time and remember some of the CRPGS from back then. Moria was a big favorite among many along with Labyrinth and Oubliette. There was even a Star Trek game many of us used to play. I recall working from home many times via remote terminal and modem. I had another terminal that used thermal paper for printouts for the Star Trek game. Some weekends, I'd go through about 3-4 rolls of it playing games. I lived in an apartment just across the street from the Arden Hills facility and many CDC employees lived there at the time. It was a good place to work, but CDC no longer exists.