The Codex - Entry 0002: dnd (aka Game of Dungeons) (1975)
Wherein two unlikely college students create one of the first RPG video games ever, and two others keep adding to it for a decade
Welcome to the first proper entry of The Codex! The first post introduced the project, and Entry 0001 had the little issue of the game being discussed, not actually being playable. But thanks to the incredible Cyber1 project that I’ve mentioned in previous posts, dnd (also known as Game of Dungeons) is still playable in 2024, nearly half a century since it was first published onto a Midwestern college mainframe computer network.
As I discussed in the introductory post to The Codex, I’ll be splitting these entries into three distinct parts, covering each game first by plot, then gameplay design, and finally providing some of the historical context behind it. If you have any feedback about this format, suggestions about important elements I may be missing, or questions about this game specifically, please leave a comment or send an email.
On with the show!
Game: dnd (aka Game of Dungeons)
Platform: PLATO
Release Date: 1975
THE STORY
As we’ll discover with most of this era, the story for dnd is about as bare-bones as it comes. The game is set in a world with a handful of maze-like dungeons. Players take on the role of an adventurer who explores said dungeons in search of riches. The goal is to gather whatever gold and other treasures can be found while fighting or avoiding dangerous monsters.
The solo adventurer who stars in dnd is player-created and can be one of four different races: elf, dwarf, gnome, or human.1 There are considerable differences in how each of those races plays, but the game does not provide any real context or backstory about how the races relate to each other in this world or what their differing motivations might be. As far as personality goes, every dnd character has exactly the same single-minded ambition.
The initial version of the game featured only one maze to navigate: the Whisenwood Dungeon, named for the game’s two authors, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. At the bottom of the Whisenwood Dungeon, adventurers could locate an enchanted fountain that served multiple purposes: It would restore the character’s hit points, improve their stats, and load them down with tons of gold.
Later versions of dnd2 would include two new dungeons. The Caverns housed a magical orb guarded by a dragon, the most powerful creature in the game. The Tomb of Doom climaxed in an encounter with a vampire who was guarding the Holy Grail itself.
A single character can attempt to tackle all three of these dungeons. If a hero manages to possess both the magical orb from the Caverns and the Holy Grail from the Tomb of Doom, the character wins the game and is retired to the Elysian Fields. While dnd features plenty of mechanical complexity—more than I expected from one of the earliest RPG video games ever!—there’s not much more to the game’s story.
THE GAMEPLAY
Gold is more than just a goal in dnd; it’s also the method for achieving said goal. Though clearly heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, dnd splits with the pen-and-paper RPG in some major ways, most notably in the form of character progression.
Dungeons & Dragons popularized the brilliant mechanic of characters gaining experience points after successful encounters, which then fed into leveling up. Leveling up is a concept that was first introduced in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor pen-and-paper campaign before making its way to Dungeons & Dragons.
Leveling exists in dnd, but its form as been modified slightly. In Dungeons & Dragons, experience points were granted both for slaying monsters (what’s most commonly focused on these days) and for collecting treasure. In dnd, the focus is entirely on collecting gold, but it’s not enough to just pick it up. The gold doesn’t get added to a character’s experience points until they safely return their treasure to the surface.
The leveling system in dnd was actually modified across some of the game’s updates. In the earliest versions of the game, leveling was simplified: The amount of gold that a character dragged back to the surface would be applied directly to their maximum hit points. Later, a proper experience point and leveling system was added, with gold returned to the surface being added to experience points. There was one caveat, however: A hero could only gain one level per trip to the surface, a wrinkle that encouraged regular trips back and forth instead of hoarding gold.
The gold-for-experience exchange proved to be a defining feature of dnd’s gameplay loop. One of the most popular methods players discovered to ensure long-term survival was to make frequent short trips in and out of the dungeon upon starting a new character, repeating this process until the hero was built up to a relatively sturdy level. Monsters also grow more aggressive when the player character is carrying more gold, turning longer trips into the dungeon into a taut risk-reward struggle.
Part of the player’s approach to building up a fortune will depend on which race they play. Elves have higher intelligence stats and are considered the best spellcasters in the game. Dwarves have a higher strength stat, making them ideal melee fighters. Dwarves also have navigational bonuses owing to being used to living life underground. For example, if they fall down a trap chute in the dungeon, they’ll generally fall fewer floors than any other race.
Gnomes are both the smallest and quickest race available in dnd, with a higher dexterity stat than other races. They are better able to dodge attacks and also have a bonus to opening locked and trapped chests. And finally, the humans offer a middle-of-the-road experience with one major benefit: They can hold onto more gold at one time than anyone else.3
Humans can carry as much as 1,200x gold at any one time, where x is the character’s strength stat. Dwarves can hold 1,000x gold, elves are limited to 900x, and gnomes can carry a mere 800x. The extra gold storage space gives humans an obvious edge, especially in the later game, allowing human characters to venture deeper into the dungeons without having to return to the surface. Of course, early on, most players will want to head back up to drop off their goal more regularly to help facilitate leveling up.
Beyond race, the only other choice players make during character creation is which order they want to join. The game features twenty possible orders, and each adventurer is required to be part of one. Don’t stress too much, though; the choice apparently has no real effect on how dnd plays out. The orders are purely for flavor, and characters are even allowed to change orders at any time—though why anyone would want to is another question altogether.
Dnd is perhaps most true to Dungeons & Dragons in its approach to stats or, as they’re called in the game’s help text, “characteristics.” Heroes in the game have five familiar stats to draw on that each affect the character in unique ways:
Strength determines the power of attacks and how much gold a character can carry.
Intelligence works out how devastating spells are, as well as how many spells the character can know at any one time.
Wisdom operates similarly to intelligence but for clerical (i.e. generally more defensive) spells.
Dexterity affects how good a character is at dodging enemy attacks, disarming traps, and opening locked treasure chests.
Endurance is tied to a character’s number of hit points (called simply “hits” here), as well as how strong the character is against poison.
Once the character is created, the player must select one of dnd’s three dungeons. Then they’re thrust into a maze where they view their character from a top-down perspective. Every dungeon includes everything nerdy young college students would have come to expect from a challenging Dungeons & Dragons session: tons of monsters, weapons and artifacts that can help or harm the character, invisible walls and secret passageways, and traps that can fatally injure the hero or send them plunging deeper into the dungeon, down to floors they are not yet prepared to handle.
Within the dungeon, players will encounter more than sixteen different monster types, each with their own unique appearance. While some of the monster encounters are fairly standard—slimes, wizards, warriors, phantoms, etc.—dnd also shows off some original enemies. The rust monster can eat through equipment, while the balrog has been borrowed shamelessly from The Lord of the Rings.4 Perhaps most intimidating of all, when a character reaches the lower levels of a dungeon, they may find themselves pursued by the Grim Reaper itself, an indestructible enemy that leaves players with the sole tactical option of running away.
The actual process of fighting monsters in dnd is straightforward. Battles are turn-based. After the player character encounters a monster, they can choose between a number of possible actions each turn: fighting, dodging, using an enchanted item, or casting a spell.
In especially dire situations, the player also has the option of running away, but the hero will drop all the gold they’ve gathered so far in the process. If a player has completely given up, they can also surrender and let the monster kill them. Amusingly, sometimes when the surrender option is chosen, the enemy will let the character live but strip them of all their gold and magic items and decrease their experience points by thirty percent. Embarrasing and demoralizing!
Rather than present players with the exact numbers, combat damage in dnd is communicated in a more dramatic way. Monsters have three possible reaction to any attempt to hurt them. If a player receives a message that their opponent was “not amused,” that means they did some damage. On the other hand, if the monster was “amused,” the action caused no damage, and if it was “very amused,” then somehow the hero’s attempt at attacking actually helped the enemy, presumably inadvertently.
While the presentation leans toward being flavorful, dnd is crunching numbers in the background like any good pen-and-paper RPG. Damage done to monsters from melee attacks and damage done to the player character are both based on the hero’s strength stat, plus modifiers from armor and weapons they have equipped. Attempts to evade enemy attacks are checked against the character’s dexterity stat, as well as the layout of the room and the position of the hero and enemies within it. And the effectiveness of spells is, of course, based on the intelligence or wisdom stats, depending on the spell being cast, as well as various resistances that monsters have.
Though they can be difficult to get a handle on, spells are one area where dnd provides surprising depth. The game’s spell book runs the gamut from direct damage classics like fireball to more interesting status effects like sleep and “dispell” [sic]. Players can even use charm spells to win beasts over to their side and let them do the fighting.
Once again, the goal of taking on monsters in dnd is inevitably to find gold. Of course, finding gold in and of itself can be a risky proposition. The player character automatically sucks up any gold that’s lying around on the ground as they explore the dungeon, but bigger hoards are usually found in treasure chests, and said chests are usually guarded by powerful enemies, fitted with devious traps, or both. Players have a number of options for recognizing and disarming traps, including using magic spells, examining the chest carefully, or just trying to open it as cautiously as possible.
What happens if a character tries to pry open a chest without getting rid of traps first? Well, it blows up. When this happens, the player character gets hurt, and any items that were held in the chest are lost, although gold that was contained in the chest will still be available to grab. Some traps will also blind the character for a set amount of time, leaving them more vulnerable than usual to attacks.
In addition to gaining more money, players are urged to open chests in order to find magic items. These items can provide major power boosts far beyond what characters earn from leveling up.
Rather than a wide range of equipable gear, dnd opts for a system where generic pieces of gear provide similar bonuses. For example, swords, shields, and armor all provide protection from melee damage and can be stacked to increase their effectiveness. Helmets provide slightly less melee protection but also give the character a bonus when examining chests and potions.
That’s not to say that all the loot in dnd is generic, though. The game also features a few more specialized items, such as the bag of holding, which allows the character to carry more gold, or the cloak of visions, which lets them see hidden doors. Perhaps most unique and most impactful on gameplay is the amulet of ESP, which provides some guidance on how tough a monster will be for the hero to take down. If the monster stands a good chance of killing the player character, the amulet will offer up a cheeky “Farewell!”
These are just a few examples of the couple dozen magic items that exist in dnd. Between various wands, orbs, rings, and more, any given run through the game should have a fair bit of variety. Each new playthrough is likely to introduce new obstacles—such as a magical book that lowers the player character’s stats—as well as a new source of power—such as a potion that immediately grants the character enough experience points to level up. Extra lucky characters may even stumble across a genie lamp, which will carry extra gold for the hero and allow them to use their wish (and a small fee of all the gold they’re currently carrying) to teleport safely out of the dungeon at a moment’s notice.
All of this is to say, there’s a lot more variety to dnd than one might expect from such an early example of the medium of video games. Going back to older games can be tough with all the conveniences of modern gaming, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover how fully formed a lot of the core RPG ideas already were by the time they were first getting translated into video game form.
Another point of interest in dnd is how its dungeons are laid out and navigated. Rather than stairs, the dungeons have “transporters” that warp characters up and down to different levels. The first floor of each dungeon also houses a special “Excelsior Transporter” that allows the player character to instantly jump multiple levels down in exchange for some hit points. This serves as a sort of fast travel for when a player has run out of the dungeon from far below to bank their gold and wants to return to the floor they were exploring, although bold adventurers can attempt using it to skip ahead.
As mentioned in the story section, the real end goal of dnd, at least in its final updates, was to successfully gather both the Holy Grail and the magical orb. Accomplishing this didn’t just win the game; it granted the player a spot on the “Hall of Fame,” a sort of proto-leaderboard or high score list where other PLATO users checking out dnd could see names displayed. Players could also make it to the Elysian Fields (and thus the Hall of Fame) by reaching level 1,000, a point at which the game acknowledges that this character could easily burn through all three of the dungeons with little effort.
While its depth might be surprising, it’s less shocking that, at this early point in the life of the video game medium, dnd is very much a game of firsts. It is the first game to feature teleporters between levels. It is very likely the first game ever to have boss encounters—the dragon and the vampire, each in their dungeon of choice. And it may very well be the first game ever to encourage grinding in its player base.
See, dnd was difficult. A single flubbed spell or opening the wrong treasure chest could end even the most promising run, and once the player character died, the player had to start over from level 1. The college-age budding gamers who were playing dnd were determined, though, and before long they figure out a means of exploiting the game’s structure to ensure victory.
Basically, instead of bum-rushing as deep into the dungeon as they could as quickly as possible, players would stick around on the first floor, gathering small piles of gold, facing more reasonable monsters, and ripping open the less deadly treasure chests. Players would run back and forth, sweeping across the first floor and then returning to the entrance, hoarding gold and growing their levels. Some players would do this for hours before finally venturing deeper. It was a tedious process, but it worked, and it was destined to become a tried-and-true method for success in many role-playing video games to come.
THE BACKGROUND
Though it’s one of the first role-playing video games ever created, dnd came from surprising origins: two unlikely college buddies who didn’t even share the same fields of study and weren’t necessarily exposed to computer programming through their classes.
As undergrads at Southern Illinois University in 1974, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood were very near the epicenter of the development of the PLATO mainframe computer system. Whisenhunt was pursuing a dual major in psychology and political science, while Wood was studying electrical engineering, but both of them were drawn in by the siren call of PLATO and the seemingly limitless possibilities it presented. In fact, Whisenhunt found himself so enamored of the mainframe that he switches his major to computer science. It was while messing around at Southern Illinois University’s PLATO terminal in the basement of the campus library that the two met and became fast friends.
Wood described Whisenhunt in one interview as “more normal than the rest of the people” who were excited about PLATO. On any given evening at Southern Illinois University, one person would be hunched over the PLATO terminal’s monitor while as many as ten others gathered around them, eyes glued to the screen. Though PLATO was intended as a device for teaching lessons, these diehards were more interested in using it to play games that had been secretly programmed by other students.
Some favorites for Whisenhunt and Wood included Moon War, Dogfight, Star Trek, Airwar, Spasim, and the most popular of them all, Empire. Almost all of these were sci-fi strategy or space shooter games, many inspired by the popular Star Trek TV show from the ’60s. Each game had its own quirks, though, and PLATO players would often swap between them at rapid speed.
Wood described this heady experience in an interview with RPG Fanatic: “In 1974-75, you could play every video game in the world in about sixty minutes (and I think I did on several occasions).”
But the absolute favorite for Wood and Whisenhunt was pedit5. Instead of sci-fi, this game was a fantasy dungeon crawler (which I’ll be covering in great detail in an upcoming entry). The duo and other PLATO-using friends would regularly get together to play pedit5 as a group. However, sometimes their plans would be foiled, as they’d discover the pedit5 “lesson” had been deleted by a system administrator marking it as an “inappropriate” program. Thankfully—and unlike the previously covered m199h—pedit5 was always backed up and would inevitably return. Sometimes the game would get loaded back onto the mainframe within hours, but at other times, it could be gone for weeks at a time.
Finally sick of the annoyance of their favorite game disappearing, and having taken an increased interest in authoring their own “lessons,” Wood and Whisenhunt started working on their own game in late 1974. And by this point, both of them had become system admins for PLATO themselves, which meant they could ensure that the game they created would not be deleted over and over again.
While building dnd together, Whisenhunt and Wood focused on fun above all else. At this point, there were no best practices for game development; rather, they would put in things that they thought sounded cool and see if they worked. They had a regular rotation of PLATO users who could test each new addition and give feedback, and then the duo would tweak things as needed.
This loose approach to game design led to some of the most impressive inclusions in dnd, such as the game’s “boss.”
“There was no term for [a boss monster] since there wasn’t anything remotely like that at the time,” Whisenhunt said. “We just wanted a final challenge against a very powerful opponent before you could ‘win’ the game and have your character retired to the Elysian Fields.”
Another amazing addition to dnd was Whisenhunt’s creation of a maze editor. Essentially serving as a development tool, the maze editor let the duo add levels to the dungeon much faster than they had previously. Initially, they would draw out a level on graph paper, and then they would have to use a tedious process to translate that physical map into the game’s code. That’s why the initial version of dnd’s dungeon—released in 1975—contained a mere two floors.
Once Whisenhunt created the visual maze editor, though, that all changed. Wood proclaimed that “anyone could design a level of the dungeon in ten to fifteen minutes... In fact, my wife designed a couple of levels.” Before long, dnd’s initial dungeon had expanded to twelve floors, and then twenty.
Despite the dnd name, which was obviously meant to evoke Dungeons & Dragons, Wood and Whisenhunt were actually more inspired by pedit5. They were aware of dnd’s namesake, but most of their dungeon-crawling experience was from that other PLATO RPG that they loved.
That wasn’t the only inspiration, though. Sometimes dnd’s mechanical additions came from surprising places. For example, one night Whisenhunt and Wood decided to take a break from working on dnd and grab dinner out. During their dinner, they took turns playing pinball on a machine at the restaurant. Overjoyed at the high scores they achieved, they had a revelation: They could add a high score system into dnd. Thus the Hall of Fame was born.
Not that the game’s creators would ever see it. Whisenhunt and Wood were notoriously not very good at their own game. They would regularly cheat in order to test new mechanics or new floors of their dungeon. In fact, the developers were largely convinced that the game was unbeatable—until they were proven wrong by devoted players. Eventually Whisenhunt took a trip to the University of Illinois to try to figure out how some players there were managing to beat one of dnd’s most devious challenges. What he found astonished him.
“Once I saw one person who would walk into the dungeon, grab the first valuable item (which at that level was not much), and then leave,” Whisenhunt recalls. “Then to proceed to do this for hours on end. We never thought anyone would have the patience and would spend the time to do such a simple thing over and over again to gain large amounts of wealth.”
While Wood and Whisenhunt couldn’t hope to stop the practice of grinding altogether, they did end up implementing a system to stop this particularly cheap version of it. In a later version of dnd, if players repeatedly went in and out of the dungeon in a short stretch of time, the game would teleport them to the bottom floor of the dungeon, effectively ending that run.
Whisenhunt and Wood continued working on dnd, releasing new versions and updating it throughout 1975 and 1976. By May 1976, they released what Whisenhunt considered the “complete” 1.0 version of the game, with all the features and ocntent that the duo had intended. However, they continued to add new things into the game, putting out a 2.0 update around August 1976.
This is where two other enterprising game developers enter the picture. Dirk and Flint Pellett were brothers, the former attending Iowa State University and the latter at the University of Illinois. As they were at different schools, the Pelletts never actually met Wood or Whisenhunt in person, but they all knew each other very well. Dirk Pellett, especially, would constantly send Wood and Whisenhunt messages through PLATO with suggestions for how to improve dnd, or things he felt should be added to the game.
The Pelletts were also interested in programming themselves. In fact, they were basically early hackers. According to one story, they had hacked a Pong terminal to make the ball move slower and to give them a paddle that ran the full width of the screen. Clearly they had some skill.
Around August 1976, just as version 2.0 of dnd was completed, Whisenhunt and Wood started to get overwhelmed. Between their schooling, their increasing responsibilities as PLATO system admins, and the growing number of dnd players, they began to feel that they wouldn’t have time to continue adding more and more content to the game. In a surprising decision, they eventually handed over access to dnd to the Pelletts so that they could keep it going.
When they first took over, the Pelletts focused on expanding the number of items in the game while keeping a similarly whimsical tone. Dirk said that the only real equipable items in dnd when he took over were a sword and a shield; he saw this as the most obvious space to expand on what the game could offer.
In an interview describing his contributions to dnd, Dirk Pellett offered the following: “You could say the roof and walls and foundation of dnd are all [Wood’s and Whisenhunt’s], and the window dressing and furniture are mostly mine.”
The Pelletts had a very different approach to game development than Wood and Whisenhunt. For one thing, they would discuss and test each balance change and addition a ton before releasing it rather than allowing the wider PLATO player base to test things for them. The Pellets created a note file in PLATO where players could leave suggestions for additions or tweaks they wanted to see, not unlike the messages that Dirk used to bombard the game’s original creators with.
The Pelletts were also much more blatant in borrowing from pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons—at least at first. Many of the items Dirk first added to dnd were taken verbatim from that source material. It wasn’t until later that he started focusing more on adding totally unique items and monsters.
The Pelletts ended up massively expanding from what Wood and Whisenhunt had ended with as the base game of dnd. Most notably, in addition to all the new items, enemies, and so on, they added two full new dungeons on top of the original Whisenwood Dungeon. These new areas—the Tomb of Doom and the Caverns—offered many new challenges and gave players a little bit of freedom to shape their playthrough by choosing which to enter first.
Other Pellett additions to dnd include player character races, shops, the ability to stash gold, an inventory weight limit and fatigue system, the ability for players to save themselves from death with a potion of revival, and a completely rewritten maze plotter that helped the game run twice as fast.
The Pelletts released many updates to dnd through the years, but two of the major versions remain playable on the Cyber1 PLATO emulator today. Dnd version 5.4 represents the full Pellett vision for the game, and version 8.0 is the final major update the game received. Dirk Pellett has stated that version 8.0 of dnd was accessed at least a million times, though there is no clear record of total playtime or total number of unique users.
A version 9.0 was planned to introduce a major outdoor area that would be hex-based, but it was never finished. Dirk and Flint Pellett worked on dnd for a decade—from 1976 until 1986, right around the time when the PLATO mainframe system started slowly but surely vanishing from companies and college campuses around the Midwest.
Though it was essentially just a hobbyist project from a bunch of college kids, a commercial version of dnd was eventually released for CDC PLATO, a Minneapolis-based service where users could pay for time on a cloned PLATO mainframe system. However, royalties from this version were minuscule, especially when split between the four creators.
Flint Pellett did some work on other PLATO-based games, and for a time, Whisenhunt programmed flight simulators for the US Navy. None of dnd’s creators became full-time game developers, though. They did, however, stay involved in the blossoming world of computers and computer programming, including Whisenhunt becoming a microprocessors architect, Whisenhunt and Wood reuniting to work together at Motorola, and Flint Pellett joining the developer tools team at Intel.
Asked about the legacy of dnd, Wood shared the following thoughts:
“When [the Pelletts] finished with it, dnd was really the prototype for all the RPGs that came along... Bethesda5 created a very sophisticated version of dnd. But there really isn’t much original as far as gameplay, i.e. get sword, map dungeon, find boss, kill boss, get treasure, use treasure to buy a better sword, rinse, and repeat.”
One could argue that this description deeply downplays the complexity of future RPGs. But one could also build a strong case that when it comes to that core style of combat-heavy, dungeon-crawling RPG inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Wood is essentially correct. Dnd and other similar PLATO RPGs nailed down the formula almost fifty years ago; everything since then has just been adding new flourishes.6
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Notably, this more or less matches up with the races available in the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons: elf, dwarf, hobbit, and human. The hobbit race was soon renamed to halfling, making the The Lord of the Rings inspiration just slightly less obvious.
What, you thought “games as a service” is a modern thing? Surprise! Turns out iteration, patching, and content updates were married to game development from basically the very beginning.
Is this choice a comment on greed as an inherent part of human nature? It’s possible! Or perhaps the game’s developers just wanted to give the otherwise milk-toast choice something to make them stand out.
Spoiler: This will be far from the only early RPG to feature that specific Tolkien creation.
The developer of the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout 3, and more. We’re not going to get around to talking about them for a long time yet, so strap in.
One of those new flourishes is that I, personally, don’t die constantly. That’s one innovation in modern RPGs that I appreciate.