project had promised to be a multiplayer game but had not yet been able to deliver the feature—nor would it—he set out to create a single-player game. Rutherford tried to use Dungeons & Dragons concepts as much as possible, including hit points, levels, and experience and treasure rewards for defeating monsters. The player-character was a combination of a fighter, magic user, and cleric. The limitations of the system required Rutherford to compromise on size; the dungeon was limited to 40-50 rooms on a single level, and the game could only store 20 players at a time, which Rutherford later said was a large problem when the game became popular. The game was named pedit5 as Rusty Rutherford was a member of the Population and Energy Group at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; each group was assigned a limited number of program slots on the school's mainframe, with the Population and Energy Group having program slots names "pedit1" through "pedit5". The group had used the first three slots, and Rutherford was able to code his game into the fifth slot, which became the game's default name. Rutherford used pedit4 for the game's manual. Because at the time the game was not seen to be an appropriate use of the resources by system administrators pedit5 was eventually deleted, but Rutherford continually restored it. Legacy pedit5 was one of the first computer role-playing games; pedit5, dnd, and Dungeon were all created around the same time in 1975, though they may have been preceded by the swiftly-deleted m199h in 1974. It is considered to be the first example of a dungeon crawl game. The random generation of monster encounters and treasure makes the game an early predecessor of the roguelike genre. A new version of the game, based on the original work but significantly expanded, was written by three other programmers as orthanc, named after a tower in The Lord of the Rings. The original version of pedit5 was resurrected as orthanc1. Both orthanc and orthanc1 remained on the PLATO system. Since then, copies of the game's source code have been made available allowing users to play the title on the PLATO (Cybis) system, or an emulator of it, connected to the Internet. References External links cyber1.org, website dedicated to PLATO, with emulators for a variety of operating systems 1975 video games Fantasy video games PLATO (computer system) games Role-playing video games Video games developed