Rate top gamespedit5
About
pedit5, alternately called The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network by Rusty Rutherford. In it, the player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure. When they encounter a monster, they can fight the monster with a weapon or spells, or attempt to flee. Characters can be saved between sessions. Rutherford developed the game over four to six weeks in late 1975 as a computerized take on the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game; it was named pedit5 as it was stored in the fifth "pedit" slot his school group had available. It is considered to be the first example of a dungeon crawl video game and one of the first computer role-playing games. An improved version was later created on the PLATO network as orthanc.
System requirements for PC
pedit5 reviews and comments
The rapid pace at which you can create new characters and enter the dungeon makes it relatively addicting to keep trying; you could end up making dozens of new characters in a single hour, but that's really just if you don't know what you're doing. There're not too many systems to learn and the game is well-documented. Really, your main opponent is the random number generator; once you're sufficiently good at utilizing the tools at your disposal, it's simply a matter of probability of hitting a lucky playthrough.
If you don't mind reading the docs to understand the optimal way to play it, the game can be beaten in less than 30 minutes, so it's harmless to give it a try, but there are much better games on PLATO.