Orthanc is the black tower that the wizard Saruman controls in Lord of the Rings and part of the name Orthanc Labyrinth; an early RPG for the PLATO system. PLATO was a computer system / alt-internet, first developed in the 60s, from the Univerity of Illinois. The game was released in 1975 and was inspired by a previous PLATO came called The Dungeon, also known as pedit5.
There is very little on the web to draw on regarding Orthanc’s development but the game itself is available to play on Cyber1.org.
Othanc plays very similarly to The Dungeon, which makes sense as it began as a recreation. It introduces a number of new features. The user inteface is the biggest difference; everything that can be displayed on screen, is. Orthanc introduces a multi-level dungeon that’s 10 levels deep. The version of Orthanc on the Cyber1 PLATO has been in continual development, so it’s hard to date which features where introduced when. For a more in-depth look I definitely encourage you to read CRPGAddict’s playthrough (there’s also some interesting discussion around the dating of these very early PLATO games).
Gameplay Screenshots
Legacy
One of the notable features of Orthanc was that’s it’s level layout was randomly generated but not per-playthrough, rather every few months.
Orthanc, much like dnd, was created in response to The Dungeon (aka pedit5) often being deleted from the PLATO system. In fact on the cyber1 system if you open lesson orthanc1 it’s a copy of The Dungeon under a different name.
The name Orthanc is probably from Tolkien but other than the name I couldn’t find a source to confirm that. There is a tower called Orthanc in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself got the name from an old English poem called “The Ruin”, “orþonc ærsceaft” meaning skilled ancient work.
❖ The DungeonI heard from author Paul M. Resch. [...] it was the deletion of "pedit5" [...] that prompted the creation of Orthanc in the first place, and that creation was immediate, after Rusty Rutherford gave his blessing to Resch and his collaborators.
Here are a selection of resources used in the article and for further reading.