Before White Box

Before White Box there was a game called "Dungeon"
Let's talk legendary, back in the days before the White Box, even before the white box with wood grain sides, before the three little brown books were more than a gleam in Mr. Gygax eye. As gamer legend goes, there was a time when all the hobby world had was Chainmail and its Fantasy Supplement and some imaginaries who were developing a new way to "wargame". A group of those folks, maybe the first group, gamed around the Minnesota Twin Cities. Mr. Arneson was one of those first, but he didn't game alone. Apparently there were others around the Twin Cities that started to play various versions of the new roleplaying game they started calling the Dungeon Game or simply Dungeon.
The image above is a reconstruction of an early version of the game Dungeon as written out by Craig VanGrasstek and can be found on Jon Peterson's blog Playing At The World. I am grateful to both Mr. VanGrasstek and Mr. Peterson for making this piece of our hobby history available. In his Forward to the rules, Mr. VanGrasstek describes an expanding series of mazes or dungeons run by diiferent referees who had played the game maybe once before and by the time of his writing down his rules the new game is being played in many different mazes or dungeons in the area with somewhat different rules in use for each maze.
I like to think of those heady days when the idea - dungeon delving - was so new that players couldn't wait to give it a try and were willing to create their own rules to make it all happen. The idea was the novelty, a group including fighters, spell casters and clerics (they are all three here in Dungeon) go down a dungeon and have adventures, exploring, fighting and finding treasures. How you rolled dice and determined the outcome might vary considerably, but the fun of kicking in a door, fighting some baddies and grabbing their loot was definitely here from the start. I am tempted to find a few willing friends and give Mr. VanGrasstek's rules a try...with a few tweeks of my own of course. I'll bet the game will feel very familiar.
About the same time as Mr. Arneson was running his Blackmoor campaign and various other area gamers were delving in their own homegrown pen and paper dungeons, local gamer David Megarry developed the idea into a boardgame he called Dungeon! which he later published through TSR. As I recall, there is much in common between the Dungeon! boardgame experience and those early dungeon crawl adventures. 
In music and in art it is common to find a movement of artists that inspire and encourage each other in taking their craft in new and creative directions. They borrow ideas from each other and experiment with changes, bouncing ideas off each other and sharing their thoughts and criticisms. It's how the creative process seems to work and when it's on, there's something "magic" about it. Twin Cities, Minnesota (and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin) had that magic in their gaming communities in the early 70's. What a thing it must have been to witness and be a part of!