#0015 Rogue

Alright! Time for another issue of “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die”. Today on 1k1VGYMPBYD we look at Rogue, a 1980 Dungeon Crawler created by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold for the Unix mainframe systems and ported to IBM, PC and Macintosh.

The trio wanted to design a game that they themselves could play. See, the problem with playing games that you developed is that you already know what's going to happen, you know all the traps, what to avoid, where to go. The three wanted to make a game that they could play, and still be surprised at every time. That's where the mechanics of randomly generated Dungeons came into play. Every time you play the game nothing is the same, the dungeon layout is different, and even the potions and scrolls do different things every time. And thus a genre was born! “Roguelikes” as they're called are games like “The Blinding of Issac”, “Don't Starve”, or “Dungeons of Dredmor”. They all use the elements of randomly generated environments, and permadeath and are actually growing in popularity. Making it the only genre that's on the list so far besides RPGs that are still popular today! Back in 1980, the trio probably didn't realize they were inventing a new genre at the time, but because of them, they ended up making a game who's influence could be felt more than 30 years later.

In Rogue, you play as a smiley face on an ASCII interface where everything from potions to monsters are represented by letters and symbols. You move around the randomly create dungeon with the arrow keys. The dungeons themselves must be explored before you see them on the screen. The game starts out in a small room with at least one exit and as the player moves around the screen, more of the dungeon is revealed. Your goal is to make it to something like the 25^th floor of the dungeon to recover the Amulet of Yendor and bring it safely back to the first floor. Which is NOT an easy task considering how hard even the earliest levels are. I can't tell you how many times I died because I rolled the dice and drank a potion only to discover it was poison. And it's not like you can just remember which color potion is which, because they change every game. I never even made it to the tenth floor!

All in all, it wasn't bad. It was the first Roguelike I've ever played, so it was nice to start with the one that started it all. I enjoyed it, I found myself playing it over like five times and I really liked exploring each floor for potions, armor and weapons. Overall, if you're a big fan of games like “Don't Starve” or “The blinding of Issac” you might just get a kick out of playing the game that gave those games their start. I would say go play it, but I'll be honest, it was NOT easy to find. I had to hunt for it on some website from like 1999, and even then the game is so old I needed DOS Box (which is awesome BTW) to even play it. Which is understandable... Considering that it did come out 36 years ago... I should be thankful that I could play the original version at all.

Okay! Up next: Tempest!