Join Computing on this trek into the verdant pastures of a burgeoning video games industry, as we remember the best games of the '80s. In this first feature, we start where it all began in 1980 itself
2. Rogue
Ever played one of the exponentially expanding catalogue of games calling itself ‘Rogue-like'? Of course you have. Well here's the original. A dungeon-crawler, it was originally developed for Unix-based mainframe machines, and even made it into the official Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 operating system, a major factor behind its discoverability, and hence success.
Another game in part inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, players control a character exploring a multi-level dungeon, with the aim of making it to the lowest level and finding the Amulet of Yendor. Of course.
Graphics are minimal, with ASCII characters doing the job of representing everything from the player character, to monsters and the dungeon itself. The game also features permadeath. So that's iron man mode by default.
The idea for the game came to one of its co-developers, Michael Toy, when he visited his father's office (a nuclear facility, no less), and played 1971's Star Trek on the facility's mainframe system. He later took up programming and met the game's other creator, Glenn Wichman at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Wichman was into Dungeons & Dragons and was writing his own adventure game.
With those parents, Rogue is pretty much the precise offspring you'd expect.
