Top 10 Games of 1980 | Number 2: Rogue #shorts

Rogue (also known as Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom) is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman with later contributions by Ken Arnold. Rogue was originally developed around 1980 for Unix-based mainframe systems as a freely distributed executable. It was later included in the official Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 operating system (4.2BSD). Commercial ports of the game for a range of personal computers were made by Toy, Wichman, and Jon Lane under the company A.I. Design and financially supported by the Epyx software publishers. Additional ports to modern systems have been made since by other parties using the game's now-open source code.

In Rogue, players control a character as they explore several levels of a dungeon seeking the Amulet of Yendor located in the dungeon's lowest level. The player-character must fend off an array of monsters that roam the dungeons. Along the way, players can collect treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items. Rogue is turn-based, taking place on a square grid represented in ASCII or other fixed character set, allowing players to have time to determine the best move to survive. Rogue implements permadeath as a design choice to make each action by the player meaningful — should one's player-character lose all his health via combat or other means, that player-character is simply dead. The player must then restart with a fresh character as the dead character cannot respawn, or be brought back by reloading from a saved state. Moreover, no game is the same as any previous one, as the dungeon levels, monster encounters, and treasures are procedurally generated for each playthrough.