It's Roguelike ... But Do You Remember Rogue?

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue.

I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove.   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes.

He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient.

He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do.

To put credit where it belongs, I paused at the splash screen for Rogue in those videos, and the credits say "Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, Copyright 1981 by Michael Toy, Ken Arnold, and Glenn Wichman; Copyright 1983 by Mel Sibony, Jon Lane (A.I. Design update for the new IBM PC.)  Windows port by Donnie Russell."  RogueLove talks a bit about the different versions, but there are the original authors.

DOSGames has a version of Rogue you can play in your browser, but it won't save your game.  Like always, DOSGames gives you a download link, and you can use DOSBox to play them on your local machine.

Here is a shot after my first few minutes in the game ...

and yes, I died soon afterwards, backed into a corner by an "H".  Hobgoblin.  R.I.P.

Personally, I did play some Nethack way back when.  The king of the ASCII games must be Dwarf Fortress, and I tried that a few times as well.  I have a pretty low tolerance for the ASCII games.  I just can't get so worked up by being chased by the letter "x", or killed by a comma.

Back to my original quests: it sounds like the base definition of a "roguelike game" has nothing to do with graphics, it is simply a game with procedurally generated levels and permanent death.  So these would be "ASCII text-based roguelike RPGs".

It turns out that "roguelike dungeon" has become a serious rabbit hole of it's own.  With a nickname of RLs or RLDs, I saw a bunch of reviws of 7DRLs on RogueLove's pages ... and some research turned up the Seven Day Roguelike Dungeon challenge, whose homepage is here: https://7drl.com/  The challenge has been running since 2005, and among the archives are dozens of games, so we will never run out of mazes and backwoods to explore.

As a style of popular game that has been around for over 40 years, of course there is a huge following, probably split into hundreds of smaller followings, and fans vs haters of a thousand projects mostly forgotten by the world at large.  This is an interesting chapter in the world of games.

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