Rogue 1980

Is it still worth playing?

Starting at the top level of an unmapped dungeon full of monsters and treasures, you play an adventurer. It is a dungeon crawling game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, with later contributions by Ken Arnold, developed around 1980 for Unix minicomputers. The goal is to fight down to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, which is Rodney spelled backwards, and climb back to the surface. Monsters get harder to defeat on deeper levels, and until the Amulet is retrieved the player cannot return to earlier levels. In the original text-based versions everything, from the dungeon and the character to the monsters, is drawn with letters and symbols, with capital letters for monsters, so there are twenty-six varieties. Later ports use extended character sets or graphical tiles. Today a dungeon drawn in letters and symbols is a sight worth seeing.