Rogue: The Adventure Game
| Developer: AI Design | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Epyx | Sound: |
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| Year: 1986 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Role-playing game | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
6/10 | |
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a wave of indie games popping up on Steam, proudly labelling themselves as Rogue-likes. Never before, it seems, have I seen so many self-proclaimed heirs to a game from 1980 as I did in 2015. Should we celebrate this interest in vintage, or despair at the lack of boldness and innovation in the gaming industry? Either way, I realised, with mounting horror, that this venerable cornerstone of gaming history, Rogue, wasn’t even mentioned on Dazeland. What a blunder!
Luckily, it just so happens that it was ported to the Amiga. And thus, I found my excuse to talk about it.
Rogue was created by American students on a UNIX operating system back in 1980. It’s one of the first games to offer graphical representation (unlike interactive fiction). This “graphics” system consisted of printed characters (ASCII), representing the player (a charming “@”) and their immediate surroundings: walls defining rooms and corridors, monsters, and of course, a plethora of items and treasures…
The goal is simple: locate the Amulet of Yendor, lost deep within a sprawling dungeon, and return to the surface. Rogue’s distinguishing features at the time included:
- A single character with a single life. If the player dies, they lose absolutely everything and must start over from scratch. Saving is possible, but the save file is deleted upon reloading.
- Procedurally (i.e., randomly) generated dungeons, offering a fresh adventure every time, with a different layout of rooms, monsters, and items to collect.
- Turn-based gameplay: take your time—time itself only advances with the steps you take, and your food consumption is linked to your movements.
- Progression through stats (health points, armour points) as you defeat monsters and acquire items. Many artefacts come with unknown or negative effects, encouraging the player to take risks—and sometimes pay the price!
Ironically, while the game’s name has endured through history, to the point of branding hundreds of reheated knockoffs even in 2015, the original title, though a campus sensation in the US, never achieved the commercial success its creators had hoped for. It was quickly overtaken by competitors, and by the time it arrived on the Amiga in 1986, there were already plenty of more visually advanced RPGs available.
Incidentally, the Amiga version stays quite faithful to the original. It does, however, introduce a basic yet welcome mouse-driven interface, sparing players the need to type commands (right-click on the top banner to access drop-down menus). The Atari ST version replaces ASCII visuals with slightly more detailed illustrations (sprites) but at the cost of a restricted field of view.
On an emulator, if you encounter the fourth screen, I recommend finding another version of the game. A rather creative anti-piracy measure spawns an unbeatable monster to punish you!
What sustains the concept’s success—perhaps even more so in this era of overabundance and relentless zapping—is, in my opinion, not just the brutal, unpredictable gameplay but also the unique, relatively short play sessions (20 minutes to two hours). And of course, its simplicity to program: you can create a Rogue-like quickly and cheaply, extend its lifespan indefinitely by adding items and monsters (preferably via paid DLCs). All of this would be perfectly tolerable if it weren’t for the fact that seemingly every indie developer is jumping on the bandwagon at the same time, contributing to the homogenisation of an already saturated market of low-budget remakes, now sold before they’re even finished, with garish, infantilising marketing (and preferably a pixelated aesthetic).
Since I’ll probably link to this page every time I discuss Rogue-likes or Rogue-lites, it’s worth defining the terms—or at least how I understand them:
- Rogue-Like (literally, “like Rogue”) refers, in its strictest definition, to the genre of game Rogue belongs to (13 criteria are commonly accepted).
By extension, any game that recalls Rogue in some aspects can be considered a Rogue-Like, regardless of its genre. Common elements include procedurally generated levels, hero progression based on a random selection of items or abilities, and of course, permadeath, forcing the player to start over and dive into quick successive runs. - Rogue-Lite (lite meaning “light”) is a term that first appeared, I believe, in the press kit for Rogue Legacy (2013). It’s essentially a way of standing out by describing exactly the same thing (“slightly like Rogue”).
Over time, the term has come to imply that players don’t restart entirely from scratch. Rogue-Lites soften the blow of defeat by allowing players to gradually unlock new features, skills, or items, or to retain some sort of resource from their session, which can then be used to make the next run ever so slightly easier. Essentially, a punishing game that rewards persistence, heightening the addictive appeal.
Some examples of “orthodox” Rogue-likes: Angband (1980), Moria (1983), Hack (1984), Ancient Domains of Mystery, also known as ADOM (released in 1994 and re-released on Steam in 2015).
As for the Amiga, I’m not aware of any games that offer procedurally generated dungeons. The closest would be Temple Of Apshai (1986). I’d love to uncover other amateur, shareware, or public domain Amiga variants with graphical interfaces (sprites instead of ASCII characters). If you know of any, please get in touch.
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