Back in the era of bulky CRT monitors and floppy disks, a game developer called Epyx published an adventure game for MS-DOS called Rogue. Thanks to Pixel Games UK, which has been breathing life back into old titles, the original roguelike is going to be available on Steam October 20th.
In this game, which inspired many roguelikes afterward, players take on the role of the Rogue, who descends into the Dungeons of Doom in pursuit of the legendary Amulet of Yendor. What made this game revolutionary for the time was that the Dungeons of Doom were randomly generated every time a player started a new game. With 26 different monsters to encounter, one for every letter of the alphabet, the journey was a perilous and often short one. Now players can look forward to playing this classic title via Steam.
Originally released in 1985, this title launched a category of gaming that remains popular due to the gameplay's endless replayability. With death being the ultimate barrier to success, players are encouraged to keep trying until they have mastered the dungeon and retrieved the Amulet of Yendor. Other games that followed in Rogue's footsteps include Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and The Binding of Isaac.
Rogue is very unlike most roguelike games released today. For one, its graphics were based entirely on ASCII characters, long before emojis were a thing. The player character is a solitary @ sign, and movement is controlled either through the numpad or the HJKL keys (plus YU and BN for diagonals). Most monitors at the time were only capable of black and white, or sometimes black and green, so the game's real artwork existed solely on the user manual and packaging.
There is no word on what the title's price will be. Rogue is available for free through many distributions, but other classic games released by Pixel Games UK tend to range from $1.99 to $5.99. Players will have to wait and see.
Rogue is playable on PC, and will be coming to Steam October 20th, 2020.
Source: PCGamesN