Rogue The Game (1983)(Artificial Intelligence Design) Game

This may be one of the most revolutionary games in the history of Western RPGs. You play as a rogue, and your goal is to descend down twenty six levels of a dungeon to steal the fabled amulet of Yendor, and escape alive.

You have a dagger, and some armor. Everything else must be found on your own. You can come across purses of gold, which are useless except for a high score, or you can come across magical scrolls and potions that have either beneficial or useless effects. The whole game is a blur, and that's what makes part of the adventure. Memorizing the obscure Mongolian names of the magic scrolls and coming up with strategies to combat the more annoying enemies in the game is part of what makes this game so memorable.

It seems very standard today, but Rogue introduced many gameplay elements that separated it from all of the other RPGs at the time. For instance, Rogue was one of the first roleplaying games to have randomly designed dungeons, something which is still utilized in dungeon crawling games today like Diablo. this type of RPG gaming became so popular, the genre, "Roguelike" was named after this game. Even a number of Epyx's own titles, like the Sword of Fargoal, utilized this concept of randomly designed levels and enemies.

In a way, though, this held the title back. The levels were random, but so were the enemy and item placement. In a freak accident of misfortune, you could never come across food rations in your journey and could starve to death, or you could be stuck with a poor item in the late levels in a dungeon and not have enough fire power to fend off strong enemies.

It's very dated, since all the game's graphics are ASCII characters, and the enemies are letters, but the gameplay, at least in my eyes, makes the game hold up as a masterpiece and a criminally underrated classic.