Oddly enough, for all the endless Roguelikes and related clones I’ve played over the years, I’ve never actually played Rogue for the PC. Well I finally got a boxed copy of the Epyx release from 1985 so that's about to change!
This was fun and nostalgic to watch. Love that this is still interesting to anyone. I have answer to questions, if you care :) "Save" quits because one of the things which makes a "roguelike" is that you cannot try something, die, restore from a save, and try something else. You are intended to explore the world and possibly die. Decisions have consequences. You can save to be able to walk away, but you can only continue from where you left off. You certainly are not intended to replay the same map. I would mock your unwillingness to actually read the help screen, only that is SO me. The "throw arrows while wielding a bow" ... yeah sorry about that. I was young and stupid. Making an "Any Key" was an attempt at humor. It was very little different than the original PDP-11 version of Rogue. A few monster names changed and maybe take advantage of color and extra characters in the CGA character set, but the game is exactly the same.
Yes there are still people that are interested in Rogue and Roguelikes thankfully. Thank you sir for your work (and of course everyone else involved) ! It spawned a whole genre of games and if people are still having fun with it then that means you did something right. :)
@@LGRBlerbs Oh, one thing you missed was that the potion that made you feel sick lowered your strength from 17 to 15. That's probably why you had a much harder time killing things after that.
I love the over-the-shoulder perspective, including thumbing through the book, it's exactly like being at a friend's house back in the day, trying to figure out some weird new game on the family PC. At least this time I'm not sitting on a hard wooden kitchen chair.
I miss buttons in games like the "Supervisor Key." When I was younger playing games in my basement, I wondered why so many games had a button for a fake work screen. My dad had to explain it to me. I thought it was hilarious that adults were capable of slacking off like kids do. Now as an adult, I get it all too well.
Saving quits because there is no save scumming in rogue-likes. Each character gets one single timeline with no backsies, and saving is basically just pausing the session to be resumed later. EDIT: Typically a save file is deleted when you load it. And on Unix, they're stored in a special system folder that the game can access but players can't. Obviously that's not something that could be done in the MS-DOS port.
But the question is: did you make all the way back out of the dungeon? You only finish the game after doing that. Getting the amulet is the easy part xDDD
@@FeelingShred yes! In one of those outrageous cosmic coincidences, I'd also found enough food to dash out of there. Played the game on and off for years, never got close to the amulet let alone made it out ever again.
I legitimately had no idea there was an amulet. I just had the game on a big ol' floppy disk and printed out the command list and just figured out as much as i could through trial and error. never got all that far, but it's still a fond childhood gaming memory for me.
I got a map on nethack that I got the amulet in like two levels down, my random character seemed to be OP, in and out in a few minutes. Never won again too! Hahaha
I absolutely miss buying boxed games and software. Going to CompUSA, BestBuy and local game shops was something I did in my free time as a young adult.
Sadly I never had money in the box game days, so I pirated games. when I got money to buy games, they had moved to those DVD case style releases. But I got to buy some older games from the bargain bins of those days .
My favorite memory is still opening up the box on Microprose's B-17 simulator and finding no less than two massive manuals alongside a keyboard reference. One of the manuals were more like a history book on bomber operations over Europe, including things like navigation aides that were developed to ensure the formations got to the target. These days at best you get DVD case wit ha single disc inside that is practically useless, and a registration code for Steam and such.
I miss buying games on disks / discs, and having something that will install right now, not having to wait four hours for it to download. And then being able to install it again in 20 years, without having to worry about being able to activate it, log in, download the rest of the game, etc.
The oblique desktop lighting while the blinds are parted just enough to see night outside generates maximum nostalgia. This was the way computer games were played in Abraham Lincoln times. For me it was Tetris and some kind of miniature golf on an Amiga 500 at 2 AM when the parents were asleep.
Dude... you should look into an Epyx retrospective. This is the company that designed the Lynx, some popular joysticks, all kinds of games across a bunch of platforms. They really kicked ass in the 80’s and are semi forgotten today.
I had many Epyx games on the Amiga, that generally sucked. and I hated their joystick. Rogue is great but it seemed to me that Epyx was like LJN on computers.
Every once in a while, I'm reminded by a video in my RU-vid subs of the fact I've been playing Rogue, Hack and Nethack on a regular basis for THIRTY YEARS, whether on my 286, my current PC or my phone. After which I remember I've only beaten Nethack twice in all that time. Beating this game requires a pool of knowledge equivalent to taking a final degree exam.
@wargent99 DOS was also all single-tasking. With Windows you gained a 'minimize' function so the boss key was not needed the same way. Of course on UNIX you could switch between programs using the 'screen' command.
@@eDoc2020 I used screen quite a bit doing IRC and other tasks on work UNIX systems in the 90s. Very useful when you only have a Single Session terminal. I still use it today on my Linux systems.
If this was the true original 1980 Unix-based Rogue (correct me if there is even a more original one) it would be neither a Rogue-lite nor a Rogue-like. It would be just Rogue. Technically this is still a -like :p
So good to see this being played by someone who can appreciate it, I consistently show it to my friends and nobody gets it, it's incredibly deep and such a fun time. Glad you're enjoying it!
The first time I played Rogue was in 1982 when I was 12. Some older friends took me to their university computer lab and let me play on the school's mainframe.
Very cool! I've got the Atari ST version of Rogue by Epyx. I recently made a video about a Commodore PET game called Dungeon, which was released in 1979 and is essentially a pre-Rogue-like. And before that an Apple II game called Beneath Apple Manor was released in 1978, and that's probably the first for-real Rogue-like. There were also a couple of games for the PLATO system earlier in the '70s which were awesome, but lacked the procedural generation aspect.
Finally! I usually play this game, it's actually the only game I've ever streamed, nobody was watching though, just me and a friend that had some spare time. It's a very fun game when you get the hang of it, the learning curve is the problem and it's almost imposible to finish, but hey! that's one of the main appeal "the mythical amulet of Yendor"... It's really interesting that it's hard to get information about this game online, there are a few old sites, but the nae "rogue" has been used so much that you can get lost in the google results for the search.
I must be the only crazy person out there searching things like "Rogue" and "ZZT" on Twitch search bar. There's a ZZT channel out there regularly streaming =D Now we only need one for Angband too Nerds unite
Nethack is like the hyperexpanded radiation infused, too complicated to be commercial product, mutated yet still recognizable. Watching a live nethack speedrun where the player beats it in two hours is mind bending
Dave F here’s the video I was talking about. The ending is some desperate last stand of the Alamo, barricaded in with a final altar of opposite alignment, too many enemies outside, desperately waving a wand of wishing to change his alignment. Game is crazy ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rIB0y_kwFuY.html
When I was 15 or so, I ordered one of those disks out of a magazine that promised 3000 games. It was almost all shovelware, but there was an ASCII version of rogue on the disk. I sunk many many hours into that game. Good times.
Highly Surprised you'd not played this one. I went through a "Rogue" phase a few years back and I gained a deep appreciation for the permadeaths and endless replayability
Hell the game is 40 years old, I’d never even knew about it till recently, had to look it up because I started seeing the term “rogue-like” pop up now & again, had to look it up, lol.
Reminds me game called NetHack. Still under development, first release in 1987. No wonder it looks similar as NetHack is a software fork of the 1982 game Hack, itself inspired by the 1980 game Rogue.
Colby Boucher I hope they have tuned down the hunger rate; for me the only way yo stay alive for prolonged time, is to get amulet of slow digestion.. Net-Hack is brutal in so many ways..
This was exactly how I dealt with trying to play the game back in 1987! Of course, I had a printed manual (that became dog-eared) which I read 20 times over a 2-day period to get it all in my brain! This is what you did with manuals back in the day!
Speaking of boss mode, I remember a flash game - bubble wrap popping simulator I believe? - where if you press the boss key, your computer blasts "HEY, I'M NOT WORKING" out of speakers.
While I've never played Rogue I played the hell out of Moria growing up, and kept going back to it for years, finally actually defeating the balrog in college, which is still one of my proudest gaming accomplishments.
growing up in this time frame, these games were awesome. that was all we had. so we always felt like they were more then they seem today. lots of imagination used :)
I often come back and rewatch Blerbs when I need to reset my brain. I've had Covid for nearly 2 weeks now and aside from the physical aspects, I think I've reached mental exhaustion and my brain went defcon 1 today. I'm a bit ashamed that it's taken me until nearly the end of the day to come here, but I am feeling a bit better now.
Played this as a kid..on my mothers office PC in the 90's and tracked it down just off the look alone without knowing the name of the game....it only took 20 years...thanks for covering this LGR. I got the flashbacks to vampire chasing me around a room and never beating him even though I had holy water....HAHAHAH
This is actually the very first game I remember playing back in 1989... I didn't have access to the manual, so I had to learn the commands via the game, but I still remember the majority of them! Knowing the controls for Rogue helps me out with playing many other roguelikes I've found! In any case, this game is something that's close to my heart!
Played this endless hours, back in college. Never did manage to beat the game. A couple of my favorite memories: A potion that does nothing is a "potion of thirst quenching". And a ring that does nothing is a "ring of adornment". I still occasionally refer to a real-life water bottle as a "potion of thirst quenching". "Plaid potion" was always worth a chuckle as well. I still remember trying out a wand on some low-level critter, and next thing I knew I was staring at my tombstone. "Killed by a dragon". 😛
I remember you could throw potions at a monster and essentially force it to consume it. That’s why I kept the poisonous potions. Throw one at a monster and make it sick, or lose strength or whatever 😂… the imagination in this decades-old game is off the charts!
I'm surprised you didn't know, save games are a common feature of Roguelikes; however, the intent is to let you stop a session and pick it back up later, rather than the usual intention of letting you save, try something, and load if it fails. That's why it quits, and why the save is deleted when you load it.
Personally I’m waiting for the term “Hunt the Wumpus-like” to catch on for survival horror games. Like me, there’s an entire generation who grew up fearing the family’s TI-99 and still get uneasy whenever In the Hall of the Mountain King plays.
Holy shit I've wondered for years now what this game was. I only had vague memories of it since it was the very first video game I have ever played. Mever knew the name of it. Checked out this video since I see the category "rogue like" on everything and was curious. Friggin awesome man
This was fun to watch you play for the first time. Rogue was one of the first PC games I ever owned and though it was a bit intimating at first, being more complex than most of the arcade style games I owned, I was inevitably drawn back to it by the seeming endless potential and depth it contained. It wouldn't be until many years later that I could claim any sort of mastery over it, which happened when I became obsessed with Brogue and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Games like Rogue demonstrate how unimportant fancy visuals are in entertainment and what a large role game mechanics and the player's imagination play. It's aged quite well, in my opinion.
This game legit took me twenty-five years to beat. And this was after a run nine years prior that took me down to level 33 before I remembered-as I was killed by a Gryphon-that once you got the amulet (on level 26), you could *ascend* stairs. Doh.
There are so many versions of this game out there. The version I played as a kid had slimes instead of snakes for the letter S. They would divide every time you struck them and were basically guaranteed death if you didnt kill them quickly.
I am surprised by your surprise(!) over the save feature, as it felt like every text-based Rogue followup had a save feature that quit you to the DOS prompt. Then again, maybe it just saved automatically when you quit.
@@mistamethylbrot2187 Whatever dude, if you get your kicks by being pedantic. It's an unstressed syllable and pronounced as a schwa. Based on the rules of English orthography, any single vowel you write there would also be pronounced as a schwa. Since kestrel is the only word in English with that pronunciation it is then completely unambiguous which word is meant by the game developers, especially since "kestral" is a well-known misspelling. The only way to misunderstand what it is is to either not be familiar with the word kestrel, in which case searching for "kestral" in google will still find the correct result, or by being purposefully obtuse (To be "funny"? I can't tell). I have no patience for either so go peddle your bullshit to someone who thinks it is cute.
There was something about Epyx games that shone out in front of other devs and publishers back in the day. If you bought an Epyx game you were in for a treat most of the time. They should have survived the 80s-90s rat race. Impossible Mission is one of my absolute favorites of the C64.
I definitely assumed Epyx was a huge company based on how many of my favorite Atari 800XL/XE games were from Epyx. Though that is also probably part of why they failed, because they were specialists in the dying non-IBM world.
ahhhhh, it's all coming back to me! don't forget about "running". you can use SHIFT on the vim style movement keys h,j,k,l and it will have your character go until it hits something. and in tunnels, no matter how many twists and turns it has, it will just have you follow its windings.
So much nostalgia. I probably sounded like this the first time I played a rogue-like (which was Moria, if my memory is still working).Thank you for stoking memories of how easily we were amused back in the day. So simple, yet so fun.
That is because Rogue was originally played on a mainframe, and there you hadn't any arrow keys. That's also the reason why vim uses hjkl for cursor movement as well.
It was originally developed for the PDP-11 and VAX-11 before being ported to just about everything. Like VI, it was designed to be run on terminals that didn't necessarily have dedicated cursor keys.
Wow, this game makes so much more sense when you know more than a handful of words in English. And the game comes with instructions? Who knew. For some reason I still remember it as being pretty fun, even though I kept getting killed by those pesky "hob-gloo-ins".
Back in the day when I had games on floppies I would copy the contents to my hard drive and run it. Dude love your reviews they bring back such good memories you rock!
This video made my day. Takes me back to a few years ago when I did a sort of classic rogue-like "deep dive." Even if you just plan on reviewing this PC version, I would recommend checking out some of different versions and early variants. I got a real feel for the history of the genre and, as an added bonus, felt like a digital archaeologist.
I grew up playing ADOM in the 90s but never actually played Rogue. Never realized how similar they are. Was fun to watch you dig into this. Would LOVE to see you play ADOM.
Ahhhh this is really neat! I'm much more familiar with the younger cousin of this game...Nethack. Very similiar indeed. It's so interesting to so an older variant on a proper CRT!
I think the a sign of a good game is being able to play it roughly 36 years later and still have fun with it. And being so turn-based and silent, it's playable on anything running DOS or pretending to. My first experience with _THE_ Rogue was within the last decade, but I'd been playing _roguelikes_ for much longer, starting with a game called "Powder" on my Nintendo DS flashcart. Played that game forever, it had special graphic modes for "ascii" and my immediate thought was "who would play a game that looks like this?" Cut to me 13 years later playing Dwarf Fortress for 9 hours straight.
This rogue seems like a commercialization of the original text only version. I don’t recall it having a graphical intro screen or colors. But this is pretty close to original, the keyboard commands are definitely accurate to the original that I remember. Edit: You should also try the original DOS Empire (the text based version) Edit 2: I had a spiral bound notebook that I used for all my games. I remember writing down every single one of those keyboard commands as a reference. Edit 3: you have to use an identify scroll to figure out what the other scrolls and potions do. You can’t do that early in game, so the only way to find out what a scroll does is to use it, hope it doesn’t kill you, and then you’ll know what it is next time you find the same one. Edit 4: there’s also a text based football game called Field General that you should try. If you thought the keyboard commands for Rogue were tough to learn...,, 😜
I'm surprised how much is still the same in NetHack, from Quaff, Zap, and eating Slime Moulds, even the Amulet of Yendor. It does make sense since it's a fork of Hack, itself inspired by Rogue. I don't think I've come across Kestrels in NetHack though.
This is why some people take exception to games like Dead Cells being called a roguelike. To them, and I get it, a roguelike is literally a game like rogue, not just a game that has permadeath and randomized levels. That is why they prefer roguelite for those games, not to be elitist but for clarity. I love them all and can tell which is which pretty easily, I also don't really care about genre names.
I have been playing this game for 35 years. It is still one of my favorite games. In 35 years I have never beaten the game without cheating. It is the hardest game to I have ever played.
The most faithful Rogue-like game that I can think of would be Angband, and later z-Angband which added a graphics overlay so that you didn't have to play with the ASCII graphics on-screen and they eventually made a version of Angband with different dungeons and an overworld, among other things. I remember dumping soooooo many hours into that. There was also a Win3.1 game called Castle of the Winds which was very, very similar to this but a bit more advanced, which I always thought was rather fun.
What memories😂 I used to play this game at work ages ago! Great enemy characters too. I remember the Xerox monster, which would emulate any of the other monsters. And the Venus Flytrap, which would grab and hold you while other monsters beat on you. One of the greatest fears was to enter a room where literally every space was filled with monsters and they’ll chase you through the tunnels until they get you 😂😂
You said it boy! When you said about people making clones of it. It's very inspiring. I love a game to have lots of depths, even if some players may never use them. It gives it more meat on the bones, and the players that do go deeper will get more enjoyment from it :D
This is probably my favourite game of all time. Watching you play, while entertaining, is also frustrating. I find myself screaming at the screen "don't eat the food yet!"
This is a later version, but the earliest one for DOS actually still works on Windows 10 as far as I know. It just runs in a command prompt, but it works perfectly. Haven't tried it in a while so it might have actually been XP or Win7 when I did, but nevertheless, I was surprised it worked at all - without DOSBox.
@@_Thrackerzod yeah, I kind of figured it would need 32-bit Windows. Now I think about it, it was on XP. Still, DOSBox would make the experience pretty much identical.
@@Psyklax There's a new Windows version out there but I feel like the DOS through DOSbox looks better, bigger characters on screen. Also, it seemed to me that the Win version also used a whole lot of CPU when idle. I don't remember what it was, but there was a reason why I stuck with playing it on Dosbox.
Far more people nowadays have played games inspired by the original Rogue than have played Rogue itself. The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series for example probably has had more people play it (including me) than played the original Rogue.
And even fewer have played any of the original Fushigi no Dungeon games , which itself was directly inspired by Rogue, and eventually spun off Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.
Rogue was far surpassed in the late 80s and early 90s by its successors. It's fun, but it doesn't compare well to Nethack, Angband, ADOM and even more recent games like Brogue.
I've always wanted to play Rogue but never got around to it, the same with the Temple of Apshai series which I used to admire from afar in the computer section of K-Mart when I was a kid.
Rogue Tip: Drink potions when you first find them, but only when you have full hit points. Try not to read any scrolls until after you find a mighty sword and better armor and only read when you're wielding that sword and wearing your finest armor.
