Tales of PC gaming from the DOS era

Over on GameSetWatch, John Harris is writing a bi-weekly column, called @Play, which takes a look at various games termed “Roguelike” — a term I’ve never heard of before, but it’s a genre I’m familiar with. Last week, he took a look at one of my favorite games of the DOS era, which was appropriately called Rogue.

I can’t recall how I first come across Rogue, although it most likely got passed on to me by one of my best friends in high school. I do remember how I was instantly hooked by it’s familiarity to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mythos where monsters were just what they were and potions, spells and armor all had simple intuitive names. I loved the challenge of finding the secret doors and heading deeper into the random dungeons generated by the game, and by never knowing what spell, wand or potion you picked up until you used it. And very often you never know what it did unless you had that “Scroll of Identify,” whose name was garbled in the first place, so you just had to use it by chance to find out what it was. I often named items whose effect I was not sure of really stupid things. One scroll, upon it’s use, says something along the lines of “You feel like you are being watched,” so I just called it “Watch.” And I still do to this day.

In his post for @Play, John Harris takes an indepth look at the gameplay mechanics of Rogue, revealing that it’s simple graphics and interface were extremely deceiving. Sure the monsters were simply chosen to represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, sure all you did was explore and fight, but the game is apparently extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to win. And John details this aspect I had never realized. I just thought I was bad at the game. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was playing the game all wrong. This game was about speed, go through the dungeon as fast as possible because everything will likely kill you because your character is so weak. And food! I never really thought about how having to eat food when you are hungry added another challenge to the game. I didn’t even remember you had to eat food. Instead, I tried to spend my time grinding for levels and equipment, exploring every hallway and every room for every bit of gold and equipment I could find. I didn’t know that the game was stacked against you, and it was exactly how Rogue was unfair, but it was exactly what made me keep going back. Just one more time into the fray, “this time I can go farther,” I would think to myself. Only to die even earlier than before, unless I was lucky.

I would have never imagined what the game was really all about if I hadn’t read this column. Nor would I have searched out to see if I could find a download of this freeware game, which turned out to be readily available at the Dos Games Archive. Now when I play it, I barely make it past the second dungeon. Have I not learned or is this game much harder than I remembered?