Rogue

Rogue kicked off a genre in which every game is different: the many-floor dungeon is generated randomly on each run, monsters and treasure appear in different places, and character death is permanent, so the player can't undo a mistake by loading an earlier save. The original was created on university Unix machines by programmers Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold, who, after adding saving, immediately programmed the save file to be deleted upon reload, so players couldn't get around character death by reloading repeatedly. Along the way the player finds weapons, armor, scrolls, potions, and rings whose effects are often only discovered by trying them, adding another layer of risk to every decision. The goal is to descend as deep as possible while keeping an eye on the character's hunger, obtain the Amulet of Yendor, and return with it to the surface alive - something only a fraction of attempts actually manage, since the difficulty rises sharply with dungeon depth and a single mistake can end an hours-long expedition.

The Atari ST port was released in 1986 by A.I. Design and publisher Epyx, alongside the Amiga version, and the two rival platforms of the time received technically very similar treatment - the same color rendering of the dungeon, an identical interface, and the same set of keyboard commands, though the Atari ST had access to a noticeably better graphics chip than the older text-based DOS port. For Atari ST owners, this was essentially the first official chance to play the legendary game on their machine, since until then it had only been available on Unix, DOS, and Macintosh. The game system, level generation, and difficulty were unchanged from these earlier versions - the port was purely technical, focused on making use of the sixteen-bit machine's graphical capabilities.

Why play it: Anyone who owns or emulates an Atari ST and wants a taste of the roguelike genre's roots gets exactly the experience that inspired generations of later games here - without any extra compromises, changes, or simplifications.