Rogue

Rogue is arguably the most influential game of its kind: the player explores a multi-level dungeon whose layout, monsters, and treasures are regenerated every time, must manage their character's hunger alongside combat, and collects weapons, armor, scrolls, potions, and rings whose effects are often only discovered by trying them. Once the character dies, the game ends with no way back to a saved position, and the next attempt starts on a completely different map. The original was created by programmers Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold on university Unix computers, and once they added saving, they programmed the save file to be deleted the moment it was reloaded, so players couldn't sidestep character death. From this simple but merciless foundation grew an entire genre — roguelikes — which still inspires new titles today and which the game's name literally created.

On the ZX Spectrum, the game arrived in 1988 courtesy of Icon Design and British budget publisher Mastertronic, independent of the earlier American ports for DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST, which were made two to four years earlier by an entirely different team. Visually, this is a simplified, character-graphics version adapted to the Spectrum's modest hardware and controlled from the keyboard; the game's principles — random dungeon generation, turn-based combat, and permanent death with no second chance — remained unchanged. It was a cheap, mass-market release aimed at the European market, available in newsstands and ordinary game shops alike, rather than an expanded or otherwise improved version of the older Epyx original; controls remained purely keyboard-based, and the need to identify unknown items by trial and error was likewise unchanged.

Why play it: For Spectrum owners, this is an affordable way to experience the game that gave birth to the entire roguelike genre, with the understanding that it's a more modest, budget take on a late-1980s classic.