BRIEF: AtariROGUE (1987)

 

At least they tried a bit with the font and background.

        

AtariROGUE

United States

Independently developed and published as type-in code for the Atari 800 in the May 1987 Antic magazine

       

"As far as Antic knows," Robert Jung's article begins, "this is the first 8-bit Atari version of Rogue--one of the famed early graphic adventure games on mainframe computers." There are a couple of interesting things about that sentence. First, both the article and a video I watched make it sound as if producing a version of Rogue for the Atari 800 was a difficult feat. And yet not only did Mastertronic do that very thing in 1988, an independent game called Talisman (1988; link to my review) did the same thing in the same year.

   

Antic may have been more excited about this game than the project merited.

    

Still, replicating Rogue in BASIC would still be an accomplishment worth talking about---except that AtariROGUE is confused about its own sub-genre. It has very little in common with Rogue, and a lot in common with the DND line, as created on the PLATO system and passed down to others (including the microcomputer) via Daniel Lawrence. At best, it's a fusion of the two games.

    

Character creation consists only of a name. Every character starts with a hand axe, leather armor, 12 hit points, and 2 units of food. The player begins to explore a small, one-screen dungeon level that admittedly looks a bit roguelikeish. The DND line never had much of a graphical distinction between rooms and corridors; nor did it have a map that slowly revealed itself as you explored. AtariROGUE has both of those.

    

One of the only mechanisms of "character development" in the game.

    

After that, the similarity mostly ends. The most important distinction between Rogue and this game (but not DND) is that monsters and treasures have no permanence. The game rolls for a random encounter every time you change positions. There's no point in exploring an entire level; just find the stairs down and shuffle back and forth between two squares and you'll get a ceaseless parade of gold, items, spells, potions, and monsters.

   

The nature of these encounters is again much more like DND than Rogue. In combat, you're given options to attack, cast, or flee. You and your enemy take turns until one of you is dead. If you flee, the enemy disappears permanently. If you find a weapon or armor, the game reminds you what you already have and asks if you want to pick up the new item; if you do, it automatically replaces the old. There are only three spells--"Fireball," "Teleport," and "Heal"--and you collect them on scrolls. There are no rings, wands, staves, amulets, missile weapons, or other types of armor other than the main suit; the game thus has nothing of Rogue's combat tactics or inventory mechanics. Potions exist, but you have to drink them immediately when you find them. The game also follows DND's tradition of giving you better items as you go lower in the dungeon rather than offering an equal chance of any item found anywhere as in Rogue.

   

The game admittedly has a food system inherited from Rogue and also doesn't let you go back up stairways until you've found the object of your quest--the Jewel of Taldra. At least that doesn't spell anything backwards.

     

Combat with a goblin.

  

The author clearly also has experience with classic adventure titles. One of the enemies is a grue, and when you kill enemies, they frequently "die in a cloud of greasy black smoke," a death message that goes back to Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1976).

   

But whether the game's source is Rogue or DND, the biggest simplification from both games is a lack of character development. The author removed combat-based experience and leveling and replaced it with an automatic bump of 3 maximum hit points every time you go downstairs (you also get fully healed when you go downstairs). Enemies get harder in lock-step, though. The author also removed permadeath, instead offering a save option in every square.  

       

Checking my inventory and status.

     

As my Patreon subscribers know I've been tinkering with a new definition for what constitutes an RPG. One of the reasons for this re-working is to avoid this very thing: "character development" that occurs at fixed, scripted intervals with no player agency. In this case, it wouldn't even meet my old definition, since I've never regarded improvements in maximum health alone as "character development."

   

Nonetheless, since each dungeon level in AtariROGUE takes only about five minutes, I was prepared to spend a couple of hours descending to Level 20 and finding the Jewel of Taldra. Alas, I got this trying to leave Level 11:

    

     

And thus my journey ends and this remains a BRIEF. If it hasn't already become clear, I've been using a couple of weeks to pick some low-hanging fruit on my backlog as I try to decide how I'm going to approach my master list from now on. This may continue for a while longer.