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A View on Video Games

Video games have existed since 1958 and by 2010 they had already made their way inside our daily routine. From the first co-op game by William Higinbotham, “Two Player tennis”, which implemented simplicity & entertainment, to today’s much bigger titles such as “Uncharted: A Thief’s End”, “God of War” and “The Last of Us”, that have evolved in complexity and above all expression. When talking about expression, though, i would like to think that a video game is similar to a painting in a way that both are a medium through which the artist (The development team) and the viewer (The Player) can bring forth their thoughts and feelings.

A video game is much like a canvas. Empty at first but through the different means of the artist, be it Design (The Frame), Art (The Main Painting) or Programming (The Finer details and shades), it can be brought to life for us to see. The Player (Viewer), on the other hand, can interact with the, now complete, canvas by interpreting it through their own perspective.

This blog, though, is about a rather interesting genre in video game history. Found mainly in indie (low budget or small team) games, this is one of the oldest, yet mostly unknown, sibling of video game genres. Dating back to 1975 in it’s earliest form of “pedit5″ and later in 1980 where it’s turning point came. This genre is typically called, Roguelike.

#roguelike #roguelikes #rogue #roguevideogame #videogames #history #pedit5 #roguelikeblog

The Rogue

Also known as “Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom” ,this game inspired the genre as a whole. A dungeon crawler with strong elements from the table-top game D’n’D (Dungeons & Dragons) as well as two famous text-based games, namely “Star Trek” (1971) and “The Colossal Cave Adventure” (1976).

Star Trek, Mike Mayfield, 1972

The Colossal Cave Adventure, Willie Crowther, 1976

Rogue mainly consists of 26 dungeon levels all of which are procedurally generated from the layout all the way to the items. On the other hand, in terms of movement, the player can be controlled through various ways, namely Arrow Keys, The Numpad by deactivating num-lock and through the letters H, J, K, L for vertical/horizontal movement and Y, U, B, N for diagonal movement

If this wasn’t enough then it must be considered that other letters can assist the player in performing certain actions in-game. For example “W” is for Wear while “w” is for wield.

The game was created using the Curses Programming Library mainly for the graphics interface through the use of ASCII characters (ASCII Drawing).

Lastly the game was ported to some known systems at the time such as Amiga, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, Atari 8-bit and Unix.

#colossalcaveadventure #startrek #videogames #roguelike #roguevideogame #roguelikeblog #rogue #dos #commodore #amiga #macintosh #mac #atari #atarigames #unix