I spent years banging my head against the ludicrous complexity and idiosyncratic mechanics of roguelikes like NetHack, ADOM, and Angband before I got around to playing Rogue. I was a little surprised at the simplicity of its design: There's no character creation to speak of. You name your rogue and the game plops you down on the first floor of the dungeon.

The dungeon design is also relatively simplistic. Each floor is composed of a 3x3 grid of rooms. The only thing that changes in the layout is the presence or absence of a room, how the corridors connect the rooms, and the shape of the rooms. On later levels, the hallways may become more complex and difficult to navigate, and some rooms may be dark, limiting the player's field of vision. There is only one stairway down on each level. You cannot go back to previous levels until you retrieve the Amulet of Yendor.

As a result, the structure of Rogue is more linear than something like NetHack, but that also makes it far more accessible: the moment-to-moment decisions a player needs to make are leaner, more focused.

This isn't to say that Rogue doesn't have a lot of compelling depth to it. As with most other roguelikes, it features potions, wands, staves, rings, and scrolls – all of which have random effects and must be identified by experimenting with them. Figuring out different strategies to mitigate the risk involved in identifying these items is one of the chief pleasures of any roguelike, but here it feels a lot more manageable than later versions, especially for new players.

In many ways, calling the games that were created in the image of Rogue “roguelikes” is a bit of a misnomer. The games that sprung from its combination of dungeon crawling, procedural generation, and permadeath expanded on its formula in a range of ways that give them only a passing resemblance to their inspiration.