Rogue

Few games leave a legacy so clear that an entire genre takes their name.

Created for Unix systems in 1980, Rogue sent an adventurer into the Dungeons of Doom in search of the Amulet of Yendor.

Its world was drawn with text characters, but the dungeon changed every time. The player was an @ symbol moving through spaces that had to be rediscovered with each run. An unidentified potion might save you or ruin everything, and death meant losing the character and beginning again.

Rogue did not invent every part of this formula. Its importance was in bringing those ideas together and becoming a game other programmers wanted to recreate and expand.

That influence produced descendants such as Hack and Moria, eventually leading to NetHack and Angband.

Decades later, a genre still carries Rogue's name, and its ideas have spread far beyond dungeon crawlers.