News The Game That Inspired The Term 'Roguelike' Is Now Available On Switch

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Pixel Games UK has rereleased Epyx's Amiga port of Rogue on the Nintendo Switch eShop, meaning you can now rediscover the game that inspired the popular term "Roguelike" on the Nintendo console.

To give a brief bit of background, Rogue is a dungeon-crawling adventure that was developed in the early 1980s by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (with additional contributions from Ken Arnold).

It was originally developed for Unix-based systems and was initially distributed to players as freeware, before becoming a commercialized product in the years that followed when it was ported over to other machines.

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These commercialized ports were primarily the work of a company called AI Design (formed by Toy and an individual named Jon Lane) and were financially supported at the time by the publisher Epyx. The Amiga port of the game was released in 1986 and is often considered one of the better ports of the title.

Here's some PR for the new reissue:

"In the 1980s a computer game emerged that changed the world of fantasy gaming forever. Randomly generated rooms meant that each journey into the infamous Dungeons of Doom was unique. The potent combination of random generation with perma-death proved to be intoxicating, and the game was so influential it spawned an entire genre: "Rogue-likes".
"Now you too can experience the thrill of dungeon crawling for the fabled Amulet of Yendor in this pioneering game. Delve deep into this recreation of the original graphical port of Rogue by strategy game giants Epyx, that replaced the earlier text-based interface with pixel-art for the first time."

According to the description, the game is essentially the same one that you will remember playing back in the day but features new modern conveniences like different display filters, global hall-of-fame leaderboards, a choice of soundtracks, new achievements, and a standard mode where you can save your game.

It costs $7.99/£7.99 and is available on the Nintendo Switch eShop (US/UK) now

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