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Last week Torchlight was released. Future Shop Techblogger Matthew Kumar wrote a great overview of the game.

But there was a time, way back in the last century, when similar computer games were played without the benefit of 3D graphic cards, Dolby Surround Sound, or mice and gamepad macro programming applications.

Strap yourself into the way-back machine 'cause we're going to look at the progenitors of Torchlight, Diablo, and any other hack 'n slash dungeon crawl, and we're going to use the iPhone / iPod Touch to do it.

There's something to be said for games that don't have the latest graphics or cutting edge audio or uber intellegent AI. Games lacking in those departments generally force the player to use their, *gasp*, imagination.

Earlier this week I discovered two such games from the early days of computing, happily running on the iPhone and iPod Touch platform. It looks like the device really is a gaming machine.

So if you remember back to the days of ASCII CRTs and 80 column screens, then you likely remember Nethack and Rogue; two games of limited graphics, clunky user interfaces, that were huge, HUGE imagination catalysts. Oh, yeah, they're all about the dungeon crawling too. Think Dungeons & Dragons, single player, on a computer -- back in the '70s and '80s when computer power was a hugely scarce commodity. This is what the cool kids comp-sci geeks played...and now you can experience it on your very own iPhone!

A bit about each classic game, the original not the iPhone version,  excerpted from Wikipedia, of course:

Rogue

In Rogue, the player assumes the typical role of an adventurer of early fantasyrole-playing games. The game starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures. The goal is to fight one's way to the bottom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (Rodney spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface.^[8] Until the Amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat.

The game's setting was influenced by the text game Colossal Cave Adventure as well as Dungeons & Dragons, from which most of the monsters were, initially, closely modeled.

Nethack

NetHack is a single-player roguelike video game originally released in 1987. It is a descendant of an earlier game called Hack (1985), which is a descendant of Rogue1980).^[2] Salon describes it as "one of the finest gaming experiences the computing world has to offer."^[2] (

The "net" element references that its development has been coordinated through the Internet.^[3] The "hack" element refers to a genre of role-playing games known as hack and slash for their focus on combat. The player takes the part of a dungeon-delving character in search of the Amulet of Yendor.^[4]

The Modern Era
Ok, enough history, if you need more, follow the links provided above. For the iPhone and iPod Touch, both games fairly accurately replicate the experience of the originals, except that the screen is much smaller, and obviously the controls and interface were tweaked for the touch screen.

iNetHack is a port of the classic 1987 dungeon crawler and Roguelike Nethack. For the pureists, the codebase is from Nethack 3.4.3.

The object of the game is to adventure through the dungeon, defeating monsters, gathering loot, avoiding traps, and eventually recover the fabled mythical Amulet of Yendor for your master who will reward you with the gift of immortality.

Rogue gained popularity on university and college campuses in the early '80s. As with Nethack, the goal is to explore the Dungeon of Doom and retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. The gameplay though, is a bit different, including tile graphics and a more sophisticated control / interface system.

Both games are excellent examples of classic computer Dungeons & Dragons style adventure gaming. And they're both free -- so fire up your iDevice, download the games, and see what your parents played when they were playing the only computer games around.