Dungeon

Overview

Dungeon is a high-fantasy turn-based top-down role-playing game developed by Brian Sawyer and released for the Commodore PET on December 1979 as part of the 15th issue of the CURSOR cassette magazine.

In Dungeon, players must navigate a mysterious dungeon labyrinth filled with a variety of bloodthirsty creatures (such as spiders, dragons, and grues) and collect all the gold pieces in order to escape.

It is notable for being one of the few "pre-Roguelike" games, where it has most of the elements of a traditional roguelike (such as random dungeon generation, turn-based gameplay, and perma-death) despite it being released before the genre's progenitor, Rogue.

Some notable game mechanics of this game includes its simplistic experience and stat systems (where players gain additional hit points, which are also used as the player's attack strength, based on experience points from defeating enemies), a bartering system (where if players are in a tough combat situation, they can give half their gold to have them leave), and the ability to walk through walls (which are used to access rooms that are normally inaccessible due to faulty dungeon generation).