Temple of the Roguelike: How did I miss THIS?

Back in the early 80s, I was too totally proud of my roguelike, real-time dungeon crawl game imaginatively named TG (The Game, clever, huh?), which had some all-time design wins like being real time, fast-paced, and required you to type all your actions out in Zork-like sentences. When a dragon is tracking you down, typing “TAKE SWORD FROM STONE” without any spelling errors probably isn’t as fun as I thought it was back then.

Anyway, apparently (news to me!) Temple of the Roguelike has just run a contest all about making ASCII-based, dungeon-crawl games in the vein of Rogue and Nethack in just seven days!

I’d totally have given this a shot. I haven’t written a roguelike in awhile; back in the 80s, though, you couldn’t walk two feet without tripping over a dozen. My favorite was Larn, largely because, unlike Nethack, it was usually possible to win. Even though I contributed to Nethack, I never won it legitimately.