Rogue: Adventure

Although the game may be off putting to the user when they first see it, Rogue: Adventure is an incredibly addictive game for something that looks so simple. The idea seems fairly simple, you must travel through a huge dungeon complex to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and return it to the surface. However, any experienced Rogue player can tell you that the game is anything, but simple. The namesake of Rogue (and all Rogue variants) is that gameplay is a far more component to fun than having cutting edge graphics.

Since the game only uses ASCII characters to show the world, the developers can work on making the game far more exciting.
Rogue features randomly generated dungeons, which makes every game that you play different from the last allowing for infinite replayability. Also Rogue has hundreds of different items and scrolls that do different things in each game, because a Gray Potion in one game could be great, but in the next it could be something very dangerous, this is because nearly everything about your Rogue session is randomized.
However, another piece that will be frustrating to players of more modern games is that when you die, your character is dead forever, and as such you must start again from the beginning. Although this is frustrating it is very exciting to think about how far you are getting without ever dying, once you become a fairly skilled player.
Rogue is one of the most lasting games in history, as it was first developed in the early 1980s people are still playing the original game and one of the thousands of popular variants that it has spawned over 25 years later. Some of the most popular variants of Rogue are Hack (and the variants of hack, NetHack, Slash'EM, etc.), Angband, and Linley's Dungeon Crawl (or simply Crawl).
Probably the greatest piece of Rogue is the sense of accomplishment one can receive from just making it farther than the last time you played the game. Since the game is so difficult to beat, and very few people end up doing so, the game holds a special place in the hearts of everyone who have tried to play it. Those who play Rogue are likely to be interested in the genre for weeks, months, and years to come and because of its many variants there is something in the family for everyone.