h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The first game to be seen on personal computers was Zork, (right?)
the text adventure with the famous opening words which i cannot remember.
Then Rogue came along, which was a turn-based ASCII roguelike. You
runned around as an "@", trying to kill monsters (symbolized as "T", "a"
and other symbols) Items could be picked up, every category had a symbol.
(! for potions, ? for scrolls)

Zork spawned other text adventure games which evolved into the graphical
ones (Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).

Rogue set the standard for almost all computer role playing games, and
created a special sub-genre of games: roguelikes.
Roguelike games have no graphics or sound (everything represented by
ASCII symbols and text) but they're huge games, having lots of playability
and replayability. Think of them as books.

Pong was the first game on personal computers I believe. Zork and Rogue were fairly advanced. Zork i believe initially arrived for the PC, and Rogue for the Amiga (would have been the 500 at that time). Before that were the Atari and the BBC, all with their own lines of games. Rogue developed into moria, and finished as moria v5.4. Zork, obviously, continued along the Zork line of games. The first BBC game eludes me, it may have been pong, though I am not sure. The first Atari game, as mentioned, was indeed pong.

sorry, wasn't the Amiga 500

What I've heard about Rogue, is that it was first made for Unix systems
and spread around on universities...

I'm sure rogue had sound. It went 'bleep' and 'bloop'

I think you're confusing with a different game or a variant
of rogue... or maybe you heard the low-hitpoint-warning,
which is a speaker bleep.

Oooooo... After literally minutes of ceaseless surfing, I found the Rogue website. Its at http://www.win.tue.nl/games/roguelike/rogue/
You can get the original version and stuff.

Have you tried any of the variants on Rogue (roguelikes)?
Try:
http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/index.html
Or http://www.adom.de for one of the bigger games...

I still find it funny that the only computer program ever to shut down the computer systems of an american military base facility was the Star Trek game, when a science convention wound up using over 95% of the terminals connected to the base's mainframe (and an amazing amount of printout paper as well) all of which were devoted to late-night gameplay.

I could never figure out that game. It was that type of game where you needed the manual to actually figure out how to work it.

You seem to be forgetting Adventure. I thought it came out before Zork did. You know..."xyzzy".... And those twisty mazes of little passages...err, was that a maze of twisty passages? No, wait, it was a little maze of twisted passages.....whatever..

This game was very similar to Zork, but it was more realistic. Also known as Colossal Caves, it featured a cave with realistic passages, treasures, and dwarfs. The goal was to collect treasures and take them back to the house. ...Fun game...

I seem to recall another game, too, called Rats. It was graphical, and you had to kill rats that were coming out of a factory, and then blow up the factory. It wasn't quite as old, and was around in the late 70s-early 80s. I don't think it ever got on to a PC, but was on mainframes instead...