Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol

One of my favorite video games of all time is the quasi-Roguelike Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol.  It came out in 1995, just as I was starting college, and I while away far too many hours that should have been spent on coursework delving deeply (and more deeply) into that game.  Recently I've been waxing a bit nostalgic about it--not sure why.

It was charming, low-tech, and almost obscenely heavy with features and fun details.

The game was a top-down, grid-based dungeon crawl that consisted of a simple town (no map, just a button-menu) and a fifteen-level dungeon, complete with pit traps, rotating squares, fog, water, chutes, teleporters, secret doors, etc.  You could build a party of up to four characters of a wide variety of races to travel into the dungeon fighting monsters, collecting treasure, and leveling up.

Unlike many other games of this type, the gameworld for all the characters and parties you make is shared--so you can have twenty different characters and pick different combinations of them to make up a party if you like, and all the treasure you sell to the town's store (because no one in the current party can use it, it's too expensive to identify, or you're just strapped for cash) is available to any other character in the game.  Furthermore, when a character or a party dies in the dungeon, their corpse sticks around and can be recovered by other adventurers, who can then carry it back to town for resurrection, or attempt to do it on the spot.

The characters also had about fifteen different "guilds" (or classes) that they could join, entry to each of which was based on the person's ability scores--a single character could gain levels in as many classes as they like, so long as they had the appropriate stats and could afford the exponentially-increasing enrollment fees.  The system promoted only having 3 or 4 guilds at most for a single character, which provided a huge amount of flexibility in character design as most of the different guilds had very specific and only slightly-overlapping abilities and strengths.

All in all, this is a game I would still play if I had it, and one I would heartily recommend to anyone who hasn't heard of or tried it.