Gateway To Apshai is sometimes described as a Roguelike RPG, but it doesn’t have randomly generated dungeons – they’re set, in number order, and there are a lot of them.

According to the ColecoVision manual, each of the eight levels in Gateway To Apshai has 99 dungeons, and each dungeon has approximately 60 rooms, making over 40,000 rooms in total.

The manual advises that you make a map of each dungeon and refer to it by number. That way all the items will be where you mark them on your map the next time you try that dungeon. If Gateway To Asphai was truly ‘Roguelike’ then you wouldn’t be able to do that – the random nature of Roguelike games would never give you the same map twice.

Regardless, Gateway To Apshai is a brilliant game. There’s something very compelling about it, even though it looks very simple. I could easily sit and play it all day…

The Apshai series – by Epyx – is quite famous because it was one of the very first graphical Role-Playing Games ever released for home computers, and has appeared on a variety of different systems. First there was Temple of Apshai on the TRS-80 in 1979; followed by a bunch of enhanced conversions; then Gateway To Asphai for the C64, ColecoVision and Atari 8-bit family; then The Temple of Apshai Trilogy with improved graphics and gameplay. Gateway To Asphai is actually a prequel to Temple of Apshai, but I’m not sure how that works because it’s hardly a story-driven game.

More: Gateway to Apshai on Wikipedia