Before Rogue
The dungeon was already on the computer before Rogue gave this family its name.
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The 1970s
Rusty Rutherford’s pedit5 and the PLATO game dnd belong to the early computer dungeon experiments of the mid-1970s. They translated parts of tabletop adventuring into explorable spaces on a shared computer system. Their surviving histories are not a clean chain of numbered commercial releases.
Beneath Apple Manor, written by Don Worth for the Apple II in 1978, is particularly relevant. It generated dungeon levels before Rogue’s release. Its original manual survives.
Beneath Apple Manor’s 1978 manual
Worth later said that he and Rogue’s creators had apparently reached related ideas independently. That is a good reason to resist drawing a confident arrow between two games simply because one came first.
Don Worth’s recollection, reproduced by the CRPG Book Project
What Rogue changed
Rogue’s name became attached to a particular tradition of replayable expeditions: generated floors, uncertain resources, positional decisions and a character who could be lost for good. Its Unix circulation gave that tradition a durable meeting place.
The history begins before 1980, but this archive’s main game entries begin with Rogue because the later families repeatedly define themselves in relation to it.