Rogue (computer game)

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Rogue is a dungeon crawling computer game dating from 1980. It inspired a class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes". Some of the popular members of this gaming genre include Hack, NetHack, Larn, Moria, ADOM, Alphaman, UltraRogue and Angband.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Rogue was ported to all common operating systems. It is seen here on Mac OS X. The original game was monochrome. Color was quickly added to the first ports by the original authors for the first generation of home computers.
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Rogue was ported to all common operating systems. It is seen here on Mac OS X. The original game was monochrome. Color was quickly added to the first ports by the original authors for the first generation of home computers.
The inventory of a well-equipped player at the end of a winning game. Wins are very rare indeed and the assortment of high-powered magic items, armor, and weapons show here are typical of a winning player.
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The inventory of a well-equipped player at the end of a winning game. Wins are very rare indeed and the assortment of high-powered magic items, armor, and weapons show here are typical of a winning player.
A certificate, suitable for framing, awarded to those rare souls who survive
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A certificate, suitable for framing, awarded to those rare souls who survive

Rogue was extremely popular in the early to mid-1980s at colleges using UNIX systems. Monsters were represented by capital letters (such as Z for zombie), and as such there were 26 types. Each dungeon level had a 3 room by 3 room grid, or a dead-end hallway where a room would have been expected. Later variations include "mazes" in the place of rooms as well. While the graphics are archaic by today's gaming standards, the strategy necessary to play and succeed is more complex than many RPGs of the 1990s and 2000s. Due to this complexity, the game is still quite playable today. With an assortment of potions, scrolls, wands, weapons, armor, and food, there are many ways to succeed, and many ways to die. Maximizing the character's survival potential is always a challenge. Unlike many games, it is nearly impossible that a player can become so powerful that the gameplay becomes uninteresting, except at advanced stages. It can be played by beginners and long-time players with equal enjoyment.

In Rogue, the player assumes the typical role of an adventurer of early fantasy role-playing games. The game starts at the top level of an unmapped dungeon with a myriad of monsters and treasure. The goal is to fight one's way to the bottom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor on level 26, and return to the top. Until the amulet is retrieved, the player cannot go back to earlier levels. Rare was the adventurer who would again see the light of day. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat. Unlike most adventure games of the time, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within it are randomly generated. Every time it is played, exploration is equally risky.

In the original, all the aspects of the dungeon, including the character and the monsters, were represented by letters and symbols. This type of display made it appropriate for a dumb terminal. Later ports of the game allowed replacing the characters with graphical tiles. The basic movement keys (h, left; j, down; k, up; and l, right) are the same as the cursor control keys in the vi editor (see also HJKL keys). Other game actions also used a single keystroke- q to quaff a potion, w to wield a weapon, e to eat some food, etc.

Rogue worked off the termcap database which was an amazing feature of Unix systems and not commonly remembered. By specifying and collecting terminal information on competing vendors, the game could be played on very different CRTs.

[edit] Authorship

The original authors of Rogue were Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold (of Jini and JavaSpaces fame). Rogue was one of the first widely used applications of the screen control library curses. Originally written on Unix, Rogue was ported by its original authors to many platforms, including the PC, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64. After attempting to sell these versions on their own, they eventually handed marketing over to established video game publisher Epyx.

Numerous freeware clones now exist for modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Linux and BSD-derived variants.

[edit] A.I. players

Because the input and output of the original game was over a terminal interface, it was relatively easy in Unix to re-direct that into another program. One such program, Rog-O-Matic, was developed to play and win the game. It was an interesting study in expert system design (Ken Arnold intentionally added a new feature to each release of Rogue that would break Rog-O-Matic to see what the authors would do to compensate).

One of Rog-O-Matic's authors, Michael Mauldin, would go on to write the Lycos search engine. This has led to the development of other game-playing programs (typically called "borgs"), including some for Rogue variants, especially Angband.

[edit] External links

[edit] Ports, clones, and remakes

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