Rogue (Video Game)

Rogue, subtitled Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, is a text-based dungeon-crawling game developed around 1980 for UNIX?-based timesharing systems, in which the player descends through a randomly generated cave complex in search of the Amulet of Yendor.²⁴ Widely regarded as one of the most influential games ever made, it gave its name to the roguelike? genre, the enormous family of games built on its formula of procedurally generated levels and permanent death.²⁴ The game presents its world entirely through ASCII characters — the player is an @, walls are drawn with - and |, and the uppercase letters A through Z represent the various monsters of the dungeon.¹

The concept originated with Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, who met as freshmen at the University of California, Santa Cruz? in 1978.⁴ Wichman had wanted to design board and card games, and after discovering the text adventure Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure), taught himself BASIC and began writing text adventures; Toy, who knew more about programming, became his collaborator, each writing games for the other to play.⁴ The pair recognized that a designed adventure ceased to be fun once its puzzles were solved, since the author already knew the answers — a problem Rogue solved by generating a new dungeon every time it was played, so that even its creators found it entertaining.¹⁷ Kenneth C. R. C. Arnold later contributed significantly to the game, and the title screen of the PC version credits the game as originated by Toy and Arnold, adapted for the IBM PC by Jon Lane, with significant design contributions by Wichman.⁹

Rogue was made possible by two features of the terminals of the era.⁴⁷ University users worked on screen-and-keyboard terminals connected to a shared DEC VAX minicomputer housed, in Wichman’s recollection, underground about a kilometer away, with the whole university sharing time on the single machine.⁴ Control characters allowing the cursor to be moved to arbitrary screen positions — the same capability that enabled screen-based text editors such as vi? — let Rogue redraw the map each turn instead of merely scrolling text down the page.⁴ Earlier terminals had treated the screen as if it were a paper printer, sending text to the bottom so that everything above scrolled up and off the top, gone forever; the cursor-addressing routines that broke this limitation were unique to each terminal manufacturer.⁴ The curses? terminal-handling library abstracted away those differences between terminal brands, allowing the game to address characters anywhere on screen.⁷ This made Rogue a graphical game built entirely from text characters, distinguishing it sharply from the “You can see...” prose descriptions of the text adventures that preceded it.¹⁴

In the game, the player takes the role of a newly trained fighter, having finished years of study at the local fighter’s guild, who is sent by the guildmasters into the Dungeons of Doom to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and return alive.¹ The character sets out equipped with an enchanted sword taken from a dragon’s hoard, elf-crafted armor, and enough food to reach the dungeons, whose entrance is marked by ancient ruins.¹ The bottom line of the screen tracks the character’s dungeon level, gold, hit points, strength, armor class, and experience, while the top line is reserved for messages describing things impossible to represent visually.¹ Play is turn-based and controlled by single-keystroke commands, many of which can be preceded by a repeat count; movement uses the keys h, j, k, and l with their diagonals, and the s command searches adjacent squares for traps and secret doors.¹ The full command list can be consulted at any time with the ? command, and the / command identifies any symbol visible on screen.¹

The dungeon extends downward, its level number starting at one and increasing until the player is killed or quits, with the Amulet located on level 26 — one level for each of the alphabet’s monster letters — and once seen, the Amulet is lost forever if dropped or left behind.¹⁸⁹ Items are drawn from randomized pools of scrolls, potions, rings, and staffs whose effects — from enchanting weapons and magic mapping to teleportation, polymorph, and lightning — must be discovered by trial and error, since their identities are shuffled from game to game.⁹⁷ A scroll of identify can reveal an item’s nature, but is itself unidentified to begin with, so players accumulate mystery items and gather clues until they risk trying them.⁷ Hit points can be regained by resting, and a lower armor class number indicates more effective armor.¹ The game permits saving and quitting a session to resume later, but not reloading a saved game to undo a bad outcome, a restriction central to the roguelike ethos of living or dying with one’s choices.⁷⁴

Many of the game’s monsters were originally named for creatures from Dungeons & Dragons, and were renamed before the commercial PC port to avoid legal problems once Rogue became a commercial product; the Umber Hulk became the Ur-vile, the Rust Monster became the Aquator, the Floating Eye became the Ice Monster, the Giant Ant became the Rattlesnake, the Purple Worm became the Jabberwock, and the Mimic became the Xeroc, among others.⁸ Some monsters were renamed simply to supply a creature for an unused letter of the alphabet.⁸ The gameplay drew obvious inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons and from the earlier computer text adventures of the 1970s.²¹⁰

Distribution and commercial releases

Rogue spread not through marketing but organically through academic institutions and enthusiasts, becoming ubiquitous after it was included in the Berkeley Software Distribution? 4.2 release of UNIX.² Its source code fell into outside hands around 1981, and the resulting Rogue 3.6 code circulated widely and served as the starting point for later ports; the Roguelike Restoration Project worked from 2000 to 2006 to bring it to modern systems, releasing version 3.6.3.² A commercial version was produced by A.I. Design and funded by the publisher Epyx?, appearing on a wide range of systems including the Amiga?, Atari machines, Commodore 64, DOS, and Macintosh.² This 1984 commercial release added color and a smiley-face player character to the original black-and-white display.² Epyx’s commercial port was released on the IBM PC on June 1, 1985.¹⁵

The Epyx version has since been re-released digitally: it is sold on Steam by publisher Pixel Games UK?, where it holds a “Very Positive” rating across 486 user reviews, 95 percent of them positive, and a version titled Epyx Rogue is available for the Nintendo Switch.⁵⁶ On Steam the game is tagged as a traditional roguelike, dungeon crawler, and RPG, and is described as “the game that spawned a thousand ‘Rogue-likes’”.⁵ Later players have found the commercial release unforgiving of newcomers, dropping them into the dungeon without explaining controls, iconography, or objective beyond the search for the Amulet, with essential commands such as searching for stairs left to be rediscovered.³

Legacy

Rogue was not the only early game of its kind — antecedents included Beneath Apple Manor? on the Apple II and a number of role-playing games on the PLATO? system — but it became the most influential foundation of the genre and the one that gave it its name.⁴ It gave rise to an explosion of successors, from Hack and NetHack to Moria and Angband, and the action role-playing game? Diablo built directly on the roguelike genre, carrying its influence into the countless games that followed.²⁴⁷ NetHack in particular extended Rogue’s formula with elaborate interactions between items and monsters — mixing potions, zapping wands, and exploiting creatures such as the petrifying cockatrice — that made it a far more complex descendant.⁷ Later independent hits such as Spelunky, FTL, Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Hades, Slay the Spire, and Vampire Survivors all descend from the formula Rogue established.²⁴

At a 2008 conference in Berlin, developers attempted to standardize the genre in what became known as the “Berlin Interpretation,” defining roguelikes by eight points including randomness, permadeath, resource management, and hack-and-slash gameplay.² Commentators generally agree on at least two core traits: procedural generation, meaning randomly generated dungeons, and permadeath, meaning that once the player dies the game is permanently over and must be restarted from the beginning.²³ A “roguelite,” by contrast, retains some of these elements while allowing progress — such as unlocked weapons or abilities — to carry over between runs.²

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