Rogue
1980 · Dungeon Crawler · Unix / Multiple
Overview
Rogue (1980) is the Unix dungeon crawler of procedurally generated levels, ASCII graphics and permanent death that gave the roguelike genre its name.
Deep Dive
The player, shown as an @ sign, descends through dungeon levels drawn in ASCII characters in search of the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom. Each level is built from a 3×3 grid of rooms and generated afresh each game, and the 26 kinds of monster are each represented by a letter. Items are unidentified until used or identified, play is turn-based, and death is permanent: the save file is erased when it is loaded, so players cannot reload after a mistake.
Developer Story
Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman wrote Rogue as students at UC Santa Cruz, and Ken Arnold later contributed. It spread with BSD Unix from 1980. Toy, Wichman and Jon Lane formed A.I. Design to sell an IBM PC version, and Epyx published versions for the Macintosh, Amiga and Atari ST, but the commercial releases were a flop. Early followers such as Hack (1982) and Moria (1983) grew into the roguelike genre.
Did You Know?
- Yendor is "Rodney" spelled backwards.
- In 1983 a bot called Rog-O-Matic achieved a higher median score than 15 top Carnegie Mellon players.
- Dennis Ritchie reportedly called it "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history".
Sources & further reading
- Rogue (video game) — Wikipedia
