Rogue (video game)

The player character is an adventurer. The game starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures. The goal is to fight a way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor ("Rodney" spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat. Until the Amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels. User interface In the original text-based versions, all aspects of the game, including the dungeon, the player character, and monsters, are represented by letters and symbols within the ASCII character set. Monsters are represented by capital letters (such as Z, for zombie), and accordingly there are twenty-six varieties. This type of display makes it appropriate for a non-graphical terminal. Later ports of Rogue apply extended character sets to the text user interface or replace it 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. Other game actions also use single keystrokes—q to quaff a potion, w to wield a weapon, e to eat some food, etc. In the DOS version, the cursor keys specify movement, and the fast-move keys (H, J, K, and L) are supplanted by use of the scroll lock key. Each dungeon level consists of a grid of three rooms by three rooms (potentially); dead-end hallways, T-forks, or bending passageways sometimes appear where rooms would be expected. Lower levels can include a maze in place of a room. Unlike most adventure games of the time of the original design, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within are randomly generated. ==Development==

At UC Santa Cruz The concept of Rogue originated with Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. Toy grew up in Livermore, California, where his father was a nuclear scientist. Once a year, his father's workplace allowed employees' families to visit, which included allowing them to use the facility's mainframe system to play games. Toy took interest in the text-based Star Trek game (1971), which represented space combat through characters on screen, and required players to make strategic decisions each turn. Toy took to learn programming and recreate this game on other computer systems that he could access, including the Processor Technology Sol-20 and the Atari 400. Toy subsequently enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the late 1970s. Working first on UCSC's PDP-11 and then its VAX-11, Toy began exploring what games were available over ARPANET, the predecessor of the current Internet. One game that intrigued him was Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure) (1976) by William Crowther and Don Woods. Adventure, considered the first text-based adventure game, challenged the player to explore a cave system through descriptions given by the computer and commands issued by the player. Toy was impressed by the game and started writing his own. Around this time, ca. 1980, the Unix operating system included in the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) had started to gain a foothold as the operating system for many of the University of California's campuses. One element of the BSD distribution at this point included the curses programming library by Ken Arnold. curses enabled a programmer to place characters at any point on a terminal, effectively allowing for "graphical" interfaces. Initially, a Rogue game had to be completed in one sitting, but by demand of playtesters, Toy and Wichman added the ability to save the state of the game, so that players could continue a game across sessions. They soon found players were "save scumming", reloading the game from the save file, an approach counter to their design goals. They changed this so that the save file was erased upon reloading the game, thus making a character's death effectively permanent. He had ideas for how to fix it, but at this point Toy and Wichman had opted not to release the code. It was later selected as one of the game titles included in the 1983 distribution of 4.2 BSD, which spread across ARPANET and quickly gained popularity among colleges and facilities with access to this hardware. Among its fans included UNIX's co-developer Ken Thompson working at Bell Labs; Dennis Ritchie had joked at the time that Rogue was "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history". At A.I. Design version of Rogue using graphical tiles created by A.I. Design and Epyx Toy left UCB sometime before 1984 and took a consulting position with Olivetti, an Italian typewriter company that at the time were starting development of their own computer based on the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) operating system. Numerous clones exist for modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Linux, BSD OSs, It is even included in the base distribution of NetBSD and DragonFly BSD. File:4.3 BSD UWisc VAX Emulation LS.png|4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin, . Rogue is shown in "/usr/games". File:4.3 BSD UWisc VAX Emulation Rogue Manual.png|4.3 BSD displaying the man page for Rogue In July 2024, the Amiga version of the game was re-released for the Nintendo Switch. This version includes modern features, such as display filters, leaderboards, a choice of soundtracks, new achievements, and a save function. ==Automated play==

Because the input and output of the original game is over a terminal interface, it is relatively easy in Unix to redirect input and output to another program. One such program, Rog-O-Matic, was developed in 1981 to play and win the game, by four graduate students in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh: Andrew Appel, Leonard Harney, Guy Jacobson and Michael Loren Mauldin. ROG-O-MATIC remains a noted study in expert system design and led to the development of other game-playing programs, typically called "bots". Some of these bots target other roguelikes, in particular Angband. ==Reception==

In March 1984, Jerry Pournelle named the version of Rogue for the IBM PC his "game of the month", describing it as "a real time trap. I found myself thinking 'just one more try' far too often". The game was reviewed in 1986 in Dragon #112 by Hartley and Pattie Lesser in the "Role of Computers" column. In a subsequent column, the reviewers gave the IBM and Mac versions of the game 3½ out of 5 stars. Compute! favorably reviewed Epyx's Amiga version as improving on the text-based original, stating that "the game will give you many hours of gaming fun". In 2009, Rogue was named #6 on the "Ten Greatest PC Games Ever" list by PC World. ==Legacy==

Because of Rogues popularity at colleges in the early 1980s, other users sought to expand or create similar games. However, as neither Toy, Wichman, nor Arnold released the source code of the game, these efforts generally required the programmers to craft the core game elements from scratch to mimic Rogue. Though there were multiple titles that tried this, the two most significant ones were Moria (1983) and Hack (1982). Both games spawned a family of improved versions and clones over the next several years, leading to a wide number of games in a similar flavor. These games, which generally feature turn-based exploration and combat in a high fantasy setting in a procedurally generated dungeon and employing permadeath, are named roguelike games in honor of Rogues impact. Most of the graphical interface conventions used in Rogue were reused within these other roguelikes, such as the use of @ to represent the player-character. ==References==