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, UltraRogue and Angband.
Overview
Rogue was extremely popular in the early to mid-1980s in 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 deadend hallway where a room should have been. 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, and the game is still quite playable. With an assortment of potions, scrolls, wands, weapons, armor, and food, there are many ways to succeed and many ways to die. Maximizing one's character's survival potential is always a challenge. Also unlike many games, it is nearly impossible, except at advanced stages, that a player can become so powerful that the gameplay becomes uninteresting. 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 fantasy games such as Dungeons & Dragons. 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. Levels have progressively harder monsters. Unlike most adventure games when it was first created, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within it are randomly generated, so 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, making 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.
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 and Atari ST. 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.
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. This has led to the development of other game-playing programs (typically called "borgs"), including some for Rogue variants especially Angband.(Ken Arnold purposefully added a new feature to each release of rogue that would break rog-o-matic to see what the authors would do to compensate.)
External links
- A [history of the game]
- Another [brief history of the game] by Glenn Wichman
- An [Interview] with Glenn Wichman
- [The Rogue Home Page] with versions of Rogue for several operating systems
- [MobyGames entry for Rogue]
- [The Underdogs entry for Rogue]
- [ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System]
- [The Rogue Archive] - The Rogue Archive at roguelikedevelopment.org aims at delivering the definitive collection of Rogue versions and source code
- [The Dungeons of Doom] - Contains a lot of information about the game
Ports, clones, and remakes
- [Hexatron's Java Rogue] - an online Java version of Rogue
- [zRogue] - a port of Rogue to Infocom's Z-Machine virtual machine specification (playable on the web)
- [Mac OS X version] of Rogue
- [Linux version] of Rogue
- The [Debian package (bsdgames-nonfree)] version of Rogue
- [KRogue] - KDE port of rogue features improved user interface
- [iRogue] - Palm OS synthesis of Rogue 5.3 and URogue
- [nanRogue] - Windows CE port of Rogue 5.3
- [Rogue Clone IV] - Michael Lehotay's open-source reproduction of Rogue, that can be configured to look like either the UNIX or IBM PC versions (for DOS and Windows)
- [ClassicRogue] - a remake of Rogue with graphical tiles and Playback feature (new save/restore code)
- [Roguelike Restoration project] - project to update old roguelike games to run on mondern Linux and Windows/Dos machines. Includes Rogue, Advanced Rogue, XRogue, UltraRogue, and Super-Rogue
- [AGBRogue] - Rogue ported to the Gameboy Advance
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