Rogue (video game) - Wikipedia [Link]

org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)

Rogue (video game)

Rogue (also known as Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of
Rogue
Doom) is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and
Glenn Wichman and later contributions by Ken Arnold. Rogue was Developer(s) A.I. Design (Non-
unix versions)
originally developed around 1980 for Unix-based mainframe
systems as a freely-distributed executable (Public domain Publisher(s) Epyx (Non-unix
versions)
software[1]). It was later included in the official Berkeley Software
Distribution 4.2 operating system (4.2BSD). Commercial ports of Designer(s) Michael Toy

the game for a range of personal computers were made by Toy, Glenn Wichman
Wichman, and Jon Lane under the company A.I. Design and Ken Arnold
financially supported by the Epyx software publishers. Additional Jon Lane
ports to modern systems have been made since by other parties Platform(s) Amiga, Amstrad
using the game's now-open source code. CPC, Atari 8-bit,
Atari ST,
In Rogue, players control a character as they explore several levels Commodore 64,
of a dungeon as they seek the Amulet of Yendor located in the DOS, Macintosh,
dungeon's lowest level. The player-character must fend off an array TOPS-20, TRS-80
of monsters that roam the dungeons. Along the way, they can collect CoCo, Unix, ZX
treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as Spectrum
weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items. Rogue is Release 1980
turn-based taking place on a square grid represented in ASCII or Genre(s) Roguelike
other fixed character sets, allowing players to have time to
Mode(s) Single-player
determine the best move to survive. Rogue implements permadeath
as a design choice to make each action by the player meaningful: should the player-character lose all their
health from combat or other means, the character is dead, and the player must restart a brand new character
and cannot reload from a saved state. The dungeon levels, monster encounters, and treasures are procedurally
generated on each playthrough, so that no game is the same as a previous one.

Rogue was inspired by text-based computer games such as the 1971 Star Trek game and Colossal Cave
Adventure released in 1976, along with the high fantasy setting from Dungeons & Dragons. Toy and Wichman,
both students at University of California Santa Cruz, worked together to create their own text-based game but
looked to incorporate elements of procedural generation to create a new experience each time the user played
the game. Toy later worked at University of California Berkeley where he met Arnold, the lead developer of the
curses programming library that Rogue was dependent on to mimic a graphical display. Arnold helped Toy to
optimize the code and incorporate additional features to the game. The commercial ports were inspired when
Toy met Lane while working for the Olivetti company, and Toy engaged with Wichman again to help with
designing graphics and various ports.

Rogue became popular in the 1980s among college students and other computer-savvy users in part due to its
inclusion in 4.2BSD. It inspired programmers to develop a number of similar titles such as Hack (1982) and
Moria (1983), though as Toy, Wichman, and Arnold had not released the source code at this time, these new
games introduced different variations atop Rogue. A long lineage of games grew out from these titles. While
Rogue was not the first dungeon-crawling game with procedural generation features, it introduced the
subgenre of roguelike RPG procedurally generated dungeon crawlers with Dungeons-and-Dragons-like items

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(armor, weapons, potions, and magic scrolls) that also had permadeath (permanent death) and an overhead
graphical view, albeit via ASCII drawings, as opposed to text descriptions in natural language as did the
landmark games Adventure/Colossal Cave and the original mainframe version of Zork (which themselves were
the origin of Interactive fiction games).

Contents
Gameplay
User interface
Development
At UC Santa Cruz
At UC Berkeley
At A.I. Design
Other ports
Automated play
Reception
Legacy
References
External links

Gameplay
In Rogue, the player assumes the typical role of an adventurer of early fantasy role-playing games. The game
starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures. The goal is to fight
one's way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor ("Rodney" spelled backwards), then ascend to the
surface.[2] 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
The "dungeon" as it looked on an
replace it with graphical tiles. IBM Color PC

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
sometimes appear where rooms would be expected. Lower levels can also include a maze in the place of a room.

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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.[3] Toy grew up in Livermore,
California, where his father was a nuclear scientist. Once a year, the father's workplace allowed their employees
family 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.[4]

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.[4]

Toy soon met Wichman, another student at UCSC who was also writing his own adventure game. Wichman had
created his own variations on traditional role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons while growing up.
Wichman chose UCSC specifically to study on game design as to become a board game developer, and this led
him into the computer sciences to get the opportunity to play and develop games. The two became friends,
shared an apartment, and challenged each other with their own adventure game creations. Of the two, Toy was
more proficient at coding, while Wichman had a better sense of the design of these games. Toy and Wichman
soon found that most adventure games suffered from a lack of replayability, in that the game did not change on
separate playthroughs.[4][5]

Around this time, ca. 1980, BSD Unix has 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.[4] When Toy saw this library, he and Wichman quickly
realized the potential for it. After crafting a few games using curses to learn the library, they came up with the
idea of an adventure game in the flavor of Dungeons & Dragons but to address their concerns with the static
nature of adventure games, wanted to include elements that would change every time the game was played. The
two came up with a narrative, that of an adventurer setting out to explore and find treasures in the Dungeons of
Doom, specifically the Amulet of Yendor (the name "Rodney" spelled backwards, which they envisioned as
renowned wizard in the games narration).[4] Wichman came up with the name Rogue, based on the idea that
unlike the party-based systems of Dungeons & Dragons, the player's character was going at this alone. They
also wanted to make sure the name was short to make it simple to type out on command lines.[4][5]

As Toy was more proficient at programming, he led the development of the game in the C language which
generally produced fast effective code. Wichman learned the language from Toy as they went along while
providing significant input on the design of game.[4][5] The first two major aspects of the game developed was

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the method of displaying the dungeon on screen to the player, and how to generate the dungeon in a random
manner. Limited by choices of what a terminal could display, they stuck to ASCII-based characters, such as .
for empty floor space, + for doors, and | and - for walls of the dungeon. They also opted to use the "at" symbol
(@) to represent the player, considering this showed the player "where they're at".[4] For the dungeon, they
found initial attempts at purely random generation to be weak, in some cases having a stairway ending up in a
room inaccessible to players. They found a solution through procedural generation, where each level would
start on the idea of a 3x3 tic tac toe grid, with each room of various size occupying one space in this grid, and
then creating the hallways to connect the rooms.[4] Once they could have their character move about these
randomly created dungeons, they then added equipment, magic items, and monsters. With magic items, they
wanted the effects of these items to be a mystery on each run through, and thus would initially present the
items to the player only by a descriptor such as by color, and only later in the game give the true name of the
item once the player experimented or used another means to identify the item.[4] For monsters, they wanted to
have more advanced intelligence routines as the player got to deeper depths of the dungeons, but had started
running into memory limits on the VAX-11, and simply made the monsters stronger with more health to pose
more of a challenge.[4][2]

The two started testing the game with other students at UCSC, finding that despite the limited graphics, players
were filling the gaps with their own imagination. Playtester feedback helped them to improve the procedural
generation routines to balance the game's challenge.[4][2] One element that fell out from playtesting was the use
of permadeath. Toy wanted to move away from the notion of simply learning the right sequence of steps to
complete within adventure games, and instead make the player focus on finding the right moves to avoid the
character's death at that moment;[4] Wichman later called this idea "consequence persistence".[6] 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.[4] They subsequently added a scoreboard feature that let players rank their
progress with others, rewarding players with more points for surviving as deep as possible into the dungeons
and making the Amulet of Yendor a lucrative goal.[4]

Around 1982, Toy's attention to Rogue and computer games caused him to suffer poor academic performance,
and he was kicked out of the school, shortly finding employment at University of California, Berkeley (UCB) in
their computer lab. Toy took the Rogue code with him to continue its development.[4] Wichman, still enrolled
at UCSC, continued to help develop Rogue for a time, such as adding armor elements, but the logistics of
working over the distance made it difficult for him to keep up, and he let Toy fully take over development.[4][5]

At UC Berkeley
Prior to Toy's arrival at UCB, Ken Arnold had gotten to play Rogue, which had been distributed as an
executable across many of the UC campuses. Though impressed with the game, he expressed frustration at the
inefficient means the game updated the screen via his curses library over a modem line.[7] He had ideas for how
to fix it, but at this point Toy and Wichman had opted not to release the code.[7]

When Toy arrived at UCB in 1982, he sought out Arnold to get insight into the nature of how the curses library
worked. After the two got to know each other, Toy allowed him access to Rogue's source code.[7] In addition to
helping to improve the interface and rendering of the game, Arnold helped to improve the procedural
generation aspects of the game.[7]

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With its popularity on the UCB servers, Rogue was 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".[7]
Rogue's distribution in 4.2 BSD did not include its source code, so after Toy and Arnold separately left UCB,
they took the code with them, making it difficult for anyone to build off it. Rogue' source was eventually added
under a BSD software license within 4.3 BSD in 1986, putting it into the open source.[8]

At A.I. Design
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 model based on the IBM
Personal Computer (IBM PC) operating system.[7] There, he met
one of Olivetti's computer system administrators, Jon Lane. Lane
had previously seen the popularity of Rogue among the United
States location he managed and had played the game himself along
with Ritchie's observations on Rogue.[2] Upon meeting Toy, Lane
proposed the idea of porting Rogue to the IBM PC as a commercial
product, which Toy agreed. They founded the company A.I. Design A screenshot from the Atari ST
to port and market the game. Though Toy's source code was version of Rogue, where the text-
necessary for the porting, Lane had to redevelop many of the based characters have been
routines for the game's interface. Lane took advantage of the more replaced by graphics created by A.I.
Design and Epyx
graphical Code page 437 character set on PC to expand the number
of symbols to represent the dungeon, such as using a happy-face ☺
for the player-character. They also took steps to avoid potential copyright issues with TSR, the company that
owned Dungeons & Dragons at that time, by changing the names of monsters like kobolds that were unique to
that game.[7][2]

Toy and Lane initially funded the publishing, distribution, and promotion of the IBM PC version themselves,
and though they continued to gain sales, they were only were able to break even as they lacked the power of a
larger distributor. Around 1984, Robert Borch, the vice president of publishing at Epyx discovered that Rogue
had become popular by several of Epyx's employees and that they suggested that Epyx should help fund ports
to other systems. Though Borch felt there was niche appeal to the game, he followed this advice and contracted
A.I. Design to port the game to the Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga upon which Epyx would take over
distribution and marketing.[7]

Toy obtained a Macintosh and took the lead in marketing the game to that system. Both Toy and Lane
recognized that they could implement improved graphics with the Macintosh version, but neither had art skills
to make the icons. Toy reached out Wichman to help with these graphics. Wichman was initially cautious due
to the fact that his credit for Rogue in the PC version had been cast as a "contribution" equal to the UCSC
playtesters rather than as equal to Toy, Arnold, or Lane.[7] However, he agreed to help and joined A.I. Design.
Much of the Macintosh version was developed in concert by Toy, Wichman, and Lane in a cabin at the Squaw
Valley Ski Resort.[7] Following this, Epyx requested that Wichman lead the development of the Atari ST
version, with the company providing Wichman a system to work on. This work occurred alongside Toy's work
on the Amiga version. Wichman enlisted help from an Epyx in-house artist, Michael Kosaka, to create the art
on the Atari ST version.[7] Epyx would also fund A.I. Design to port the game to other systems including the

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TRS-80 Color.[5]

Borch recognized the difficulty in marketing Rogue through traditional methods compared to other games on
the market at that time, and opted to push the title through software catalogs rather than retail channels.
Though it sold well initially, Rogue's sales quickly declined and was considered a commercial flop. Besides the
competition from more graphically-interesting games, Wichman attributed the failure to the fact that the
commercial version of Rogue was essentially the same game previously offered for free via BSD and did not
pose a new challenge.[7] Epyx eventually went bankrupt in 1989, and A.I. Design disbanded. None of Toy,
Wichman, Arnold, or Lane profited greatly from Rogue though became renowned in the industry for their
participation on the game.[7]

Other ports
In 1988, the budget software publisher Mastertronic released a commercial port of Rogue for the Amstrad CPC,
Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit,[9] and ZX Spectrum computers.[10]

Numerous clones exist for modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows,[11] Mac OS X,[12] Palm
OS,[13] Linux,[14] BSD OSs,[14] and iOS.[15] It is even included in the base distribution of NetBSD and
DragonflyBSD.

4.3 BSD from the University of 4.3 BSD displaying the man page for
Wisconsin, circa 1987. Rogue is Rogue
shown in "/usr/games"

Automated play
Because the input and output of the original game is over a terminal interface, it is relatively easy in Unix to
redirect 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.[16]

“ In a test during a three-week period in 1983, Rog-O-Matic had a higher

median score than any of the 15 top Rogue players at the Carnegie-Mellon
University and, at the University of Texas at Austin, found the Amulet of
Yendor in a passageway on the 26th level, continued on to the surface and
emerged into the light of day. ”
Ken Arnold said that he liked to make "sure that every subsequent version of rogue had a new feature in it that
broke Rogue-O-Matic."[17] Nevertheless, it remains a noted study in expert system design and led to the
development of other game-playing programs, typically called "bots". Some target roguelikes, in particular

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Angband.[18]

Reception
In March 1984, Jerry Pournelle named the version of Rogue for the IBM PC as his "game of the month",
describing it as "a real time trap. I found myself thinking 'just one more try' far too often".[19] The game was
reviewed in 1986 in Dragon #112 by Hartley and Pattie Lesser in the "Role of Computers" column.[20] In a
subsequent column, the reviewers gave the IBM and Mac versions of the game 3½ out of 5 stars.[21] 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".[22] In 2009, Rogue was named #6 on the "Ten Greatest PC Games Ever"
list by PC World.[23]

Legacy
Because of Rogue's popularity at colleges in the early 1980s,[24] other users sought to expand or create similar
games to Rogue. 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 Rogue's impact.[17] 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.[17]

Toy, Wichman, and Arnold reunited onstage for the first time in 30 years in an event called "Roguelike
Celebration" at San Francisco in 2016.[25]

References
1. [Link]/[Link] ([Link] on [Link] "The public
domain version of rogue now distributed with Berkeley UNIX "
2. Edge Staff (2009-07-03). "The Making Of: Rogue" ([Link]
//[Link]/features/making-rogue). Edge Online. Archived from the original ([Link]
[Link]/features/making-rogue) on 2012-08-15.
3. Kuittinen, Petri (Jun 12, 2001). "Rogue – Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (1980)" ([Link]
/web/20071217100401/[Link] Archived from the original
([Link] on Dec 17, 2007.
4. Craddock, David L (August 5, 2015). "Chapter 2: "Procedural Dungeons of Doom: Building Rogue, Part
1" ". In Magrath, Andrew. Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the
Course of Video Games. Press Start Press. ISBN 0-692-50186-X.
5. Wichmann, Glenn R. (1997). "A Brief History of Rogue" ([Link]
/[Link] Archived from the original ([Link]
/[Link]) on February 17, 2015. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
6. Carnevale, Tony (September 19, 2016). "Rogue Creator Says We Need A Better Word For Permadeath"
([Link] Kotaku.
Retrieved September 19, 2016.
7. Craddock, David L (August 5, 2015). "Chapter 3: "Rodney and the Free Market: Building Rogue, Part 2" ".
In Magrath, Andrew. Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the
Course of Video Games. Press Start Press. ISBN 0-692-50186-X.

7 de 9 22/12/2017 11:28
Rogue (video game) - Wikipedia [Link]

8. Craddock, David L (August 5, 2015). "Chapter 5: "When the Inmates Run the Asylum - Hack-ing at
Lincoln-Sudbury High School" ". In Magrath, Andrew. Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other
Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games. Press Start Press. ISBN 0-692-50186-X.
9. "Atari 8-bit Rogue" ([Link]
[Link]. Retrieved 2010-09-02.
10. Rogue by Mastertronic ([Link] from World of
Spectrum
11. Rogue for Windows ([Link] from [Link]
12. Rogue for OS X ([Link] from SourceForge
13. Roguelikes for PalmOS ([Link] from SourceForge
14. "The Rogue Home Page" ([Link]
/pub/rogue/[Link]). Archived from the original ([Link]
on Jul 15, 2008. with various versions of Rogue
15. Classic Dungeon Crawler Rogue Comes to the iPhone ([Link]
dungeon-crawler-rogue-comes-to-the-iphone/) from [Link]
16. A. K. Dewdney. "An expert system outperforms mere mortals as it conquers the feared Dungeons of
Doom" ([Link]
/doc/An_expert_system_outperforms_mere_mortals_as_it_conquers_the_feared_Dungeons_of_Doom.ht
ml). "Scientific American", volume 252, issue 2, February 1985, pp. 18–21. Archived from the original
([Link]
/doc/An_expert_system_outperforms_mere_mortals_as_it_conquers_the_feared_Dungeons_of_Doom.ht
ml) on 2014-03-15. Retrieved 2014-03-12.
17. "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs" ([Link]
/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php#comment19111).
18. "Angband Borg" ([Link] Thangorodrim – The Angband Page. Retrieved
2007-12-23.
19. Pournelle, Jerry (March 1984). "New Machines, Networks, and Sundry Software" ([Link]
/stream/byte-magazine-1984-03/1984_03_BYTE_09-03_Simulation#page/n47/mode/2up). BYTE. p. 46.
Retrieved 22 October 2013.
20. Lesser, Hartley and Pattie (August 1986). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (112): 23–26.
21. Lesser, Hartley and Patricia (October 1987). "The Role of Computers". The Dragon (126): 82–88.
22. Stumpf, Robert J. (January 1987). "Rogue: A Dungeon Adventure" ([Link]
compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_080_1987_Jan#page/n39/mode/2up). Compute!. p. 39. Retrieved
9 November 2013.
23. Edwards, Benj (February 8, 2009). "The Ten Greatest PC Games Ever" ([Link]
/158850/best_pc_games.html#slide6). PC World. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
24. Parish, Jeremy. "The Essential 50 – 12. Rogue" ([Link]
//[Link]/features/essential-50-rogue). [Link]. Ziff Davis. Archived from the original
([Link] on 2012-03-03. Retrieved 2007-12-23.
25. Carnevale, Tony. "Rogue Creator Says We Need A Better Word For Permadeath" ([Link]
/rogue-creator-says-we-need-a-better-word-for-permadeath-1786822855). Retrieved 2016-09-20.

External links
Rogue ([Link] at MobyGames
Rogue ([Link] can be played for free in the browser at the
Internet Archive
Interview with Glenn Wichman ([Link]
/cybergoth/gamesc/[Link]) at the Wayback Machine (archived January 31, 2008)
The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Z's ([Link]

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/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php) from Gamasutra by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton

Rogue 1984 ([Link]
The_Science.html) – The DOS Game, the History, the Science
Rogue Central @ [Link] ([Link] Information, documentation,
screenshots, and various versions for download and online play.
Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold panel ([Link] at
the 2016 Roguelike Celebration

Retrieved from "[Link]

This page was last edited on 13 December 2017, at 00:24.

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