Rogue
| Rogue | |
|---|---|
| Major Roguelike | |
| Developer | Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold |
| Theme | Fantasy |
| Influences | Dungeons & Dragons, Colossal Cave Adventure |
| Released | 1980 |
| Updated | 27 Aug, 2006 (3.6.3)
13 Mar, 2005 (5.2.1) 05 Sep, 2007 (5.4.4) |
| Licensing | ?? |
| P. Language | C |
| Platforms | Linux, Windows, DOS |
| Interface | ASCII, Keyboard |
| Game Length | ?? |
| Official site of Rogue | |
Rogue, published in 1980, is the game that established the genre and inspired all other roguelikes.
Description
Rogue's storyline was very light: the point of the game was to go down all levels of a dungeon, in a world based on Dungeons & Dragons, starting from the top, killing monsters and plundering treasures, until finding the Amulet of Yendor. Then, the player had to climb every level up.
It was one of the first games to use a spatial representation of the world where the action unfolded instead of textual descriptions - the authors sought to combine a traditional "dice" RPG with the original Crowther/Woods interactive fiction game Colossal Cave Adventure. This was possible using a C function library called Curses, and this brought important advancements into the cRPG and in general PC gaming genre.
Contrary to many other computer RPGs of the time, all levels were randomly generated. Rogue was intended to be played on Unix terminals. Thus, the dungeon was displayed in text mode, characters and monsters being represented by letters. Actions were issued by single keystrokes. Rogue defined the very roguelike genre. Random generation, basic plot, text (or tiled) based display still are the usual features of roguelikes.
The more direct descendant of rogue was Hack, although Larn and Moria are closely related to it as well.
Versions and platforms
Rogue was written in 1980 by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold for Unix. It was ported to several platforms.
Rogue clones can now be found for nearly every existing platform. Notable modern examples include:
- ClassicRogue (Windows, DOS, Linux)
- TileRogue (Windows)
- CalcRogue (TI-89 graphing calculator, TI-92 plus graphing calculator, Voyage 200 graphing calculator, Windows, Linux, PalmOS)
- LinuxRogue (Linux)
- Rogue Clone (various)
Related topics
Related links
- The Rogue's Vade-Mecum, a Rogue spoiler.
- Roguelike Restoration Project (See article)
- The Rogue Archive, a comprehensive collection of Rogue versions for several platforms (both source code and binaries).
- A Brief History of Rogue
- The Roguelet's ABC Poetry based on various monsters in Rogue.
- Longer history of Rogue (Gamasutra)
- About Rog-O-Matic, a borg for Rogue
- Edwin Rots' Rogue Page Spoilers, technical info, and scanned source code of DOS version. Also useful for ClassicRogue.
- Browser-based version of Rogue Based on MS-DOS Rogue. Ported to Flash by Donnie Russell.