Rogue (game)

Rogue is a 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, and Angband.

The basic premise in Hack and Nethack is that you play an adventurer typical of fantasy games such as Dungeons & Dragons. You start out at the top of a massive dungeon[?], filled with all kinds of monsters. Your goal is to fight your way down to the bottom of the dungeon, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor[?], and make your way back to the top. Unlike most contemporary adventure games, however, the dungeon and everything in it was randomly-generated, yielding a different game each time it was played.

In the original version, all the aspects of the dungeon, including your character and the monsters are represented by letters and symbols, making the game appropriate to play on a dumb terminal. Later versions replaced the characters with graphical tiles[?], but the gameplay remained the same. The basic movement keys (up, down, left, and right) are the same as the cursor control keys in the vi editor.

The original authors of Rogue were Michael Toy[?], Glenn Wichmann[?], 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, it has since been ported to many platforms.

(need a screenshot)

External Link

• A history of the game (http://www.hut.fi/~eye/roguelike/rogue.html)