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Rogue is a dungeon crawling computer game dating from 1980. It proved extremely popular on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s^[1] and inspired a class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes". Among others, a few of its notable members are Moria, NetHack, Angband, and ADOM.

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 treasure. The goal is to fight one's way to the bottom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, then ascend to the surface. Until the amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat. Rare is the adventurer who will again see the light of day.

Each dungeon level has a 3 room by 3 room grid, or a dead-end hallway where a room would be expected. Later variations include "mazes" in the place of rooms as well. Unlike most adventure games of the time, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within are randomly generated. Every time it is played, exploration is equally risky. With an assortment of potions, scrolls, wands, weapons, armor, and food, there are many ways to succeed, and many more ways to die. Maximizing the character's survival potential is always a challenge. While the graphics are archaic by today's gaming standards, the strategy necessary to play and succeed is no less than that required by modern games.

In the original, all aspects of the dungeon, including the character and the monsters, are represented by letters and symbols. Monsters are represented by capital letters (such as Z for zombie), and as such there are 26 types. This type of display makes it appropriate for a dumb terminal. Rogue was one of the first widely used applications of the curses screen control library. Like all programs using this library, the game uses the termcap database to adapt to the capabilities of terminals made by different vendors. 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 a single keystroke — q to quaff a potion, w to wield a weapon, e to eat some food, etc.

The original authors of Rogue are Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold. First written on Unix, Rogue was ported by Michael Toy and Jon Lane to the IBM PC, and then by Michael Toy to the Macintosh. Toy and Lane formed the company A.I.Design, which marketed these versions.

Later, marketing was handed over to established video game publisher Epyx, who contracted A.I.Design to port the game to Amiga, Atari ST, and CoCo personal computers.

In 1988, the budget software publisher Mastertronic released a commercial port of Rogue for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum computers.

Numerous freeware clones exist for modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Linux, and BSD-derived variants.

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 to play and win the game. It remains an interesting study in expert system design (Ken Arnold intentionally added a new feature to each release of Rogue that would break Rog-O-Matic to see how its authors would compensate).

This led to the development of other game-playing programs (typically called "borgs" or "bots"), including some targeting roguelikes, in particular Angband.^[2]

1. ^ Jeremy Parish. The Essential 50 — 12. Rogue. 1UP.com. Ziff Davis. Retrieved on 2007-12-23.
2. ^ Angband Borg. Thangorodrim - The Angband Page. Retrieved on 2007-12-23.

• 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
• The Roguelike Restoration Project, with multiple versions of Rogue
• Rogue at MobyGames
• ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System
• The Rogue Archive - a collection of Rogue executables and source code
• The Dungeons of Doom - information about Rogue
• Hexatron's Java Rogue - an online Java version of Rogue
• The Mac Games Machine — U Mac Rogue