9 ms·
The story of Rogue
- sourcepluck 2y agoLove that article, and this thread. Very new to the world of games, and this sort of area (and MUDs, generally, too, I suppose) seems so ripe for further exploration. What an exquisite world
- ggm 2y agoThe Sysadmins where I worked in leeds 82-84 invested a LOT of time doing codework on rogue. They also got high fu in Mud on the dec-10. When a PhD student worked out how to eject the memory resident part of Mud and get it back to zero, thereby losing the chief ops his power, he banned him from login for a month, and then once he got "finger of death" back basically harrassed the living shit out of his character inside the Mud. The Rogue work pre-dated Hack. I think when Hack came up, and there was persisting state of the dungeon and multi-user, it reached peak. I liked Rogue. I only know one guy who got all the way down. Shopkeepers were awesome, if you did wind up sneaking in the back wall of a shop and looting it, got very feral once they worked it out. Don't step on your dog, dawg. And DEFINITELY don't eat it if you do.
- ForOldHack 2y agoMy floppy based games were Rogue, Hack and Empire.
- sourcepluck 2y agoWow. So great. Just learning of the existence of these games recently, and feeling nostalgia for pasts I didn't live. On account of your username, I clicked on your profile to see if there was some story behind it, and got to the gunkies wiki. Looks pretty cool!
- 082349872349872 2y agoIf playing rogue(6) is not your style, don't forget Rog-o-matic, the 1984 expert system that would play it for you: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html
- internet_points 2y agohaha, a rule based precursor to deepmind agent57
- throw4847285 2y agoCan't wait to share this with my Dad. He went to MIT in the 1970s where he first encountered Rogue. Some of my earliest memories are sitting on my Dad's lap, watching him repeatedly die to a Troll. It led to a lifetime love of Rogue and Roguelikes/Roguelites/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems. I just picked up Shiren the Wanderer 5 for the Switch, and it's just the most comfortable experience in the world for me: identifying shields, getting hungry, and dying repeatedly.
- dogline 2y agoNow I have to look up what's available on Switch. I've tried other Roguelikes, but often they get tedious without a keyboard (Darkest Dungeon, Into the Breach). I still want a game I can play kicking back with the Switch. I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.
- jghn 2y agoMy biggest beef with modern roguelikes, including everything you mentioned, is almost none of them make me think, "Wow, this feels like rogue to me". Which is not to say that I don't like some of them, but I like them for completely different reasons. Tangentially related: As someone who not just played the crap out of Rogue in the early 80s but also Wizardry 1, I was ecstatic to find out recently that the latter was rereleased on modern platforms [1]. It's the original DOS game with some better graphics. They included some new play options to make it less punishing, but one can disable all of them to have the authentic experience [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_...
- dogline 2y agoYeah, maybe they're not "roguelikes", but more "dungeon crawlers". I like dungeon crawlers. Don't know why. The assembly language Rogue for the Coco, mentioned in the article, was one of my first games I spent a lot of time on, and maybe that stuck.
- tombert 2y agoRogue holds up remarkably well. I installed it about a year ago out of “historical curiosity”, only to find myself playing it for almost an hour. I will admit that DRL it a bit more my style nowadays, it’s amazing to me that a game living entirely in my terminal is still pretty fun.
- nrjames 2y agoI love any opportunity to suggest people try out Brogue. It was developed with the idea "What would have happened if development continued on Rogue?" Info here: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ Repo/downloads here: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE
- card_zero 2y agoOr many more at https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Main_Page https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Main_Page and https://forums.roguetemple.com https://forums.roguetemple.com, though Brogue is one of the best.
- itomato 2y agoIsn't that Dwarf Fortress? https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
- jamesgeck0 2y agoDwarf Fortress is an amazing management game in fortress simulation mode, but kinda struggles as a Rogue successor. The layers upon layers of simulation don't mesh into a very satisfying experience in adventure mode, imho. Brogue is somewhat minimalist and very tightly designed. The design of every item, monster, and dungeon in the game is inextricably interwoven into a cohesive whole. It evokes very similar feelings to Rogue while also doing its own thing. Less "continued development of Rogue" and more "Unofficial sequel."
- sph 2y agoAnyone know what is the sexy font used in this picture? https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/XPG6_vi_editing_its_own_source_code_on_a_serial_terminal.png?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
- giraffe_lady 2y agoI think it's just called AT&T PC6300. There are a bunch of variants but I'm somewhat confident it's in that family. The very high x-height and tiny, 45º slash are characteristic.
- sph 2y agoNope, the y is markedly different than the screenshot: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?att_pc6300 https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?att_pc63...
- giraffe_lady 2y agoGood call. The p looks way different too. Idk then!
- fjarlq 2y agoI'm pretty sure that's a Link MC5 terminal, which emulates DEC VT220 by default, but that font doesn't seem very VT220ish. https://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs https://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs
- fsckboy 2y agoemulating DEC VT's generally meant the full featureset of DEC ANSI escape sequences for cursor positioning, saving, colors, bold, etc. It would not include emulating fonts. i googled and found this picture of a Link MC5 screen, though it's monochrome, don't know if they would have changed that. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnz-v8Y44ESH18qWuCTYrZbAF4alIOQ9914Rk0E7GQPBMQFlq-bR74XNBYfxRZ61VsUWUXJ9ViuY_GzkXgbVvHZPyzb7PKogbCji_QHc6UuwviRNyzsECz0HIszLM-EF9b1oHNrQmzwz-F/s1600/IMG_9533.JPG https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
- swayvil 2y agoJust played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup last night. The spirit is alive and well.
- card_zero 2y agoCDDA for me at the moment, version 0.H Herbert was released last month. https://cataclysmdda.org https://cataclysmdda.org
- anthk 2y agoI can't compile CDDA:Bright Nights with clang 11.
- sph 2y agoAnd you can play, or spectate some else, in your browser: https://crawl.develz.org/ https://crawl.develz.org/
- every 2y agoNetHack is alive, well and possibly a bit over documented: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
- chongli 2y agoYes and still under active development [1]! We also just finished the 2024 November NetHack Tournament (TNNT) [2]! I played in the tournament for the first time this year. I had one near-win with a very challenging Monk (I was doing a bunch of conducts [3]) who unfortunately died to the infamous Wizard of Yendor (Rodney as we call him). I also had a winning run with a Wizard which unfortunately finished a few hours after the deadline at the end of the tournament, so sadly that one didn't count! Next year I hope to have a bit more time to play so that I can record a win in regulation time! [1] https://github.com/nethack/nethack https://github.com/nethack/nethack [2] https://tnnt.org https://tnnt.org [3] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Conduct https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Conduct
- ForOldHack 2y agoI wish they had earlier versions.
- rgreekguy 2y agoAngband should still be under development, too. A new one I was recommended the other day: UnEpic World. It's also on Steam and itch.io, started development in 1992! By Fins!
- seanssel 2y agoOn the topic of traditional roguelikes, Caves of Qud is getting its 1.0 release tomorrow. Been in development for over 15 years now, and it’s fantastic. Can’t recommend it enough. https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/
- kibwen 2y agoThanks for this notice, I've been periodically checking for years waiting for a full release before allowing myself to dive in. :) Though with Path of Exile coming out Friday, it's a bad time to have a social life...
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> I've been periodically checking for years waiting for a full release before allowing myself to dive in. Huh? It's already released in full. You want development to stop? That would make no sense, and be contrary to the development of pretty much every other roguelike.
- Lurker1978 2y ago>Huh? It's already released in full. Nah, 1.0 will add an actual ending to the main quest and then it'll be a full release.
- kibwen 2y agoPlease don't put words in my mouth. I am referring to the developer's own roadmap, which has been slowly ticking off boxes for years: https://www.cavesofqud.com/roadmap/ https://www.cavesofqud.com/roadmap/ Nobody is asking for development to stop. I've been waiting for a game that is, by the developer's own judgment, complete on a fundamental level.
- cdchn 2y agoWow I thought it was going to be later next year. Been anxiously awaiting this before starting another play through. The writing for this game is just something special.
- beardyw 2y agoOdd to see no mention of Collosal Caves. Were they unaware of it?
- pimlottc 2y agoIt makes me feel better to know that one of its own creators hasn’t even beaten it. I never got anywhere near even finding the amulet when I was a kid, but it didn’t make it any less fun!
- dave333 2y agoHated the Rust Monsters on level 8 that would destroy any decent armor you had managed to enhance and rarely survived the Umber Hulks on level 18 with their ability to confuse you and the huge damage they did. Never found the amulet. Got fantastic keyboards skills for vi directional commands at least for a non-touch typist.
- tpurves 2y agoI went back to Rogue as an experienced Nethack player. Managed to finally win it after a good number of attempts. You have to get lucky with some early gear finds, and then spend absolutely as few turns as possible on the lower levels (otherwise, you won't survive long down there) to grab that amulet and get out. Rogue, Nethack and Nethack variants like evilhackk are all great games.
- ChuckMcM 2y agoWonderful article, and I really enjoyed rogue. I was first exposed to it when doing a port of BSD to the Data General NOVA and it was part of the distribution. I would pick one nit with the history though, CRT computer terminals were absolutely considered a "whole screen" output device. This was because IBM had made the 3270 terminal which you could download a form to, the operator could fill it out (without any computer involvement) and then hit 'submit' and have a single transaction get sent to the mainframe. Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes, but the majority had some level of 'forms' capability which involved cursor addressing, different character highlights (blinking/underling/bold), and usually some basic box drawing characters. All in the service of allowing a 'fill-in' form that someone could be trained on quickly without having to explain "computers" to them at all. When the computer started up, the terminals would light up showing a form. In terms of the tree of life for games, I put rogue, Walter Bright's empire, and Civilization (also called empire in some cases) as the roots for so many video games in the game industry.
- spauldo 2y agoIBM terminals are a completely different thing than what the popular minicomputer systems had. From what I understand, the 3270 wasn't a simple serial device. IBM had the advantage that they had control of the entire ecosystem, so their hardware and software worked together much like Apple stuff does today. Minicomputers (and some mainframes) generally used the kind of terminals as described in the article. Those things were everywhere.
- port_wire 2y agoThe wiki page for 3270 shows so many devices and machines that were designed and created by IBM. Does IBM make anything like that these days ?
- spauldo 2y agoI'm sure they do. I've seen 3270s in use in a few places in the last few years. I'm not sure what they use for new designs, though - I don't hear much about the mainframe world from my part of the industry.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago> It was a very different approach from the way you would approach things today, where you would certainly abstract out the platform and try to make a game that looked and felt as close to identical as possible. It would be often wiser not to try, especially today : for instance few games are going to work as well on a small touchscreen as on a large monitor with mouse and keyboard.
- reveal975 2y agoKinda OT but do people know why there are so many people misspelling "rogue" with "rouge"? See it a lot online.
- quuxplusone 2y agoThe "gu" combination is just tricky/rare in English, while the combination "ou" is common enough to be an attractor. See also "tounge" and "chaise lounge". "Lounge" and "rouge" also share the property of being legitimate spellchecker words in their own rights. We don't see this phenomenon happen with, say, "plauge" for "plague", because the diphthong "au" (as in "tau") is pronounced differently from long "a". But "ou" (as in "thorough") could be pronounced exactly the same as long "o". (And compare "restaraunt", as in "aunt".)
- dhosek 2y agoOne of my classmates flunked out of Harvey Mudd freshman year thanks to obsessively playing Moria. First semester he failed 4 out of 5 classes and the administration normally would tell him not to come back in the spring, but they decided to give him a chance to do better. Second semester he failed all 5 classes.
- erik_seaberg 2y agoI'm reminded of Bright's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game), a turn-based PvP strategy game. My friend's 1989-ish instance was sadistic enough to batch execute four turns per day. Every player had to rush to a TTY every six hours to give new marching orders. If you study or sleep too late, your forces and factories could be wiped out. The obsessives, living on campus newly free of supervision, were line printing maps and writing logistic planning tools that foreshadowed EVE Online's "spreadsheets in space."
- anthk 2y agoI still play it. Also, XConq it's a modern rendition of Empire, written in TCL/Tk.
- wduquette 2y agoHeh. My first rogue-like was Moria on the 4-College VAX-780, at CMC, which is a short walk from Harvey Mudd. We had both Moria and Walker Bright's Empire, and I tried both of them. I didn't really get deeply into Moria until later, when the first MSDOS version came out; but after that I was obsessed with Moria and its follow-on, Angband, plus many different variants of Angband, for many, many years.
- tzs 2y agoWhen Rogue reached Caltech in the '80s it quickly became so popular that it got banned during the daytime so people doing real work could use the computers. The version of Rogue then was quite a bit harder than later versions and it was almost unheard of for anyone to actually get the amulet and get back out. Then this one student started regularly making the high score list, and soon had pushed everyone else off. Then he got the amulet and got out. Then he did that enough time to have the high score list full of games where he got the amulet. Then he stopped playing, until someone else would get on the high score list. Then he'd come to the computer center and play for maybe a half hour until he'd pushed them off the high score list. This was driving everyone else completely nuts because he was, as mentioned, playing in the computer center. The way the terminals were arranged there was no privacy. Everyone else could watch him play, but no one could figure out why he did so much better than the rest of us. He eventually explained it. He didn't actually do any one thing significantly better than the rest of us. For any given thing he was just slightly better. But he was slighted better at many things and that added up. For example if most people were coming back through a room they had passed through the other way earlier they would take the most convenient route between the doors. That generally would not be simply the reverse of the route they had taken the first time through, because the first time they were exploring the room. He on the other hand would take a route that only involved stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people who stepped in new places.
- jhbadger 2y agoThat's true of so many things, including science and programming. We can deal with the fact that some people are geniuses and just orders of magnitude better than us, but often it's people who are just slightly better than us in most things that end up doing the thing we want to do before us.
- zenogantner 2y ago... and the compound interest of being consistently slightly better makes these people much better than others in the long run.
- 2y ago
- seabass-labrax 2y agoWhat a coincidence that this should be posted on the 12th anniversary of Pixel Dungeon, which is an entertaining free and open source roguelike for Android. There's an actively developed fork called Shattered Pixel Dungeon developed by Even Debenhams. It looks splendid and still gets new gameplay mechanics from time to time. https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/ https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/ PS. This isn't a paid advert - I've just wasted a lot of time dying to sewer crabs in this game and want to make sure you have the opportunity to waste your time too ;)
- rozim 2y agoDidn't the Unix version have some interesting encryption going on w/ the saved game file circa 1984 +/- 1y? IIRC it folded in: - the players uid and - the files inode To prevent the file from being usable by other players, and preventing the user from making a usable copy of it...
- smarks 2y agoRight, the point of being able to save a game was to pick up later where you had left off. However, the game attempted to prevent you from restarting from a saved game if you made a mistake or got killed or something. I think the scheme was fairly clever but it wasn't terribly sophisticated; nothing like public-key crypto for instance. It did have a number of countermeasures that attempted to prevent cheating, such as restarting from a modified save file. For example, I believe it hashed all the bytes of the file, plus a bunch of metadata -- possibly including the uid and the file's i-number, as you suggest -- and also things like the file modification time and maybe even the i-node change time. Then it would write this hash back into the file. I seem to recall a bit of cleverness to avoid problems because writing the hash could potentially modify things like the file modification time. Maybe it just retried until the modtime didn't change. Not too difficult since the granularity was one second. In principle this is easy to defeat if you know the hash algorithm, and if you knew how to use the Unix system calls to change a file's modification time. Since the original rogue program was closed source, the hash algorithm was secret. But eventually somebody reverse-engineered it, and programs emerged that were able to successfully copy save files.
- smarks 2y agoOh MANNNN I spent so much time playing rogue back in the day. I got decently good at it, but it was hard. I don't think I ever actually won. I do recall a strategy of clearing out the easier levels in order to gain treasure and magic items. At a certain point you wouldn't be able to defeat all the monsters, so you'd try to find the stairs as quickly as possible. On the occasions where I'd get really far -- far enough to start looking for the amulet! -- I'd get trapped by some powerful monster like a Titan and get killed instantly. Such a letdown. You'd play for hours and it would all be over in an instant. That damned tombstone.
- eichin 2y agoI worked down the hall from Ken Arnold (he was one of the later additions to the project, mentioned about half way down the page) at HP/Apollo around 1990; aside from being an inspirational Senior Troublemaker, he kept an eye on Rogomatic - an advanced rogue-playing "bot" - and would make minor tweaks to Rogue itself that didn't change things for human players, but were adversarial for the bot...
- gbudee 2y agoThat's fascinating! Do you recall any examples of such tweaks? To my mind, making the decision more complicated for all players, human and bot alike, would probably have been justified. But I suppose for a 1980s computer scientist targeting only the bot was an extra-interesting puzzle.
- eichin 2y agoI never got that deep into it. It mostly caught my attention because it was distinct variant of meta-gaming that I hadn't seen before.
- nicoloren 2y agoRogue is a very cool game, but what get me into the genre is Angband and Nethack. I played them with ascci tiles on my computer at the french university in 2002-2004 and my classmates where all playing Warcraft 3, Diablo or Call of Duty and they where very confused to see my little games! I think that ascii characters are a good interface for this kind of game because the brain has to work to imagine the game which makes the memories of games more memorable. I still play Nethack some times and I must try Brogue. I never had the time to get into Dwarf Fortress.
- amaurose 2y agoI still fondly remember how inclusive the minimalism of games like NetHack actually were. NetHack was the first game I played after moving to Linux, roughly 1995. I say inclusive, because I played it with a Braille display. Many aspects of the simplicity of the 90s led to unintentional accessibility. I also used to read guitar tabs in plain ASCII when they were still exchanged on NNTP groups. These days, every guitar tab site I find is "polished" and therefore no longer accessible.
- sourcepluck 2y agoThat's so terrible to hear! Is there no nice tool out there that converts guitar tabs from ultimate guitar or whatever to ASCII? Maybe scraping there big clunky websites is hard... Hmm. A Braille display - it converts any ASCII characters to Braille, but struggles with non-ASCII stuff, is that it?
- snackbroken 2y agoThis[1] bookmarklet strips everything that isn't preformatted plain text from a page. It seems to work on both gametabs[2] and ultimate-guitar[3] and probably others that don't try to get fancy with their typography. Hopefully it is of some use. [1](javascript:(function(){const tabs = document.querySelectorAll('pre'); document.head.remove(); document.body.remove(); document.body = document.createElement('body'); for(const tab of tabs){ document.body.appendChild(tab);};})();) [2](https://www.gametabs.net/ https://www.gametabs.net/) [3](https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/explore?type[]=Tabs https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/explore?type[]=Tabs)
- wduquette 2y agoI'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned Larn/ULarn, which I played a lot back in the day. Each level was about the size of a Rogue level, but levels weren't completely random. There were a number of basic level templates, each of which could be modified in various ways. Some were random mazes; in others, the basic map never changed, but doors got added or deleted in various places. My basic strategy was to save my coins until I could get the Lance of Death, the "Walk through Walls" spell, haste self spell, and "permanent" spell, which made current buffs permanent. Then I could romp and frolic through the levels.
- ndrake 2y agohttps://larn.org/ https://larn.org/
- stef-13013 2y agoI really enjoyed the Epyx Atari ST version... Do you know if source code (assets, ...) are available somewhere ?
- jrnichols 2y agoRogue reminds me of the Zork series. A simple text interface with your own imagination. The best GUI ever.