Hello Reader, Welcome to the Dungeons of Doom.
You find yourself in a labyrinth of hyphens and broken bars. Above you, an asterisk, and beside it, an inverted exclamation mark. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear you were in in a PDP-11 terminal at the University of California, circa 1978.
Mainframe computers were essentially one big computer that everyone used at the same time. You had your own terminal — a keyboard and display — but everyone was sharing the same resources.
Every coder knows that games are a fun way to test a system’s capabilities. That’s what motivated Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman to see if Ken Arnold’s curses programming library could simulate “graphics” by drawing a bunch of letters, numbers and symbols on screen.
Making “images” in this style was nothing new: Toy’s inspiration, Star Trek (1971), depicted a space map in this way, but most games were text-based adventures. Software was freely shared between universities, physically transported on large magnetic tapes, and anyone on a terminal could access them.
Aware of your surroundings once more, the room’s emptiness fills you with a sense of isolation. Yes… isolated… personal even — that’s right! This isn’t a mainframe at all, it’s a DOS computer! This is one of Rogue‘s many home computer ports!
The process of commercialising Rogue began when Toy met Jon Lane. The two founded A.I. Design to sell the game. If you’ve ever played this, chances are that you played one of Lane’s many ports. When it came time to make the 1986 Macintosh version, Wichmann returned to make actual graphics.
Sadly, this endeavour wasn’t very profitable. Hardly surprising since unofficial ports already existed, and by 1984, games like Ultima III (1983) and Elite (1984) were more complex — not to mention the first “roguelikes” which I’ll further on.
A wandering “H” approaches. It fails to hit you, but succeeds in signalling its violent intent. You strike back, felling what you’ve now identified as a hobgoblin… but before you have time to celebrate, an E(mu) hits you from behind!
Wichmann named the project “Rogue”, not after the Dungeons & Dragons character class (which was still called “thief” at the time) but because D&D was a multiplayer game and and in this game, you were going it alone. Rogue is superficially similar to D&D but its underlying mechanics bear little resemblance.
Rogue further distinguished itself from its D&D-inspired contemporaries by presenting all of the action all at once. You would not wander into a monster and then move to a separate combat encounter. Action and exploration were simultaneous, with every creature acting the moment you did.
Covered in the blood of S(nakes) and B(ats), you flinch as another vicious “H” approaches. Losing confidence in your mace, you scan your surroundings for alternatives. You remember the potion from earlier (the inverted exclamation mark). Hastily, you down the viscous fluid… and lose your sense of sight.
Rogue‘s many potions, magic scrolls and enchanted items have undiscernable effects, unless you have an identification scroll to hand. Only once you’ve downed a cyan potion and stumbled around like a newborn deer will you know that it was a Potion of Confusion.
Fortunately, even these items with adverse effects can be used to your advantage, as enemies will suffer the same detriments if used against them.
Somehow evading the hobgoblin despite your loss of vision, you feel your way through the dungeon’s stone corridors. You cannot be certain that any previous room will provide refuge. You push desperately against the walls and as luck would have it, a hidden room is revealed!
One of Rogue‘s defining features — and indeed, one of the cornerstones of the wider roguelike subgenre it inspired — is its procedurally generated maps. However, maze routines were nothing new in 1980: Hunt the Wumpus (1973), Beneath Apple Manor (1978) and various PLATO games all preceded it.
Rogue‘s scrambled rooms and corridors may seem truly random at first, but this is not true. Every floor can be cut into a 3×3 grid with a room in each portion. If you cannot see one of the nine rooms, there is certainly a hidden path to it.
As you lick your wounds in the hidden chamber, an unsettling quiet surrounds you. It feels safe… too safe. An absence of threat may be a blessing to others, but you know that unless you train yourself on the beasts here, you will stand no chance against the devils below.
Despite your best decisions, a run of Rogue is likely to end in failure. There is no guarantee that you will find all you need to survive its depths. For some players, knowing this spoils everything — why play a game you can’t always win? Rogue‘s fans would argue that the uncertainty is part of the fun.
That uncertainty may come in the form of unfair enemy placement, having no safe spot to rest or even simple starvation — food is a necessity on this journey and serves as the reason why you cannot afford to be leisurely.
You can always cheat by copying the save file if winning matters that much, and I guarantee that almost everyone who claims to have beaten Rogue has done so.
Having endured the worst, you arrive on Floor 26, +4 longsword in hand. You spot an aquator and quickly remove your armour before the fiend’s rusting attack renders it useless.
Without drawing your bow, you launch an arrow towards the doorway to test for invisible P(hantom)s. In the next room, you spot what appears to be a stairwell, but this is almost certainly a X(eroc) mimicking its form.
Distracted by your thoughts, or perhaps accustomed to the dungeon’s many snares, you hardly react as a teleportation trap flings you into a maze of corridors. Searching while walking is a habit you’ve yet to develop.
Then, suddenly, you set eyes upon the most beautiful, pixelated Venus symbol you’ve ever seen. There it is: the Amulet of Yendor (that’s ‘Rodney’ backwards, the titular rogue’s default name)… and the only thing standing between you and victory now is a ferocious, fire-breathing D(ragon).
You wiggle your way towards it, alternating your steps, but you weren’t aware that a dragon’s breath affects a wide area. Singed but steady, you quaff a Potion of Strength and dive towards it. May only the Amulet’s chosen survive!
When you look past its primitive presentation, Rogue is a thrilling game. It’s hardly surprising that it inspired so many derivatives, some of which have become far more layered and complicated.
For example, Moria (1983) added races and classes; Hack (1984) added new items and monsters; and Larn (1984) added a town hub and persistent economy.
Fast-forward to today and roguelikes such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006) and Dwarf Fortress (2006) are so complex that having a working knowledge of strata will actually help you to navigate the latter.
I often hear people say that the original Rogue is not worth visiting, that one should play one of its many successors instead. I can’t deny that they also offer a good time, but a distilled experience can be a comforting one. It’s nice to look back on where we came, so we can appreciate how far we’ve gone.
I consider Rogue a metaphor for life itself: we don’t choose the circumstances of our birth, the obstacles we face or the blessings we receive. The only certainty is that none of us will make it out with our lives, but it’s in the moment our fires burn that we shine the brightest.
Sir Shortlived perished in the depths, slain by a D(ragon), but you can bet that he kicked a lot of ass while he was in there.
