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A History of Rogue
blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has published "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs." Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades. What is it about Wichman and Toy's old UNIX RPG that has sent so many gamers to their deaths in the Dungeons of Doom, desperately seeking the fabled Amulet of Yendor? This article covers the history of the game, including the Epyx failure to make a ton of cash selling it in 1983. It also goes into rogue-like culture and development."
moria
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades.
Despite? Given how easily we could at least put a simple tileset on the game to make things more realistic, I'd say that Roguelikes' ongoing popularity must be at least in part _because_ of the primitive graphics. A high-rez animated monster can only ever be a high-rez animated monster, exactly as you see it on the screen. But the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better. It's just like the way books are satisfying in a way that movies can never quite be.
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People would have figured out how to spell it.
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... if the graphics are simpler the developers can spend more time on the AI. And if theres only a few developers this is a big deal. Its probably why most text based MUDs were generally more imaginative than WoW and its clones.
So as a young noob I quite like these old games, but I have to admit I prefer tilesets over text, can anybody recommend a gui frontend for rogue?
Best I've found for nethack was a qtnethack* which really sucked in some areas, is there something similar for rogue? Hell is there something that can act as a frontend for both?
*I know there if flacon's eye but I found it much harder to see whats going on in 3D
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I'm holding my breath for the day somebody develops a truly co-operatively multiplayer version. (No, sharing bones files/score tables doesn't count.) I know it will probably mean sacrificing turn-based play, but adding human interactivity into the already complex world(s) of Rogue will be amazing.
Question everything?
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals I'm still addicted to its descendants. They have some features not easily found in modern games, above all the difficulty and the challenge. Modern games often seem to be designed to let the player win.
Ok here we go, first wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(computer_game)
Then for source http://rogue.rogueforge.net/
and for windows (or dos) users, the original pc port http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/176
and lastest development as at 2008 http://www.freewebs.com/drussell/ClassicRogue.htm
I've been playing this game for nearly 20 years since my cousin introduced me to it on an old 286, scary thing is it still runs fine today under windows xp. Long live x86 I guess. And I still haven't beaten it...
From Dwarf Fortress:
I wrestle a bear and put it in a headlock. Then I gouge it's eyes out.
I am told: "The bear howls in agony. The bear pukes. The bear pukes. The bear faints in pain". All around me, the commas and dots turn red and green. On casual examination, each of the five fingers of each of my gloves is covered in bear puke.
Along the same lines as Rogue, it is probably one of the reasons for a strategy game I still like Empire. All pieces are the same on both sides and all cities are equal. It is a game of strategy with chance rolled in; that being the frequency of finding cities or the enemy. No gimmicky special powers (read : wtf ) that one side has that the other does not.. no fancy animations to get in the way of what something does.
Simple games can be the best games... I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight
As for WOW and weather....
or at least someone on a message board somewhere else did, the weather effects do not affect NPCs nor their property because they have the weather effects slider set to off. Spells are not affected because their "magic". mmmmkay?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
... get turned into a Kestrel? Is this the earliest example of dumbing down?
While porting nethack, 'way back when, we wanted to be sure that all of the levels worked, so we added a terminator-like character for the test players. Immune to poisons, more robust, ... Then one died down about level 23, and, of course, came back as a ghost. Made the game much tougher to win when playing as a tourist or whatever.
No, we didn't purge it from the system. That would be cheating.
There never was a C64 version of rogue, afaik.
Two big thumbs up for mentioning "Sword of Fargoal" and "Telengard" though. Both were a heck of a lot of fun. Telengard was from Avalon Hill though.
Epyx did the Apshai trilogy on the C64 though. "Gateway to Apshai" being the most arcade-like and fun IMHO.
You can't look at the role playing in a single player game and say that because of that it has strong game mechanics....
Immersion is good and all, but that becomes far less important in multiplayer, when the actual interaction between people and game mechanics come to the forefront.
So of course a single player RPG or a book is more "immersive" than a MMO like WoW. Doesn't mean that either game is lacking (even though WoW fails at immersion), they fill totally different needs.
The DS is a roguelike gamers paradise at this point. I'm amazed how many commercial ones that are out there. You've got something for the hardcore, the weeaboos, the kids and the computer nerds. The nethack port is worth the price of a flash cart alone. It's better than the wince/wm port!
I know there's ones I've missed. There's also a ground-up game coded for the GBA and ported to the DS.
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Michael Toy - one of the founders of Netscape was one of the programmers for Rogue. One of the first games I ever played - well before that was Adventure, Hunt The Wumpus and Star Trek text games. I played them before there were desktop computers. They were played on a continuous paper line printer, acoustic phone modem (110 baud) and a rotary phone. Fun times. Those days you could print out the code for the game program and learn how it was written in BASIC.
My favorite Rogue-like will always be Ancient Domains of Mystery. The control system is so much better than Nethack.
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I guess you could say it's an... *sunglasses* ... Epyx fail.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
One of the coolest things i remember about Rogue was Rogomatic, which was an AI that played the game. Never saw a version for any of the Rogue descendants though.
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In the mid '80s when I was in a heavy coding job, I used to run 'co-routines', the compiler and Rogue... One of my co-workers hacked the code to produce a party room on every level, the variant was known as 'twinkie - because you got a big delight with every bite.'
When Zork and Rogue came out and people started calling computer combat games "role playing games" the real role players who knew there was more to role playing than dungeon crawls were mortified.
So, what, now you're complaining that Warcrack isn't a real role playing game because it's not immersive, or something?
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.
Indeed. I can play Rogue all day at work, and everyone else assumes that I'm working at something really complicated and "techy."
Without Rogue there would be no Nethack and no Dwarf Fortress.
And I could probably have used all that time to write a frakkin' book or something, instead of zapping ghosts with a wand of polymorph or dropping merchant caravans into lava just to see what would happen.
Winning a roguelike is much like the first time you beat your chess teacher or parents in any game that required a bit of logic or skill. It's something you remember. One of the few digital bits that I make sure survives all of my data migrations from machine to machine is a copy of the output of my first ascension in Nethack.
Date: 1997/06/12
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Odin booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--
The scary/awesome part is I still remember more about the last level in that ascension than I do large parts of my childhood schooling.
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Would have been nice if the article actually talked about the different versions and ports.
When I played it back in the day it was called Nethack. I always wondered what the difference was between that and rogue etc...
There's still a fairly active roguelike development community based around the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.development.
Every year there's a competition to design a new roguelike in 7 days. The 2009 competition just ended with some cool entries, including Jacob's Matrix - a bizarre mathematical roguelike.
See the results at: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=7DRL_Contest_2009
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The first version of Rogue that was widely circulated became quite a time sink for a lot of people at Caltech. This version was considerably harder than subsequent versions. It was extremely rare for anyone to actually win the game, by getting down deep, getting the Amulet of Yendor, and making it out alive.
One undergraduate, however, had no trouble beating it. Within a couple days of his starting playing, he had all the spots on the top score list, and all of them were total winners.
He then stopped playing, except when anyone else dared to take a spot on the top score list. Then he'd come to computing center, sit down, and 30 minutes later, the interloper would be pushed off the list.
Naturally, we all wondered how the hell this guy was so much better than the rest of us (and, based on what our contacts at other schools told us, better than anyone at their schools, too). He didn't do anything to hide when playing--he didn't play in an office with a private terminal. He played right out in the main terminal room, where anyone who wanted could stand behind and watch.
As far as anyone could see, he didn't do anything significantly different than the rest of us, other than he died a lot less than we did.
Finally, he told us the secret, and we all learned an important lesson. There was no big secret--he just made every little decision correctly. For example, if he had to explore a dark room, he did it in the minimum number of steps necessary. The rest of us would use the "run until you hit something" funciton and sweep the room, which made us step on more locations, which made us have a higher chance of springing a trap.
Traps usually weren't fatal. They just put you down a few hit points for a little while. But in that little while, a monster that he would barely survive, we would barely lose to.
After he got the Amulet and was on the way up, he would only step on locations he'd already stepped on while descending, and so he NEVER sprang a trap on the way up.
He knew the odds of everything (based on observation while playing, not based on looking at the code), and would use potions or scrolls at the time when they had the maximum expected utility.
He did this for EVERY decision point in the game. He made the decision that, based on all the data available at the time, was the best decision.
None of the things I listed above, or any of the other things he did perfectly that the rest of us only did 99% perfectly would make a noticeable difference by themselves. But put them all together, and all our tiny mistakes added up to losing for us, and the lack of any mistakes added up to winning for him.
What appealed to me about Nethack/Rogue was the sheer number of things you can do. The first time I was granted a wish (I don't recall how...a fountain? A ring?), for fun I put in "Mjolnir". And, unbelievably, I was given the Hammer of Thor (I did ask for Excalibur once but I wasn't worthy enough to wield it). And with things like polymorphing your dog into a red dragon to defend you, or deflecting basilisk stares, you just got the sense this little ascii adventure game probably DID have everything because it didn't waste time with graphics.
That being said, my initial time with the original Everquest was similar. I remember being level 4 or 5 and chatting with my friend and his group that was already 6 or 7. They were going to come get me at the city gates. "Oh, you know what, we'll just send the Bard to get you, it'll be faster." And I was genuinely surprised when the Bard came racing up with a speed song, grouped with me, and we took off at 5 times the running rate I was used to. And the coolest thing was that not everyone could do this (until, of course, the potion of the wolf came out). "Balance" did not mean "similarity". You weren't all massively muscled, sword-wielding, wizards. Every class was different.
And then there was the time my 40th level friend was questing (I was level 20 or so). He had to go through a hole in the ice, swim into an underwater cavern, beat up some creature, take its loot, and get back. He dove in, and I could sort of see him swimming under the ice but as he got deeper I lost him. I waited, watching his health bar drop as, somewhere, he was fighting. "Got it!" he told me. And I waited, but then his health started to REALLY drop. "What's up?" "Underwater breathing spell ran out and I can't find the hole in the ice!" So I cast what meagre healing spells I could (I was a paladin) and he made it with about 10 of his 1000+ hit points to spare. But it was stuff like that where EQ shined over Dark Ages of Camelot and other MMOs. Not sure how WoW is in the "That can happen?!" field.
It's the 2d platformer of roguelikes. Here's a video of gameplay. Just google the rest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJPIFKSkuT8
Anyone here win rogue *without* cheating? By cheating, I mean doing funky stuff to restore save files. The best I have ever done strictly by the rules, is to get the Amulet of Yendor, but die of starvation on level 5 on the way back up.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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I doubt you'll see this and all, but I'm amused that I read your post (without seeing the poster name) and was wondering if the poster had worked with you.
Hope all is well, and btw, I'm not the father of a child(1) process.
Carleton
*sigh* ... and by not I of course mean now... stupid single letter changing the whole meaning of the sentence.