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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."
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.
While this isn't answering your question, I'd like to point out my favourite Nethack interface:
http://glhack.sourceforge.net/
GnomeHack was a very nice version of the game... But the GUI-ness of it (popup windows, scrollbars, etc..) really wasn't to my taste. So I started work on glHack, to make it feel very similiar to the text-terminal version (nice & snappy). but with graphical tiles.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Diablo is an "action rpg". That basically means it's space invaders with character development.
There is no real adventuring - despite the randomized maps, there's very little to explore (because there's very little to find, except more monsters). There's no discovery - the identify system is token and adds nothing to the game. There's no problem solving (apart from figuring out how to blast a bunch of monsters before they blast you) because there's no depth - your options are a) attack, or b) attack.
If you think Diablo is basically a real-time Rogue-like, then you've misunderstood what is so great about Rogue.
Question everything?
Well, If you'd like a more modern rogue implementation with tilesets, and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you could give Rogue Touch a try. I wrote this version from scratch in my spare time over last fall and winter as a way to fill in downtime from consulting. Borrowed some graphics from public domain tilesets, and drew others myself. It's a tribute to the Atari ST and Amiga versions of Rogue, and it's gained quite a following lately... as a matter of fact one of my players alerted me to this story (I used to post here regularly, but have been away for a while... had to quit reading so I could get some real work done!!).
Anyway a lot of neat little tweaks were made to the formula without messing up the core game: new equipment and magic, some animations, secret characters (that have unique abilities and starting equipment), and an online leaderboard to compete with dungeon crawlers all over the world.
Come by my website http://www.chronosoft.com/ to see a video and check out the forums and leaderboards.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
There was a multiplayer 'rogue' like game at the time 'nethack' came out. I can't remember the name, but it was like a multiplayer ASCII version of 'rogue' where people could collect wands and gold while traveling through a maze. The ultimate
goal was to find the "Teluma of Rodney" and escape the maze. Players were rendered as diamonds or eyeballs. There were monster characters, "The Others" that were AI controlled with the number depending on level.
Having other people to compete against did change the dynamics of the game as people would form teams to find the quest item and act as bodyguards for each other, rather than simply "yourself vs. the rest of the game world".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads