Rogue

The player character is an adventurer. The game starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures. The goal is to fight a way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor ("Rodney" spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat. Until the Amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels.

In the original text-based versions, all aspects of the game, including the dungeon, the player character, and monsters, are represented by letters and symbols within the ASCII character set. Monsters are represented by capital letters (such as Z, for zombie), and accordingly there are twenty-six varieties. This type of display makes it appropriate for a non-graphical terminal. Later ports of Rogue apply extended character sets to the text user interface or replace it with graphical tiles.

The concept of Rogue originated with Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. Toy grew up in Livermore, California, where his father was a nuclear scientist. Once a year, his father's workplace allowed employees' families to visit, which included allowing them to use the facility's mainframe system to play games. Toy took interest in the text-based Star Trek game (1971), which represented space combat through characters on screen, and required players to make strategic decisions each turn. Toy started to learn how to program and recreate this game on other computer systems that he could access, including the Processor Technology Sol-20 and the Atari 400.

Toy enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the late 1970s. Working first on UCSC's PDP-11 and then its VAX-11, Toy began exploring what games were available over ARPANET, the predecessor of the current Internet. One game that intrigued him was Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure) (1976) by William Crowther and Don Woods. Adventure, considered the first text-based adventure game, challenged the player to explore a cave system through descriptions given by the computer and commands issued by the player. Toy was impressed by the game and started writing his own.

In March 1984, Jerry Pournelle named the version of Rogue for the IBM PC his "game of the month", describing it as "a real time trap. I found myself thinking 'just one more try' far too often". The game was reviewed in 1986 in Dragon #112 by Hartley and Pattie Lesser in the "Role of Computers" column. In a subsequent column, the reviewers gave the IBM and Mac versions of the game 3½ out of 5 stars.

Compute! favorably reviewed Epyx's Amiga version as improving on the text-based original, stating that "the game will give you many hours of gaming fun". In 2009, Rogue was named #6 on the "Ten Greatest PC Games Ever" list by PC World.

Because of Rogue's popularity at colleges in the early 1980s, other users sought to expand or create similar games. However, as neither Toy, Wichman, nor Arnold released the source code of the game, these efforts generally required the programmers to craft the core game elements from scratch to mimic Rogue. Though there were multiple titles that tried this, the two most significant ones were Moria (1983) and Hack (1982). Both games spawned a family of improved versions and clones over the next several years, leading to a wide number of games in a similar flavor.

These games, which generally feature turn-based exploration and combat in a high fantasy setting in a procedurally generated dungeon and employing permadeath, are named roguelike games in honor of Rogue's impact. Most of the graphical interface conventions used in Rogue were reused within these other roguelikes, such as the use of @ to represent the player-character. Since 2000, with advances in computer graphics and computational capabilities, numerous games that build on the procedural generation and permadeath aspects of Rogue but often incorporating wildly-different gameplay from its turn-based roots. Such games are sometimes called "roguelites" to distinguish from roguelikes, with early examples including Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac, and FTL: Faster than Light.