Rogue (1980)

#GameEveryYear

Welcome to the “Game Every Year” column. This being the first, it deserves some introduction. The idea is to review one game released every year since 1980. Why 1980? It’s a nice, round number and probably the earliest example of a year when games were tolerable enough to actually play (or at least as early as I’m willing to go — sorry, boomer).

Another reason is that our first title, Rogue, is one of the most quintessential videogames of all time. The genre of roguelikes and roguelites is an enduring and popular format. Rogue was also released on ARPANET, which means it reflects the spirit of this new publication nicely. Rogue became ubiquitous not through millions of dollars worth of glitzy marketing, but by spreading organically through academic institutions and among enthusiasts. This is the kind of hobbyist do-it-yourself game making that once kept the game industry alive when consoles crashed in 1983. While personal computers were killing consoles in the US, people in the UK were passing around games by manually typing the source code into their PCs, which of course led to all kinds of mods and amateur game development. While consoles are great, it’s this kind of participatory culture over AAA dollars we want to focus on here at Playback.

A Bit of Background

So, back to year one: Rogue, or Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, was created in 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, but that was only the beginning. The original Rogue was open source and was even included in an official OS called Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2. But there were many iterations, including a commercial version by A.I. Software and funded by the publisher Epyx. Rogue appeared on a huge variety of systems including Amiga, a couple Ataris, Commodore 64, DOS, Mac, Unix, and others. And now, of course, the once again open-source game has been ported to a variety of modern systems. It’s impossible to estimate how many people have played Rogue, but we can safely guess it’s somewhere in the range of a ton to an absolute buttload.

The gameplay itself took obvious inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons and roguelikes of the 1970’s, and yes, there were roguelikes before Rogue — it just became the most ubiquitous incarnation of the format which eventually took its name. Following its namesake were an explosion of roguelikes and roguelites from NetHack to Moria to Diablo, leading up to the modern indie boom that includes familiar names like Dead Cells, Spelunky, FTL, Enter the Gungeon, and Hades. In that way, Rogue’s origins have come poetically full circle to small indie teams making breakout hits on the same formula.

That formula takes different shapes for different people — there was even a roguelike conference held in Berlin in 2008 to standardize the definition, which is now known as the “Berlin Interpretation.” They defined roguelikes by eight points including randomness, perma-death, resource management and hack-and-slash gameplay. People quibble with this definition, but everyone seems to agree on at least two things: procedural generation, and perma-death. Or, in other words, the dungeons you explore are randomly generated every time, and once you die, the game is permanently over and you have to restart from the beginning. A roguelite varies similarly depending on who you ask, but it’s generally agreed that the “lite” comes from the fact that progress carries over from one playthrough to the next. For example, if you unlock a weapon or ability on one run and are able to use it for the next, it’s considered a roguelite.

Interestingly, what is probably the most defining factor of roguelikes is the one thing that makes them uninteresting (to me, at least). The randomness was introduced by those early game developers because in designing an adventure, they knew the entire plot and thus exactly how to beat the game. By making the dungeons procedurally generated, they could experience a unique story each time… just one that was completely meaningless as a result.

Visually, roguelikes are usually isometric, with a character seen from above exploring a map. Rogue is no different in this regard, but the graphics are entirely composed of ASCII characters. In the 1984 commercial release, things were spiced up with a smiley face as the main character and a vast array of, like, three or four colors. I have played that version, but for this review, I was forced to go back to the 1980 black-and-white, no smiley face edition.

Not So Fast, Buddy

Or, so I planned. I mean, you try to find the original Rogue. It’s not so easy, is it? There are tons of different versions out there, and it’s hard to figure out which, exactly, stays faithful to the original. I mean, I wasn’t even alive when the thing came out, what am I supposed to do? Ask an old person? No way, lady. So, to get the genuine experience, should I choose the graphing calculator version or try to compile it myself? Try one of the seemingly dozens of UNIX versions?

After some trial and error, I finally settled on something calling itself Rogue V3 found here. According to the page, the source code of the original Rogue fell into the hands of an outsider in 1981 and they released it. As a result, “All the other games used this code as a starting point.” It’s not exactly clear what is meant by “all the other games,” but this is the earliest copy I could find and get running (partially due to the fact that Flash is dead, which is a whole other can of worms when it comes to game preservation). This version seems to be pretty true to the original. The page goes on to say:

“Because of the copying incident, the Rogue 3.6 source code could be found in several places on the Internet. The Roguelike Restoration Project ported the game to run on modern computer systems. The RRP worked from 2000 to 2006, releasing a version called 3.6.3 at the end.

The Roguelike Gallery’s version is based on the RRP’s Rogue 3.6.3. There have been some small modifications in order to work with the Gallery’s multi-user environment. A few bugs have also been fixed.”

So YEAH, technically the version I played is from 1981! Or even 2006 if you really want to get technical! I don’t care! Call it a lesson in the philosophy of game preservation. What is the original? If I made a game called The Ship of Theseus and replaced each line of code one by one to fix all the bugs, would it still be the same game in the end? Is there a “real” copy of Rogue out there somewhere, and will anyone ever play it again? Or is the 1984 commercial release the “real” version? I say: Yes. But obviously the answer is no.

So, What Was Rogue Actually Like to Play?

Pretty bad. I won’t sugarcoat it; I didn’t really enjoy doing this review. While the history of Rogue and what it became is interesting, the game itself is pretty clunky. And this isn’t just because it’s old and the graphics are made of ASCII characters. Pong is from 1972, and the core gameplay loop is still enjoyable despite very few components (or maybe because of that).

In Rogue, you play a rogue (go figure) who is exploring dungeons with the not-very-apparent goal of getting as much money as possible. Or, I assume it’s that because the high scores are ranked by money, but they could just as easily be ranked by the player’s level or number of floors explored.

In order to gather your money, you go around exploring rooms which might have weapons, potions, scrolls, or enemies inside. You can fight kobolds, bats, floating eyes, and whatever else lives in dungeons. To battle, you basically just bump into the letter B, which represents the bat you’re fighting, and lines of text tell you that you missed again and the bat landed a great hit.

The main appeal, then, seems to be exploration — you never know what’s around the next corner, or what that potion does, or how any of the controls work without looking up the massive index of single-letter commands. Some rooms are dark and you can only see what’s in your immediate area. Some areas have no apparent way out so you need to search for secret doors.

But this all sounds way more exciting than it actually is. There never seems to be any challenge until there’s suddenly an insurmountable enemy and you die. It feels a bit like rolling a die over and over and if you roll a six you lose.

I think the reason it’s not very enjoyable is because the randomness makes everything feel meaningless. There’s no clear goal other than to last as long as possible by chance, and that kind of game doesn’t actually need a player (literally — people have programmed Rogue to play itself). There’s no story other than what you imagine, either, and your imagination bears the whole burden of constructing that story. It’s all the wrong kinds of random.

Which is an interesting point, because other roguelikes and roguelites have very similar kinds of randomness, but they are executed differently. Hades, for example, has random rooms with random enemies and random powerups. Conceptually, it’s basically the same as Rogue, but the difference is Hades rolls the dice and then lets you choose, strategically, which of the random options you’ll choose. It turns the output randomness of Rogue into input randomness. (You can read more about the two types of randomness in Gamasutra and elsewhere)

I, personally, don’t want to dwell on that point too long because I don’t actually enjoy the gameplay of Hades all that much (I know, I’m a rebel, right?). What sets Hades apart for me is the story. Again, you roll the dice to see what pieces of story are given to you, but when you see them they trigger the next part of that storyline, and so on. In other words, there’s a sense of progression that isn’t achieved by Rogue’s goal of gaining more and more money.

Then Why is Rogue So Influential?

I think the answer of Rogue’s popularity comes down to the concept and the culture surrounding its history rather than the game itself. The mechanics and execution of Rogue meant it could be easily replicated and modded — it’s all ASCII characters, after all. And the idea of procedural generation was (and is still) magical. Done correctly, randomness can create the illusion of a real world. And convincing simulation is one of the holy grails of game design. Rogue showed hobbyists how to create random adventures that were unique every time using relatively simple mechanics. People have built on those mechanics for decades with amazing results, and the networked way Rogue was distributed foretold the golden age of Internet shareware.

So, is Rogue fun? No. But it certainly is magical, and I will forever be grateful for it. I mean, I currently have 135 hours logged on FTL, after all, and that doesn’t even count all the hours I played before I got the Steam version. The world just wouldn’t be the same without Rogue.

-Nic Barkdull