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Although the text adventures Toy and Wichman played and
developed were fun, they suffered from limited replayability. Once y
ou've
solved all the puzzles in Zork, for instance, there's little reason to
continue playing. What Toy and Wichman desired to make was a game that would be
different each time, never offering the exact same gameplay twice.
Though the
game would offer a basic story and goal (fetch the Amulet of Yendor from the
bottom of the dungeon), the real fun was exploring the dungeons, vanquishing
increasingly ferocious monsters, collecting valuable treasures and equipment,
and strengthening one's character.
The control scheme was as intuitive as one might expect
from the era before mice and pull-down menus. Besides the basic movement keys
(h, j, k, and l), players also had to remember somewhat arbitrary commands like
"q" to quaff a potion, or "e" to eat food.
Although the control scheme was relatively easy to master,
the game itself was often quite challenging. Sudden death could occur at any
moment, particularly if the character weren't well equipped and stocked with
potions and scrolls.
Still, though death was common, starting over wasn't so
tedious, as the dungeons would be randomized each time. "Every time you
played," said Wichman, "you got a new adventure. That's really what
made it so popular for all those years in the early eighties."[6]
Toy and Wichman's game was quite popular, but it didn't get
its big break until it was added to Version 4.2 of BSD UNIX, the operating
system of choice on university mainframes all over the world.
According to
Wichman, "over the next three years, Rogue became the undisputed most
popular game on college campuses."[7]
The game's rousing success among the college crowd seemed to bode well for its
commercial potential in the computer games market; after all, Zork's
developers had followed a similar path and earned millions.
Front (left) and back (right) of the box for the
Epyx version of Rogue, Atari
ST version. Despite Epyx's strong distribution
channel and advertising resources, Rogue
was not considered a commercial success.
Wichman himself wasn't involved in the first effort to
market the game commercially. Toy had teamed up with another programmer named Jon Lane, who was able to port the game to the IBM PC.
The two
started their own company named A.I. Design and tried to sell the product
themselves, but in 1983 called upon Epyx to help market and distribute it as Rogue.[8]
It was soon ported to the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Radio Shack Color Computer 3, among
others, with each version receiving its own set of enhancements and quirks.
A
screenshot from the Atari ST
version of Epyx's Rogue. Though far
more graphically interesting than most other versions of the game, the Atari
ST version was actually criticized for its visuals
by some, because it made the viewable area much smaller.
[6] See
Wichman's "A Brief History of Rogue" at
http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html.
[7] See
above note for source.
[8] The full
official name is Rogue: The Adventure
Game, which is something of a misnomer, as the game had little in common
with what most people consider to be an "adventure game," though it
does generate new "adventures" each time.
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Gameplay should always come first..
And since most have limited equipment, you must use items at the very exact moment. Sometimes you may want to drink a potion in the move, but you risk having to battle with hurt characters.
I thank Shiren the Wanderer for taking away the "item collection" from Final Fantasy. In Square Enix games you usually don't use the most powerful items (like megalixirs) because they are limited. You keep them as if they were collectible cards. However, in rogue-like games you get used to use them even if they are unique, because it is either using it and stay alive or die.
Someone invited me to the 7-day Roguelike competence (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=7DRL), but I didn't have time to spare. However, it is always good to try those games, since the concept is always the same, but the enemies, items and stages are completely different.
I don't remember the details, but I'm near certain that the original code was copyright UC Regents and so could not be used w/out license, let alone resold. I think also that the BSD Unix source code had a license fee associated with it, though it was much less than the SVR4 UNIX code from ATT.
I still have a copy of the original rogue source. Printed on a line printer :) The SCCS comments simply say "3.13 (Berkeley) 6/15/81" but I have no way of knowing if the copyright was removed, or if it was never there. The UNIX man page for the game which I have a hard copy of was most definately copyrighted.
A couple interesting points about the game implementation for history: the wizards password was encrypted using the old DES algorithm and the encrypted form was stored in the source code. The "salt" for the encrypted password was "mT" for Michael Toy. Also, though I don't remember all the details, the order of linking the .o files in the Makefile was critical, as the game stored the scores for the Top Ten in the binary for the game. It relied on there being space in the .exe at a certain point which could be overwritten. When the game source was leaked, some Makefiles got modified and the order was not maintained, which resulted in a a "low lovel rune [or room?] bug" where you'd get very deep in the dungeon and the game would crash. Even back then people hacked the game to try and put themselves on the Top Ten w/out actually working for it.
In the 80's the BSD licence was widely interpreted (by geeks and hippies, no one else cared) as "you can do what you like with the code, including, but not limited to, killing time and making babies (or vice versa), so long as the Regents of Berkeley get the credit for it".
BSD and LSD both came from Berkeley (allegedly).
Although your article focuses on individual gameplay, it's interesting you don't mention rogue-o-matic. It also did the rounds of universities a couple of years later. As the player aquired skills in Rogue, your character's attributes impacted how you did against different monsters. Rogue-o-matic ran the game automatically, aquiring skills and points until, the character died. The "-o-matic" part blended the genes/attributes of past "players" to hopefully build better ones the next time round. Hell of a way to use up spare VAX cycles at night, and have blagging rights with other universities half the way around the world.
Of course these days "scripting" of WoW or EVE Online is seen as a Very Bad Thing(TM). Twenty odd years ago this was bleading edge stuff, and secretly had the AI researchers working on it too.
There used to be a way to hit I think it was ctr-z or some secret combination and it would ask for Wizards password. But I would dig through the code and try to find what it might be and I have never found an answer to it.
Also I assume there is no end? It always felt like they had meant for one but it just never got finished.
When Michael transfered to UC Berkeley, I got sucked in to rogue development as well, so let me clarify about the license terms. (By the way, Michael and Glenn weren't worried that text-based games became boring to the *player* after they were finished. They wanted to write a game that wouldn't become boring to *themselves*, as the authors.)
At the time we were unaware of licensing issues and what they meant. Believe it or not, licensing was not a major issue for most folks writing software, especially at academic institutions, and even more especially for folks writing something on their own time like we were. From the start, Michael and Glenn had stamped a U.C. Regents copyright notice on the code and mostly left it at that.
But it's true that we tried to keep the source tightly controlled. The primary reason was that we were trying to keep the playing field (as it were) level between people who could read and understand the source and those who did not. Later, when we added the "save" feature, we also didn't want people to have the clues to the file format to see how we secured it. To respect this, the source to rogue was left off the BSD tapes, shipping only a binary copy.
To be honest, near the end, when commercialization occurred to us, we held it tightly for that reason as well. In those days that seemed reasonable, but it's not something I would do now. In fact, now I would publish the thing anyway, as the gameplay isn't compromised and it's clearer that this is the real value.
But primarily we controlled the source for (perceived) gameplay issues. The Regents license at the time made source available to academic institutions for basically free, and to commercial licensees for a non-trivial chunk of change. That isn't like open source at all. But the control was primarily (for us) not a licensing issue until very near the end. I think it's most reasonable to say that it was at a time where at Berkeley the licensing issue had not come in to focus for any but a very few running the BSD project. The GNU project hadn't yet started, so it was a question that as yet had no center, although a few battles were underway that were important to changing that. So to me it's a bit anachronistic to apply terms like "open source licensing" to a world in which the issues it addresses were for the most part unformulated. It's a bit like applying the term "constitutional rights" to a time before people conceptualized constitutional government -- you can make logically correct statements, but it implies a thought process that wasn't underway.
People did grab sources, and some of them did get sent around. So there are some actual versions floating around, and some re-writes as well. The latest version of the source I have is up on sourceforge.net : https://sourceforge.net/projects/rogue/ To the best of my knowledge, neither Michael nor Glenn have more recent versions.
On some other posts:
(*) rogue-o-matic was way, way cool. Once it came out, I made sure that every subsequent version of rogue had a new feature in it that broke rogue-o-matic, just to see what they'd do to respond.
(*) That people tried to hack the top score file was one of the main reasons we tried to hide the source. We didn't want to help them out, and wanted people to earn the scores they posted to be fair to those who couldn't hack.
(*) LSD was discovered by a Swiss scientist. It can be said, however, that Berkeley figured out what to do with it. ;-)
(*) The wizard's password for most of its life at Berkeley (post-Santa Cruz) was "cute,huh". Now that I've let that out, the black helicopters will be coming for me...
If you guys are into this stuff, don't forget the earlier Gamasutra article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070223a/barton_01.shtml
Tons of stuff there, and I believe the author even has a book out on the topic. ;)
I well remember heading back up, ebullient, only to run into the shop keepers I'd ripped off on the way down who blocked me or killed me :)
Now if I only had a non-64 bit OS to play the game to try out that password. I guess asking the guy who designed it when I was a kid was probably out of the question. But 25 years later getting the answer is still pretty cool.
I think you're confusing rogue with nethack. No version of rogue I remember had corpses, shops or fake amulets. Nethack had/has all of those things.
I found your comment about an unknown person posting the source on forum very interesting. Did that happen after I left? I don't remember hearing anything about it before this. I have my suspicions about who it was and how they got it, though.
Perhaps I'm mis-remembering some of that between Nethack and rogue, but I thought it at least had corpses and you could get the special abilities by eating them? I'll have to go back and read some source....
The appearance of the source code happened some time after Jordan was manager of the games shell. Rumor was that he left something readable accidentally, someone copied the files, and they definately later posted the files one file at a time over several hours or days.
Word then leaked that the admins were looking for the rogue, er, Rogue games. So filenames were changed to something like 30.c, 31.c etc. Still later word was that accounts with excessive disk usage were being checked. Until someone figured out that only files owned by user were counted, and that core files were owned by some other group and were not counted...so naturally the core files were used to contain the renamed rogue files.
Shane, the source code could be ported. It's well written and you'd just have to redo (icky...) the TTY handling codes, and replace old UNIX calls like creat() with th modern version using open(). I think I still have my 1/2" tape lying around :)
And yes, rogue is totally playable!
That's possible, but probably would have been noticed unless the targeted terminal was left logged in and unattended at the time. I was thinking of something much more straightforward. At one time another student asked to borrow my terminal while I was using the games account. When he returned it, I checked the history and saw that it had been cleared. I asked him what he had been doing, but he wouldn't tell me. At the time, I thought he had probably squirrelled away a copy of a game somewhere so that he could play it at times when gsh wouldn't let him, but now I wonder.
I'll add my perspective on the whole rights issue. We never gave it any thought, at least I didn't. Rogue was not done for course credit, and we didn't ask anyone's permission to do it. And I certainly didn't put the copyright notices in the source files. I just (inappropriately) considered Rogue to be our property because it was our creation written on our own initiative on our own time. It belonged to the regents by virtue of having been written using their equipment. I assume the copyright notices got added once development moved to Berkeley, probably a policy for any source code that was included in BSD.
I stand by my conviction that piracy was an enormous impediment to Rogue's commercial success, although obviously there is never one single reason. Much of the target audience was already used to playing Rogue "for free" (really part of their tuition, actually) at college, and I think the idea of paying for the game seemed odd. I can hardly complain about this since we also got to develop the original version "for free" on UC's equipment.
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Tree_of_roguelike_evo
lution
@Glenn - my first encounter with Rogue was on my neighbor's Atari ST. Loved it. Thanks for your efforts there.
When I bust out a rogue-like, I go for Angband these days. I never liked Nethack - to me it's the "emacs of roguelikes". 8^D
Firstly, sincere gratitude to all involved for many years (and in equal measure) enjoyment and frustration in my pursuit of that 'Holy Grail' of all games! (Rogue Clone IV)
However, that balance has (as of this morning) irrevocably changed when I emerged absolutely delighted from level 1, clutching the coveted 'Amulet of Yendor'
Indeed a 'life defining moment' and one that I will cherish in perpituity..".A Total Winner on Level 27"
Again...thanks to all !
ps..what is significance of 'other Amulets' which I chose to avoid on return journey ?