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Unfortunately for Epyx and the Rogue team, the
commercial versions of the game failed miserably. Wichman blames rampant
piracy, but it's likelier that the humble character-set graphics in most
versions turned off gamers who were accustomed to advanced sprite-based graphics.
Also, 1983 saw the release of Origin's Ultima III (see book Chapter 23),
a game that many considered to be the best role-playing game ever designed for
a computer. Its colorful graphics and smooth interface must have made Rogue seem
primitive by comparison.
Meanwhile, Daniel Lawrence's Telengard, published by
Avalon Hill in 1982 for most computer platforms, offered more-diverse graphics
and a similar scheme for procedurally generating the dungeons.
Even Epyx had
published a graphical "roguelike" a year earlier: Jeff McCord's Sword
of Fargoal for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. In short, gamers had plenty of
CRPGs (computer role playing games) to choose from, including some that offered
Rogue-like gameplay, but with more advanced audiovisuals.
However, the real problem seemed to be the "open
source" origins of the game. Although it's likely an exaggeration to think
of mainframe software programmers as early free software or open source
advocates, they did tend to have a much more liberal outlook on sharing and
altering each other's code.
Such was certainly the case with Rogue,
which had long been available for free in countless public domain versions.
Epyx's Rogue running on an Apple Macintosh SE.
Furthermore, the code had been repeatedly "forked,"
or taken over by separate development teams and taken in new directions. This
growing collection of CRPGs based more or less on Rogue became known as "roguelikes,"
many of which are still in active development even today.
By the time Epyx got
around to publishing the commercial version of Rogue, gamers had
several free versions to choose from. The 1986 ports for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were even considered embarrassing by
some, as critics could point out that more advanced roguelikes such as Hack and
Larn were freely available, whereas the commercial Rogue was a
typical full-priced game.
Although Rogue wasn't a commercial success, it has
still had a considerable impact on the industry, including in its
implementation of traditional fantasy conventions. Further, many credit its
procedurally generated dungeons as the inspiration for Blizzard's Diablo (see
book Chapter 4, "Diablo (1996):
The Rogue Goes to Hell").
But we can also find its influence in Japanese
imports such as Square's Chocobo's Dungeon 2 (1999) for the Sony
PlayStation and Square Enix's Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (2008)
for Nintendo Wii. However, the sectors where it seems to have the strongest
influence is the UNIX and later Linux communities, where Rogue and its
derivatives remain a staple of the gaming scene.
Screenshot from Final Fantasy Fables:
Chocobo's Dungeon.
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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 ?