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.