The story of Rogue
spillhistorie.no
spillhistorie.no
The version of Rogue then was quite a bit harder than later versions and it was almost unheard of for anyone to actually get the amulet and get back out. Then this one student started regularly making the high score list, and soon had pushed everyone else off. Then he got the amulet and got out. Then he did that enough time to have the high score list full of games where he got the amulet.
Then he stopped playing, until someone else would get on the high score list. Then he'd come to the computer center and play for maybe a half hour until he'd pushed them off the high score list.
This was driving everyone else completely nuts because he was, as mentioned, playing in the computer center. The way the terminals were arranged there was no privacy. Everyone else could watch him play, but no one could figure out why he did so much better than the rest of us.
He eventually explained it. He didn't actually do any one thing significantly better than the rest of us. For any given thing he was just slightly better. But he was slighted better at many things and that added up.
For example if most people were coming back through a room they had passed through the other way earlier they would take the most convenient route between the doors. That generally would not be simply the reverse of the route they had taken the first time through, because the first time they were exploring the room.
He on the other hand would take a route that only involved stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people who stepped in new places.
Maybe that gives you a slight edge, but it involves having near perfect recollection where you've stepped. That's not a small feat.
Go clockwise, along the walls. Want to reach something in the middle of the room? Go straight down from the top wall. If there's stuff in your way, go around it on the left side if possible, else right.
Of course you don't know these numbers directly unless you get deep into the wiki/source. But you don't know the odds when driving on a rainy night either.
You counter that with observations, forecasts and incident reports, but intuition based on personal experience leads you astray.
A game is much better because you can fail and you just have to restart the game. Make an RDR2 mod.
(edit: more intuitive anyway. It might not be easy to accurately show different snow conditions while also being fun to play)
I'd figured out where the score was held, and quickly poked "-1" into it so I wouldn't draw attention to my unconventional approach by getting on the high score list, and then tried to see if I could figure out what was going on with scroll/potion naming...
...and then I quaffed something bad, and died, and when the tombstone came up, I discovered score was unsigned.
Huh? It's already released in full. You want development to stop? That would make no sense, and be contrary to the development of pretty much every other roguelike.
Nah, 1.0 will add an actual ending to the main quest and then it'll be a full release.
The writing for this game is just something special.
Doesn’t look like it, unless something changed since that comment.
Info here: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
Repo/downloads here: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE
Brogue is somewhat minimalist and very tightly designed. The design of every item, monster, and dungeon in the game is inextricably interwoven into a cohesive whole. It evokes very similar feelings to Rogue while also doing its own thing. Less "continued development of Rogue" and more "Unofficial sequel."
I just picked up Shiren the Wanderer 5 for the Switch, and it's just the most comfortable experience in the world for me: identifying shields, getting hungry, and dying repeatedly.
I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.
Tangentially related: As someone who not just played the crap out of Rogue in the early 80s but also Wizardry 1, I was ecstatic to find out recently that the latter was rereleased on modern platforms [1]. It's the original DOS game with some better graphics. They included some new play options to make it less punishing, but one can disable all of them to have the authentic experience
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_t...
In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made. So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse as Azure Dreams and Baroque.
It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much more restrictive definition. And some people just call them all Roguelikes.
Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one more run.
One big part of it for me are the graphics. If the graphics/UI aren't kind of shitty, it's not going to "feel like Rogue" to me. I don't need ASCII per se, for instance I did most of my Rogue playing on the Mac port in the early/mid-80s.
This isn't the full issue for me though. Take Darkest Dungeon as an example. I love that game. And it checks all the standard boxes, even my "kind of shitty" graphics. But ... it's not Rogue.
Even if the graphics are clearly better than ASCII, what makes something feel like Rogue is that there's no attempt to hide the artifice. The grid is clearly a restrictive grid. Simple icons are used to represent various types of items. There's something very clearly "programmed." An unidentified item can be broken down into a handful of variables: item type, cursed or not, effect, etc.
In fact, I wonder if Rogue is one of the reasons I got into programming. The first real thing I tried to code was a version of Rogue. The rules are so clearly defined. Playing it is kind of zen.
Though to be honest, I like my Roguelikes pretty limited in scope. I could never get into Nethack because it felt like the number of factors you needed to take into account outstripped my working memory. I found myself going to a wiki, which isn't my favorite activity.
And if we want to really get nerdy about the history of game design, I have a theory about Dark Souls. Dark Souls is a roguelike/lite... but without the three gameplay elements considered most necessary to be a descendant of Rogue: there's no permadeath, it's not turn based, and it's not procedurally generated. And yet... no other game of its era leaned as hard into the idea of incomplete information, high challenge, necessity for experimentation, and risk/reward calculations.
The history of games is so cool, because nothing ever gets forgotten. There's always some visionary who grew up on some genre of game considered outdated and niche but who can adapt that genre into a new form which can find a fresh audience.
In the same vein of controller-native games, if you want a platformer that is the spiritual sucessor to Nethack, then you want to check out the Spelunky series.
In the traditional category, Switch has Shiren 5 and 6, Jupiter Hell, and Tanglewood. Maybe Dragon Fang Z and Void Terrarium, haven't played them. Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not quite "lite."
...and that's about the extent of it. A lot of traditional roguelikes are hobby projects without widespread commercial appeal that never make off PC. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of quality roguelites on Switch.
I always felt like an important aspect of “lite” was whether death was real permadeath or whether good performance in one game could make the next one easier. In that aspect, COTN feels like it's a roguelite in the default (non-all-zones) mode; you get to collect a bunch of upgrades that you keep for the next run, and you can also take the zones one by one. But all zones is hardcore permadeath.
The folks at Chunsoft made some impressive games, and they single handedly kept the flame of the commercial Roguelike alive for decades (at least in Japan).
Next year I hope to have a bit more time to play so that I can record a win in regulation time!
[1] https://github.com/nethack/nethack
[2] https://tnnt.org
A new one I was recommended the other day: UnEpic World. It's also on Steam and itch.io, started development in 1992! By Fins!
I see Errka has recently released "Ancient Savo", which looks somewhat like a rewrite of URW:
https://enormous-elk.itch.io/ancient-savo
Here he is celebrating the release.
https://www.enormouselk.com/sites/default/files/styles/w730/...
And yes, mainline angband is still under active development. There are a couple of very popular variants too (frogcomposband and sil-q.)
[1] https://www.hardfought.org/ [2] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/XNetHack
https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/
PS. This isn't a paid advert - I've just wasted a lot of time dying to sewer crabs in this game and want to make sure you have the opportunity to waste your time too ;)
[1](javascript:(function(){const tabs = document.querySelectorAll('pre'); document.head.remove(); document.body.remove(); document.body = document.createElement('body'); for(const tab of tabs){ document.body.appendChild(tab);};})();)
A Braille display - it converts any ASCII characters to Braille, but struggles with non-ASCII stuff, is that it?
The Rogue work pre-dated Hack. I think when Hack came up, and there was persisting state of the dungeon and multi-user, it reached peak. I liked Rogue. I only know one guy who got all the way down. Shopkeepers were awesome, if you did wind up sneaking in the back wall of a shop and looting it, got very feral once they worked it out.
Don't step on your dog, dawg. And DEFINITELY don't eat it if you do.
On account of your username, I clicked on your profile to see if there was some story behind it, and got to the gunkies wiki. Looks pretty cool!
My basic strategy was to save my coins until I could get the Lance of Death, the "Walk through Walls" spell, haste self spell, and "permanent" spell, which made current buffs permanent. Then I could romp and frolic through the levels.
The obsessives, living on campus newly free of supervision, were line printing maps and writing logistic planning tools that foreshadowed EVE Online's "spreadsheets in space."
IIRC it folded in: - the players uid and - the files inode
To prevent the file from being usable by other players, and preventing the user from making a usable copy of it...
I think the scheme was fairly clever but it wasn't terribly sophisticated; nothing like public-key crypto for instance. It did have a number of countermeasures that attempted to prevent cheating, such as restarting from a modified save file. For example, I believe it hashed all the bytes of the file, plus a bunch of metadata -- possibly including the uid and the file's i-number, as you suggest -- and also things like the file modification time and maybe even the i-node change time. Then it would write this hash back into the file. I seem to recall a bit of cleverness to avoid problems because writing the hash could potentially modify things like the file modification time. Maybe it just retried until the modtime didn't change. Not too difficult since the granularity was one second.
In principle this is easy to defeat if you know the hash algorithm, and if you knew how to use the Unix system calls to change a file's modification time. Since the original rogue program was closed source, the hash algorithm was secret. But eventually somebody reverse-engineered it, and programs emerged that were able to successfully copy save files.
I will admit that DRL it a bit more my style nowadays, it’s amazing to me that a game living entirely in my terminal is still pretty fun.
I played them with ascci tiles on my computer at the french university in 2002-2004 and my classmates where all playing Warcraft 3, Diablo or Call of Duty and they where very confused to see my little games!
I think that ascii characters are a good interface for this kind of game because the brain has to work to imagine the game which makes the memories of games more memorable.
I still play Nethack some times and I must try Brogue. I never had the time to get into Dwarf Fortress.
Such a letdown. You'd play for hours and it would all be over in an instant. That damned tombstone.
I would pick one nit with the history though, CRT computer terminals were absolutely considered a "whole screen" output device. This was because IBM had made the 3270 terminal which you could download a form to, the operator could fill it out (without any computer involvement) and then hit 'submit' and have a single transaction get sent to the mainframe.
Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes, but the majority had some level of 'forms' capability which involved cursor addressing, different character highlights (blinking/underling/bold), and usually some basic box drawing characters. All in the service of allowing a 'fill-in' form that someone could be trained on quickly without having to explain "computers" to them at all. When the computer started up, the terminals would light up showing a form.
In terms of the tree of life for games, I put rogue, Walter Bright's empire, and Civilization (also called empire in some cases) as the roots for so many video games in the game industry.
Minicomputers (and some mainframes) generally used the kind of terminals as described in the article. Those things were everywhere.
That said, the product capability that mini-computers were going after was to replace mainframes, and mainframes had 3270s and they could do this really cool thing. There wasn't anything particularly special about the 3270 terminal controller or the capabilities of the 3270 that couldn't be implemented in an alternative way. For a mini-computer terminal to get a similar customer experience they needed to be more than just paperless teletypes.
That started with the VT05 which was introduced in 1970 and had directly addressable cursor. Replaced by the VT50 in '74 and then the VT52 in '75 when things really started to get cooking. As the DEC-10 and later VAX started being sold to customers instead of them buying an IBM machine things really took off.
Ah yes, the proverbial "glass TTY." There were a few years in the late 1970s where printing terminals (actual Teletypes such as the ASR 33, and matrix printing terminals like the DECwriter) were fading out and "dumb" CRT terminals came in. When I arrived at university in 1980 the computer center was filled with dumb terminals like the ADM-3. There were a few smart terminals (they could run Emacs!) but they were hard to come by.
Within a couple years, though, the dumb terminals were all gone and were replaced by "smart" CRT terminals that had the more sophisticated features. So the lifetime of the glass TTY might have been only 5-10 years.
Sadly isn't maintained very well today, as I found bugs on restoring a save file made from the last GitHub build.
And it's a pity because anyone who liked VMS Empire would love XConq in the spot.
It would be often wiser not to try, especially today : for instance few games are going to work as well on a small touchscreen as on a large monitor with mouse and keyboard.
We don't see this phenomenon happen with, say, "plauge" for "plague", because the diphthong "au" (as in "tau") is pronounced differently from long "a". But "ou" (as in "thorough") could be pronounced exactly the same as long "o". (And compare "restaraunt", as in "aunt".)
i googled and found this picture of a Link MC5 screen, though it's monochrome, don't know if they would have changed that.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
And a recent and informing podcast episode about it, https://changelog.com/podcast/618.