This Week in Retro: Rogue (1980) (Patreon)

January 1980: In the Legacy Wars, Rogue Won

By Diamond Feit

Consider for a moment the number of video game genres that existed in January of 1980. Pong had hit it big, so there were many paddle-and-ball games. Breakout went global, so there were many block-breaking games. Space Invaders was a success, so every company had their own space shooting games. And Colossal Cave Adventure had been so well-received that the text adventure game genre derives its name from it (as did Atari's not-text-based Adventure).

And then there was Rogue, a game born—as so many others were—from computer programmers trying to adapt Dungeons & Dragons into video game form. It is a "text" adventure game, strictly speaking, in that the entire game is made of text, but instead of relying on elaborate commands meant to mimic real-life role-playing, Rogue wielded those simple ASCII characters as makeshift graphics. Enemies may have been represented as a single letter but the dungeons in Rogue had recognizable features like walls, narrow hallways, and treasure lying in wait.

Rogue's most important feature was that the computer program itself created the dungeon layouts automatically and randomly each playthrough. Creators Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman lamented the rigidness of other adventure games; unlike in Dungeons & Dragons, no matter how many times the player began the game, everything was set and would not change. The puzzles, the layouts, the enemies, they would always be the same. This also meant that, as the creators of the game, they had to write all of those things into place and could never enjoy playing it themselves since they would already know what to do.

Rogue's other famous trait, that the hero has but one life and each dungeon can only be challenged once, is less revolutionary given the video game climate at the time. Arcade games were king, and few games allowed for continues or save data. Rogue even creates a high-score list like arcade games do, highlighting the longest-lived characters and chronicling how far they made it into the dungeon before dying.

We consider Rogue a 1980 video game even though we have no indication of when it was "released" in any traditional sense. Rogue was freely distributed on computer networks amongst programmers and hobbyists for years before it had any sort of commercial edition, by which point newer, more "advanced" adventure games and role-playing games with actual art and music and elaborate stories were on sale. Still, Rogue persisted as a game and as a genre unto itself; imitators and derivative creations were dubbed "roguelikes" much in the way the 1990s would dub all first-person shooters "DOOM-clones" until the nomenclature we now accept took off.

Looking at the video game landscape in 2020, there's not much reason to revisit Pong or Breakout or Space Invaders or early text adventures, because subsequent adaptations and evolutions have rendered them obsolete. Some of them were outclassed by spin-offs or imitators before the ’80s had even ended. Rogue, on the other hand, remains freely available (you can play it in your browser) and it's just as gripping now as it was 40 years ago. Yet at the same time, there is a rich variety of "roguelike,"roguelite," and even "roguelitelike" descendents from Rogue available to players: Entire roguelike franchises such as Mystery Dungeon/Shiren the Wanderer exist, as well as scores of indie games using procedural generation in non-RPG works to create new sub-genres.

I myself had never played Rogue until this month to prepare for its anniversary. I found that while its keyboard commands are hard to follow, the omnipresence of its great-great-grandchildren in the video game world made it instantly familiar. The ASCII graphics are good enough; it's just as tense to encounter a strange letter in a hallway as it would be a pixelated monster sprite, and the turn-based movement and combat doesn't suffer without animations. While I find a game with a persistent character is more appealing than one that relies on a series of random, disposable heroes, I can't deny that each time I died in Rogue I did not hesitate to hit the restart button. After all, I have no time in my life anymore for a 40-hour epic RPG, but a bite-sized dungeon crawler that's never the same layout twice where death is all but certain? Everyone's got time enough for that.