Rogue

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman with later contributions by Ken Arnold. Rogue was originally developed around 1980 for Unix-based minicomputer systems as a freely distributed executable. Commercial ports of the game for a range of personal computers were made by Toy, Wichman, and Jon Lane under the company A.I. Design and financially supported by the Epyx software publishers. Additional ports to modern systems have been made since by other parties using the game's now-open source code. In Rogue, players control a character as they explore several levels of a dungeon seeking an artifact called the Amulet of Yendor located in the dungeon's lowest level. The player character must fend off an array of monsters that roam the dungeons. Along the way, players can collect treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items. Rogue is turn-based, taking place on a square grid represented in ASCII or other fixed character set, allowing players to have time to determine the best move to survive. Rogue implements permadeath as a design choice to make each action by the player meaningful—should the player-character lose all their health via combat or other means, that player character is dead. Upon death, since the character cannot respawn, the player must restart with a fresh character or be brought back by reloading from a saved state. Moreover, no game is the same as any previous one, as the dungeon levels, monster encounters, and treasures are procedurally generated for each playthrough. Rogue was inspired by text-based computer games such as the 1971 Star Trek game and Colossal Cave Adventure released in 1976, along with the high fantasy setting from Dungeons & Dragons.

Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 — Rogue (video game) · retrieved October 19, 2026

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Developer

Epyx

Publisher

Epyx

First release

January 1, 1980

Series

Not recorded

Cover

Official thumbnail

Record ID

Q2140407