Just ASCII +
A Column Covering Interactive Fiction and Other Nongraphical Adventure
Games

Adventurer vs. Red Dragon
by Simon de Vet
(click to enlarge)

By Erik Reckase

When I first started going to college at New Mexico Tech in 1990, the
computer lab was practically nonexistent. Visualize a room about the size
of a living room with about twenty VT100 terminals spread out around the
edges, with metal folding chairs as the only furniture. There may have
been a few Suns in there–if there were, they were almost always occupied
by some serious programmers or system administrators. I spent countless
hours in that room during my first semester … but I wasn’t doing schoolwork
or writing code. I’d leave my dorm room at about nine o’clock every night
and stay at the lab for about five hours, doing nothing but playing Nethack,
Rogue, or Moria–adventure/RPG games that could be played on
a text-only terminal, as all of the graphics were represented by ASCII
characters. These games were unique in that they were different every
single time you played them, similar to the Diablo series today–and
they were the most addictive wastes of time that I’d ever experienced.

Not long ago, while searching for something entertaining to put onto
my Palm Pilot for a business trip, I ran across a free Palm-ported version
of Rogue called PocketRogue. As it turns out, these games
are a perfect fit with the Palm’s small screen, and I began to slowly
slip back into my old habits. Curious as to the fate of the other ASCII
games that I had played ten years ago, I did a few Internet searches,
and to my surprise, not only are these games still around, but they are
flourishing in the face of faster processors and graphics accelerators–and
they’re absolutely free. I’ll discuss more of these Rogue-like
games in future installments of this column; these games shaped history,
and it is my pleasure to present these games, free for the taking. I may
even review some of those old text adventures … you’ll have to wait
and see.

Part 1–Rogue

This is the game that started it all. The year is 1980, and a student
at U.C. Berkeley by the name of Ken Arnold put together a library of routines
that allowed programs to address different cursor positions on a terminal
screen and place text there (up until this point, text normally scrolled
off of the top of the screen, disappearing into oblivion–a concept hard
to visualize for the Windows generation, I’m sure). This library of routines
was called “curses,” and it rapidly spread to other universities
across the country.

Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, students in Santa Cruz, California, began
experimenting with this new library and attempted to write a new pseudo-graphical
adventure game. The most important aspect of the development was that
these two students wanted to have fun playing the game themselves. Other
adventure games (including the original Adventure, Zork I, etc.)
had puzzles, but once finished, there was very little replay value. Michael
and Glenn decided that the program should build the dungeon from scratch
every time the game started, making each game different and unpredictable.
Glenn came up with the name of the game: Rogue.

Around the time that the core part of the game had been completed, Michael
transferred to U.C. Berkeley, where he met up with Ken and continued the
game’s evolution. Keeping Glenn in the loop proved to be too difficult,
so Glenn let Michael and Ken take over the development completely. The
fact that this development took place at U.C. Berkeley was critical in
the proliferation of Rogue around the country–Berkeley was also
the home of BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) UNIX, and when Version
4.2 of BSD UNIX was released, Rogue was included. Over the next
few years, Rogue easily became the most popular game on college
campuses.

Title Screen for MS-DOS version of Rogue, 1984 (click
to enlarge)

The goal in Rogue is simple: explore the Dungeons of Doom and
retrieve the fabled Amulet of Yendor. Each floor’s rooms and connecting
passages are randomly generated when you enter the levels, as well as
the monsters and items contained in them. Everything in Rogue is
represented by a character in the standard ASCII character set. For example,
your character is represented by an @ symbol. Monsters are represented
by capital letters (B is a bat, R is a rattlesnake, etc.). Punctuation
marks represent different items or special locations (] is armor, ? is
a magic scroll, % is a staircase, etc.) You can use the arrow keys or
the “hjklyubn” set of keys to move your character around in
the dungeon–moving your character into a monster attacks it. The map
of each dungeon level starts out empty, but it fills in as you explore.

Rogue truly is the granddaddy of computer role-playing games.
Your character has a single statistic, Strength, which affects the speed
with which you can dispatch your foes. Strength can be reduced by certain
monsters and poison dart traps and can only be recovered by using a Strength
potion. You character also has hit points, reflecting the total amount
of damage you can take before death. Both hit points and strength are
affected by your experience level; the more monsters you vanquish, the
higher your experience level, and therefore the higher your maximum strength
and hit points. Sound familiar?

Weak with hunger, my character attacks a Rattlesnake
on dungeon level 6,
trying to reach the food behind it (click to enlarge)

There’s not much information out there on Rogue, due to its age
and relative obscurity. However, I have found the following sites.

The
Dungeons of Doom: Maintained by Edwin Rots in the Netherlands,
this site is a great starter site for players just starting their journey
for the Amulet. There’s information here on the different monsters and
items that populate the dungeon, as well as an online guidebook complete
with hints for beginners.

The
Rogue Home Page: Maintained by Boudewijn Waijers, also
in the Netherlands, this site is download central for Rogue. Versions
of Rogue for MS-DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, and Linux are available
here, as well as a zipped spoiler list for the MS-DOS version. (The Macintosh
version appears to be a graphical interpretation of the original, which
may not have all of the monsters represented.) I’ve played the MS-DOS
version from this site, and some of the characters have been replaced
by small bitmap graphics (a little smiley face for your character, for
example), but otherwise it is identical to the original UNIX release.

PocketRogue
by Takebayashi Tomoaki; iRogue
by Half-Dead Spider Entertainment: Both of these links are for versions
of Rogue that have been ported to the Palm Pilot. I’ve used tried
both of these, with success, on my Palm IIIx: PocketRogue is fast
and small, but iRogue has some very nice features that add to the
experience.

Let me remind you that all of the available versions of Rogue are free!

I’ll be honest–I haven’t retrieved the Amulet of Yendor yet, but I’m
still trying. I’m of the opinion that very few people have successfully
completed this mission over the last twenty years, which makes it all
the more enticing.

That’s all for this installment–next time, I’ll cover some developments
in the world of interactive fiction over the last few years, with more
Free Stuff!