Welcome to the first installment of Retro Fri-Dave.  In this column, I will be discussing a “retro” game every week, either by my own choosing or one from your suggestions.  The games that I will cover will range from old Commodore 64 games to arcade-style and beyond.  So, without further ado, let's get to the game!

This week I am writing about one of the first computer games I ever played, Rogue. Rogue is a dungeon-exploring adventure game where the player journeys through level after level searching for gold and power-ups.  The ultimate goal of the game is to find the 'The Amulet of Yendor' and escape the dungeon.  Now, this may sound easy, but I neglected to mention that you will have to battle armies of monsters along the way.

The game got its start on early UNIX systems, running on dumb terminals.  In the late 80’s, Rogue was ported over to several other platforms including the IBM PC, Commodore 64 and CPM systems.

Traditional Rogue is simple in its game play and layout.  It uses the H, J, K, L keys for left, down, up, and right movements respectively.  The graphics in this game are actually just ASCII text - no high end graphics to look at.

The game can be very frustrating to play because it is never the same game twice.  This random gameplay means that one time you should stock up on magic wands, the next time you play you should have multiple rings with special powers.  Yet, I was thinking about how long I have been playing Rogue, and since I am an old fart, I realized that I have been playing Rogue for over 25 years!  In that 25 years, I think that I have won a total of three times.  Rogue is just one of the fun classic games that requires nearly no CPU horsepower and no joystick or other fancy input device to play.

You can search the internet for source code for Rogue; it is an open-source game.  It also has its own page on Wikipedia.  There are many support groups and sites dedicated to the game.

Overall, Rogue is a fun game to play - easy to learn and very hard to beat.

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