From the Roguelike Games FAQ file:

A long time ago, on a computer system far, far, away, there was Rogue. Players wandered a dungeon, hacking and slashing at monsters, gaining treasures, becoming more powerful, and living their D&D nightmares.

Rogue was a good game; people still play it. It was even distributed with many copies of Unix. But rogue is a relatively simple and limited game compared to most of the descendants it has spawned…

Although the common features of rogue and its many descendants are “obvious” to many people, they are difficult to describe in simple terms. Generally, the games mentioned below are single-user, fantasy role-playing computer games, generally set in a dungeon, run with a simple character-graphic interface. In all of the games, the player controls a single character, who roams around getting more powerful, in order to fulfill a difficult quest. Sword-and-sorcery rule the day. Logistically, they’re all free games; executables, and generally sources, are available by FTP.

For more info visit The Roguelike Games Homepage and A Brief History of Rogue.

Rogue is a very simple ASCII based dungeon exploration game that sparked off a whole generation of imitations: Angband, Nethack, Ragnarok and ADOM to name a few. It’s charm lies in its very simple control system, graphics (B=a bat, S=a snake etc) and almost endless replayability.

There isn’t a whole lot else to say about it, just download it yourself and see.

Related Links

• MobyGames: Rogue: The Adventure Game
  Read all about it on MobyGames.
• Wikipedia: Rogue: The Adventure Game
  Read all about it on Wikipedia.
• A Brief History of Rogue
  
• The Roguelike Games Home Page
  Get information on the orgininal Rogue and its clones - Nethack, ADOM and Angband to name a few.