Game 436: Rogue Clone (1986-1993)

I wonder if the Regents of the University of California are aware they have the copyright to this game.

       
Rogue Clone

United States

Independently developed and published

Released in 1986 for Unix; ported to DOS in 1988; updated repeatedly for DOS, Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms through the present day

Date Started: 11 October 2021

Date Ended: 12 October 2021
Total hours: 4

Difficulty: 4.5/5 (Hard-Very Hard)

Final Rating: 24

Ranking at Time of Posting: 199/444 (45%)

In a perfect illustration of "Exactly What It Says on the Tin," Rogue Clone is a clone of Rogue, to the extent that I couldn't tell much difference, although admittedly it's been 12 years since I played Rogue. You may recall that my desire to share my winning screen, after 80 hours and dozens of unsuccessful adventurers, prompted me to start this blog in the first place. 

     

If I have the history right, the reason that Rogue needed a "clone" was that its developers (primarily Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold), in ironic defiance of later "roguelike" mores, never released the game's source code, even after the 1985 commercialization (published by Epyx) flopped. Individuals who wanted to keep the game in the public domain (and who arguably didn't have any right to do so) were forced to recreate it. Most went their own way with the concept, as with Moria (1983) and Hack (1984), but some sought more direct replication.

     

A random shot from Level 21 of the game. I've used a Potion of Monster Finding to identify the locations of monsters and avoid them.

     

The so-called Rogue Clone series starts with a 1986 effort by Tim Stoehr to create an open-source replica of the original game on UNIX mainframes. I've been able to find very little information about Stoehr, but I gather he was 27 years old at the time and employed at the University of California at Berkeley, where Michael Toy's final pre-commercial version of Rogue resided. Most modern ports of Rogue derive from Stoehr's recreation. For some reason, some of them got their own names (e.g., TileRogue, MacRogue, LinuxRogue) while others became known as Rogue Clone, starting with a 1988 DOS port by Steve VanDevender, a student at the University of Oregon. I find the copyright to "the Regents of the University of California" amusing; I can only imagine that the theory is that since Toy developed the game on UC Berkeley time and resources, the university "owns" the game, and thus it was acceptable for Stoehr to clone it. I suspect Epyx wouldn't have felt the same way, had the commercial version been more successful.

          

The command list seems daunting, but I found it easy to memorize and master.

      

After I failed to get VanDevender's version working, I resorted to version IV of the DOS version, which was originally released in 1993. The documentation sometimes calls it Rogue Clone IV, sometimes DOSRogue, and sometimes just Rogue. Frankly, I'm not sure it should be listed as a separate game, and I toyed with rejecting it as just a port of a game I've already covered. But I found myself sucked into it, and I reasoned that if I didn't adhere to permadeath, it wouldn't take that long to cover.

         

I'll probably never win another roguelike again "honestly." The 250 hours it took me to ascend in Nethack is still too fresh in my mind. Rogue took me 90 hours back in 2009. So in approaching Rogue Clone, I decided to see how far I could get with five characters and then how many reloads it would take, saving at the beginning of each level, for the sixth character. 

     

As much as I'd like to adhere to the spirit of permadeath, I don't have 80 hours to spend on this game.

     

All the features of pre-Hack roguelikes are here. The adventurer is a fighter looking to qualify for the local adventurer's guild. They've sent him into the Dungeons of Doom to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. Along the way, he fights a variety of monsters with a variety of equipment, always with the threat of starvation pushing him downwards, always with the threat of permadeath hanging over his head. There are no character classes, no attributes beyond strength, no spellbooks, no "intrinsics" or eating enemy corpses to gain them, no complex interactions among items, no stores, no altars or blessings, no backtracking to earlier levels--those are all elements of Hack and Nethack.

Levels are randomly generated using limited graphics. This version uses the same limited graphics as Epyx's mid-1980s release for DOS, but it includes a few characters that wouldn't have been available in the original, including a smiley face for the character and double-piped walls. Potions, wands, and scrolls are randomly assigned colors and other appearance factors for each new game. Identifying these items is a key part of the game, as once you know that a "blue potion" is a Potion of Extra Healing, you know what all blue potions do. I typically just quaff potions and read scrolls as soon as I find them, at least on early levels, as there are never enough identify scrolls to go around.

Every character starts with 12 hit points, 16 strength, 1 unit of food, a +1 ring mail, a +1 mace, and a +1 short bow with 25 arrows. Enemies don't drop items; they're just randomly seeded across the dungeon level. There is no correlation between the difficulty (depth) of the level and the items that you find on it. An early magic weapon or Ring of Slow Digestion does wonders. Gold is only useful for increasing your final score. 

     

The fates of a few characters.

     

Character #1 died on Level 3. There was a large room full of treasures and monsters, and I defeated all the monsters, rising to Level 5. Afterwards, sorting through the treasure, I read an unknown scroll and it turned out to be a Scroll of Monster Summoning. It summoned a rattlesnake, which killed me in two hits. Perhaps my "always-read-scrolls" strategy is flawed, but it's the only way to find Scrolls of Identification.

Character #2 died two rooms into the game on Level 1 when he ran prematurely into one of those rooms that will come to be called "zoos" in Nethack. An ice monster froze him to death.

     

Chester begins a new game in a room with two bats and a snake.

   

Character #3 got another zoo on the first level, but he was alerted to it by a Potion of Monster Seeing in the first room. Even though I tried to stay back and shoot arrows into the room, the monsters swarmed me and I died.

      

Character #4 did pretty well, bolstered by several food rations found on Level 1. He made it to Dungeon Level 9 / Character Level 7, but on Level 5, he unwisely drank a Potion of Hallucination and thus couldn't differentiate monsters. It never wore off. I tried to fight with missile weapons and wands to keep on the safe side, but on Level 7, I encountered something in a corridor that killed me in three hits. The game said it was a centaur, but that was probably just a product of my hallucination.

Character #5: Another goddamned zoo, this time on Level 6. I tried to flee but was run down and killed. I think a rattlesnake struck the killing blow.

     

That brought me to Phase II, in which I allowed myself to save on each level and reload if I died. I managed to win with six reloads. The character got lucky with a Ring of Slow Digestion (and plentiful food anyway) early in the game, but I never found a very good weapon or suit of armor. I eventually ended up using three Scrolls of Enchant Weapon on the mace I started with just because I never found a decent replacement. I found the Amulet of Yendor on Level 26 at character Level 12, which is 4 levels less than when I originally won Rogue in 2009. I suppose I was being more cautious back then, adhering to permadeath rules.

        

You'd think joining the Fighter's Guild is something that would happen at the beginning of a career, not the culmination of it.

       

There are a handful of things that I think are different about the Clone versus the original, although the "original" went through several permutations. I'm most familiar with the 1985 Epyx release, which may have notable differences from the version at UC Berkeley that Stoehr consulted. In any event, this is what I wrote down:

   

• Clone seems to feature a lot more snakes and rattlesnakes, both of which can weaken the character.

• There are a lot more "zoos" in the Clone.

     

Stumbling into a "zoo" on Level 6. It looks like a horribly unfair one (a jabberwock, a troll, a medusa, and two dragons on Level 6?!), but I think this character is suffering from a Potion of Hallucination.

     

• Hunger is perhaps slightly relaxed, or food more plentiful. None of my characters were ever in danger of starving, in sharp contrast to my experience with Rogue.

• I don't remember Rings and Scrolls of Protect Armor in the original. They save you from traps and Aquators which damage armor.

• There are no "dark" rooms in the Clone nor, therefore, means of light.

• The corridors in Clone frequently form mazes on lower levels. I don't remember these in the original.

    

In NetHack, this type of corridor configuration would suggest that a xorn or a dwarf with a pickaxe had been through here.

       

• I never found a Scroll of Mapping in the Clone.

• "U" is for Ur-viles in the original, black unicorns in the Clone.

• In the Clone, after you find the Amulet of Yendor and are ascending the levels, everything that looks like an item (e.g., potion, scroll) turns out to be a "Xeroc," this game's version of a mimic. I don't remember that in the original.

     

I created a video of key moments in the game, along with my narration, which really would have benefited from an antihistamine. 

     

        

I'm curious to see how this game GIMLETs compared to the original. It should be about equal, but it's been 12 years, and I applied the original rating retroactively (I created the GIMLET five months after I won Rogue).

   

• 0 points for the game world. You're barely told anything about the world and why you're in the dungeon.

• 2 points for character creation and development. "Creation" is only a name. For development, you have both traditional leveling and improvement of strength. Both do a good job making you feel more powerful as you advance.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. That all goes to "foes." The game's menagerie has a satisfying variety of special attacks that create different tactical situations. You want to shoot snakes from afar, take off your armor before fighting aquators, and avoid nymphs and dragons entirely.

• 3 points for magic and combat. There's no magic in Rogue, but the complex inventory system helps create a number of options for combat. Permadeath gives a weight to combat that you don't find in other games, and a smart player knows when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

• 5 points for equipment, easily the best part of the game. Not only is there a large variety of weapons, armor, rings, potions, and scrolls, they're completely randomized throughout the dungeon.

        

I consider my inventory options while in a room with a leprechaun.

      

• 1 point for economy. Gold just adds to your score, though. You can't actually spend it.

• 2 points for a main quest with no options.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics aren't advanced, but they do their job well. Until graphics get good enough to really "wow" me, I'd rather have unambiguous letters depicting my enemies than fuzzy icons. The control system is exactly what I want--each action mapped to a unique key. I hadn't played Rogue in years and yet I had no problem settling in immediately. There is no sound, alas, except a piercing error tone.

• 5 points for gameplay. Though linear, both Rogue and its clone offer a solid challenge at a reasonable length of time and are eminently replayable. 

   

That adds up to a final score of 24, exactly where I rated Rogue in 2010. Wow. There are some individual differences, though. I apparently thought the bare-bones store was worth at least a point in Rogue, but not the economy. I rated character development lower but gave a surprising 5 points to "graphics, sound, and interface." Maybe the Epyx version had some sound? Anyway, it's nice to see the GIMLET hold up in consistency.

    

Once you've experienced late roguelikes, like NetHack, which add so much more fun and complexity, Rogue can feel hopelessly quaint. But there's something to be said for the shorter, simpler game. It has a directness and briskness that's hard to capture in a quantitative rating. As much as I don't really think Rogue Clone is a separate game, I'm glad for this excuse to dip back in to the game that started the blog.