As I recall, Rogue began to appear in late 1980 or early 81 at Berkeley. I primarily remember it on the Vax. But I thought Toy et al originally wrote it at UCSB and then it came to UCB. It was written for the Arnold curses, and served as the first major application to test it out.

I loved that game. Still do, although I rarely find time to play it anymore. It's widely available on web emulators these days, just search for "play rogue online". It will likely be the color DOS version, but it plays roughly the same.

The source was widely available and widely customized. I think I brought a copy with me to Bell Labs in 1981 where Bob Flandrena eventually sprouted the "brogue" variant. Some of the monsters could eat into the walls between rooms, and when there was a line of several chasing you down a hallway, one or two of them would pull around to pass... Brogue worked on my new curses, it was in effect part of the test suite.

Eric, of course, is the authority noting that ing70 was "i" and, as I recall, ingvax was "j".

    Mary Ann

On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 9:07 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 8:15 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

It is; it looks like it was first distributed with 4.3BSD-Tahoe. The sources there are listed as "public domain rogue", but I'm not sure about the provenance of that code.

That sounds right, you should ask Ken Arnold offline, I bet he had a better idea.  He would have made them available to Keith.

Great idea. I reached out on linked in, but don't have an email address for Ken. Anyone have his contact information?

I'm curious if e.g. Mary Ann has any thoughts here, since she took over maintaining curses at some point and might have gotten some of the inside story?

Thanks for the responses so far, all.

        - Dan C.