Rogue

Current status: Work in progress

This is a portable version of the classic Unix game Rogue, forked from the version distributed with NetBSD. It’s intended to be portable across Unix-like systems and maintains a user-specific high score table, in contrast to the systemwide, multiuser score list used by the traditional BSD Rogue.

Requirements and Installation

The program requires some version of the curses library, such as ncurses. Run make to compile the program and make install to install it. The program is installed under /usr/local by default and thus must be installed as the root user, but the location can be customized by editing the makefile.

This repository also includes a copy of “A Guide to the Dungeons of Doom,” part of the classic UNIX User’s Supplementary Documents, in USD.doc. This requires groff or another troff-compatible program, specified in the makefile. Run make from the USD.doc directory to generate rogue.txt and less -R rogue.txt to read the document.

History and Source

The original Rogue was created around the year 1980 by Glenn Wichman, Michael Toy, and Ken Arnold. The version distributed in this repository is derived from a clone created by Timothy Stoehr. The source code was copied from the trunk branch of the official NetBSD src Git mirror in 2026. The file HISTORY contains a copy of the Git log for the project directory.

License

The original source files contain both a three-clause BSD license and an informal license statement that forbids commercial use. (The USD document describes the program as “public domain,” but this is obviously inaccurate.) New code added in this repository is licensed under an ISC-style license. See the LICENSE file for details.