Game Source Code Release: Rogue from the PDP-10 circa 1982 #VintigeComputing #Gaming #RetroGaming #DnD

ECL Rogue on PDP-10 on TOPS-20 John Relph

Another game from the past has been found, complete with source code! Rogue, which was the original Dungeons & Dragons of the 1980s on a number of computers and operating systems. Similar games like Hack, Nethack, Moria and others were inspired or derivatives of Rogue.

Thanks to the efforts of Lars Brinkhoff, one of the original authors for Rogue, John Relph, has contributed all the files for a DEC PDP-10 running the TOPS-20 operating system. This version was written in Pascal! No Unix or C in sight here.

You may freely copy and use the sources to ECL Rogue (for TOPS-20), as long as credit is given to the Authors (Gary Craig, Oscar Erickson, John Relph, and Jay Skeer). In specific, we wish to have our names credited in the version (“v”) command. Please see the file Rogue.Policy for more details. In addition, we would like to receive copies of any new versions of Rogue created from our sources. That way we can play it on other machines, too. If you would like, we can let you know of any new versions, also.

See this new GitHub repository for all the files for this classic game! See the Wikipedia article for more history.

(ed: yes, I am biased, yes I played Rogue from 1983 to present on a number of computers, but hey, this is the Internet).

Do you remember Rogue or other similar games? Let us know in the comments below!


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1 Comment

  1. Yes, our Vax 750s were dedicated Rogue machines whose spare cycles were used to compile Un*x kernels in the background.

    Them wuz the daze!

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