The game's original concept was unique and rich enough that decades later, it has an entire genre of computer games named after it, commonly called "Roguelike Games", and today still attracts a loyal following and lively community and newsgroups.

What is so special about the game that it still attract gamers for over a decade? Many revoluationary features that have become the norm in today's RPGs. Rogue is an ASCII-interfaced (i.e. all text or text-charater based), turn-based, single player dungeon crawl. Its attraction lies neither in plot nor puzzles (both of which are paper-thin... you are a treasure hunter not unlike the Adventurer in Infocom's Zork), but in the seemingly endless combinations of features, a wide variety of monsters and loot, and randomly generated dungeon that guarantees infinite replayability. In short, Rogue is to RPGs what Crowther's mainframe Adventure is to adventures: a revolutionary game that spawned a genre. It may not stand the test of time very well after all these years, but for those who want to get a sense of where today's blockbuster dungeon crawls the likes of Diablo descend from, Rogue is it. Two thumbs up!

Note: if you are interested in the rare commercial version of this game, check out Rogue (Epyx) also reviewed on this site.