The "granddaddy" of dungeon hack RPGs, Rogue has a long history that dates back to the 1970's. It was first released as a test application for UNIX, and quickly garnered popularity among system administrators and computer science students. It was such a popular "test" that enterprising UNIX admins and users distributed it, expanded it, imitated it, and ported it to their home computers.

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 "Roguelikes", and still today attracts a loyal following and lively communities and newsgroups.

What was so special about it? 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 but in the seemingly endless combinations of elements, a wide variety of monsters and loot, and randomly generated dungeon that guarantees infinite replayability. 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!"