Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I found, via slashdot, this great article on the history of Rogue, a character-based dungeons-and-dragons computer game from the early 80s, originally developed for UNIX.

While I had been playing paper-based RPGs with my friends and computer-based D&D games (like the Alternate Reality or Ultima series on my Atari 800XL) all through high school, I didn’t encounter Rogue until college. This makes sense since that would have been the first time I encountered a UNIX system (actually, though, I was playing it on the university’s VAX).

Despite the fact that its graphics were limited (your character was @ and monsters were letters like ‘Z’ for zombie or ‘V’ for vampire) and the controls were a little hard to get used to (H and L for left/right, J and K for up/down), it was a fun game to play because it was different every time: you never knew what monsters you were going to encounter (watch out for those monster party rooms!) or what cool weapons, potions, or scrolls you would find.

My daughter loves playing iRogue on my Treo (although should I be disturbed that she likes playing as undead? 😀 ). There’s even an iPhone version. Portable retro gaming at its best.