The classic BSD Rogue: 26 levels, 26 monsters, and the Amulet of Yendor.

Rogue 5.4 is the Berkeley (BSD) version of the 1980 original by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold, the game that gave roguelikes their name. Twenty-six levels, one monster for each letter, random items to identify by use, and the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom. Bring it back up to win. Death is permanent.

• About the game
• Keyboard controls
• Saving your game
• Tips
• New player's guide
• History & differences
• Playing in the browser

About the game

Rogue is where it started: one screen per level, no town, no shops and no way back up until you hold the Amulet of Yendor from level 26. Levels are thrown away when you leave.

• No classes and no spells: everything comes from items. Potions, scrolls, rings and wands look different every game and are identified by use.
• Each capital letter is one monster, from the aquator (A) to the zombie (Z); deeper letters appear deeper down.

Keyboard controls

Essential keys

Saving your game

• Saving is automatic. The game is stored in this browser (IndexedDB) every two minutes while it waits for your next command, and whenever you switch to another tab or window. Reloading the page continues from there.
• S (answer y) saves and ends the session, as in the original; reload the page (or press Play again) to continue.
• When your character dies or you quit with Q, the save is deleted: death is final.
• Each browser keeps one game. New game deletes it and starts over.
• Export save downloads the save file; Import save loads one. Use them for a backup or to move a game to another browser or computer.
• Window layout, zoom and the sound switch is stored in the same browser storage.
• Private/incognito windows and "clear site data" delete the stored game. Export first if it matters.

Tips

• Keep your armour on and your weapon wielded; the starting mace and ring mail are good enough for the first levels.
• Eat when "Hungry" appears; food is scarce, so don't waste it.
• Rust monsters (R) and aquators (A) ruin armour: fight them without it or avoid them.
• Leprechauns (L) steal gold and nymphs (N) steal items; kill them before they reach you.
• Try unknown scrolls when there is nothing near; potions are riskier.

New player's guide

Your first steps

1. You start with food, ring mail, a mace, a bow and arrows. x explores; fight by walking into monsters.
2. Pick up everything (walking over it picks it up). Gold (*) is your score.
3. > walks to the known stairs and goes down.
4. Rest (.) or search (s) to heal; eat (e) when Hungry shows.

History & differences

Where it all started. Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman wrote Rogue at UC Santa Cruz in 1980, using Ken Arnold's new curses library to draw on the whole screen. Arnold joined them at Berkeley, and Rogue spread with BSD Unix. Its name now stands for the whole genre: random levels, permadeath, items identified by use.

This version. 5.4 (1985) is the last Berkeley Rogue, shipped with 4.3BSD. Earlier 5.x versions came with 4.2BSD, so this is the Rogue most Unix users knew. Its source was freed under the BSD licence later.

The big changes since 3.6.

• A new monster alphabet (5.2 and 5.3 still had 3.6's): the aquator (rusts armour), ice monster (freezes you), venus flytrap, medusa (confuses you with its gaze), xeroc (the mimic, renamed), black unicorn, jabberwock, griffin, phantom (invisible), quagga, kestrel, rattlesnake and emu.
• New commands: f/F fight until something happens, ^ identifies a trap, and more options.
• More scrolls (18 kinds instead of 16), a cleaned-up save format and scoring.

What is unique about it. It is the reference Rogue: the version described in the "A Guide to the Dungeons of Doom" manual and the one Rogue PC and most modern clones copy.

Trivia.

• Rog-O-Matic (Appel, Hamey, Jacobson and Mauldin, Carnegie Mellon, from 1981) was an expert system that played Rogue on its own. In a three-week test in 1983 it had a higher median score than any of the 15 best Rogue players at CMU, and it once brought the Amulet back to the surface.
• "Yendor" is "Rodney" backwards.
• Tim Stoehr's Rogue Clone (1987) rewrote 5.3 from scratch so the game could be shipped freely; it later replaced the original in the BSDs.

The family at a glance (numbers counted in each game's source):

Playing in the browser

• Windows: the tiled map on top; Messages (with history) and Status below on the left; Inventory on the right. Help, lists and menus pop up over the map.
• Resize windows by dragging the gaps between them; a window's contents shrink to fit when it is too small. Reset windows puts everything back.
• Zoom: A− / A+ on the Map title bar (shown on hover) change the size of the map tiles (up to 96 px); when the map is bigger than its window it scrolls to follow you. Hover over a text window's title to show its A− / A+ buttons.
• Sound effects are off until you switch them on under Audio ▾. They are synthesized for this port (Rogue 5.4 has no sound of its own); there is no music.
• Keys: hjklyubn, the arrow keys or the numeric keypad move you; capital letters run.
• Browsers keep a few shortcuts for themselves (Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+N, and Cmd shortcuts on a Mac), so those never reach the game.
• If the game ever crashes, a message appears at the top; reload the page to continue from the last autosave.

About this version

• Based on Rogue 5.4.5 (rogueforge) (Michael Toy, Ken Arnold, Glenn Wichman).
• Tiles: NetHack (default) or DawnLike by DragonDePlatino with DawnBringer's palette (CC BY 4.0), sprites picked by name via Tommy Ettinger's DawnLikeAtlas (DawnLike|a: animated); switch with the Tiles button.
• Original source: RoguelikeRestorationProject/rogue5.4, commit 9d0dccc
• Our changes (port, auto-explore, command menu, web build): memmaker/rogue5.4, compared with the original