grw (04/07/83)
For those of you who have been wondering, here is, to the best
of my recollection, a history of the development of Rogue:
'Way back in the fall of 1980, Michael Toy and I were sharing
an apartment in Santa Cruz, Ca. The apartment was equipped with
a Sol micro w/disk drive, a Sprint 5 printer, a 1200 baud modem, an
adm3a and a pdp-11/03, so we were pretty well set up. But I digress
(already). Michael & I were both on staff at UCSC, Michael as a
systems programmer, I as a consultant. It was at this point that
Michael got ahold of the "curses" terminal-independant cursor routines
from Berkeley. This package was written by Ken Arnold.
Michael wrote a few spifty programs with curses and then said
"what else can we do with this?" -- we more or less simultaneously
came up with the idea of a visual D&D-type adventure, and immediately
began programming.
We also immediately ran into problems figuring out an algorithm
for placing rooms on the map. This algorithm was provided by graphics
& math wizard Peter Broadwell.
Michael and I continued to work together on the program throughout
fall quarter. He did most of the actual coding as I was a relative
novice with C at the time, but the ideas ran pretty much 50-50.
Then Michael got offered a job on the Arpa-Vax project at Berkeley.
He went there winter of '81, and I stayed in Santa Cruz. For a while
I continued to develop rogue independantly at Santa Cruz, but our
changes kept overlapping so I left it to him, and was out of the
general rogue picture for a while, aside from making a lot of good
suggestions which were sometimes heeded, and sometimes not.
At Berkeley, Michael met Ken Arnold. Michael & Ken continued the
development of rogue together, with Ken making the program much cleaner
and faster.
In fall of 1981, Michael moved to Italy to work for Olivetti. There
he continued to work on Rogue, as Ken did here. Michael added mazes in
Italy, while Ken added the "follow turnings" option in the USA. These
changes were incorporated in rogue 5.3.
This is to the best of my knowledge completely true and factual,
with a minimum of editorial comment thrown in.
Michael is, by the way, the single person most often credited with
authorship of rogue, as in the Science '82 article on hackers.
Other people whose help on rogue has been invaluable include Jon
Lane and Mark Stein.
The name "rogue" was my idea.
I hope this clears up things for you, and I hope I wasn't too
long winded.
-Glenn R. Wichman