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Prior to electronic gaming people played board games.
Two of the most famous being Dungeons & Dragons in the States and Lord of the Rings in Europe.
The first computer game based on this fantasy genre' is Rogue for UNIX.
This required 16KB of RAM and in an era before computers had graphics.
Later, once powerful computers had ANSI graphics and 512KB of RAM, the game was upgraded.
A brief evolution of Rogue. Thousands of sites exist on the topic, so I won’t go into a lot of repeat here, but I thought you might enjoy a quick gaming history lesson.
Tolkein (Lord of the Rings and many other books), inspired the game Moria.
Zeb Cooke, and Gary Gygax, creators of Dungeons & Dragons, inspired the game Rogue.
Tolkein, from Europe, and Gygax (mainly credited for D&D), from America, detested one another.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is based upon Pixel Dungeon. Shattered Pixel Dungeon - Apps on Google Play
Pixel Dungeon is based upon BRogue.
Pixel Dungeon (Android)
BRogue is based on Angband. Releases · bilgincoskun/brogue-android-port
Angband is based on Moria and Larn and Nethack. Moria is Tolkein’s world, Nethack is D&D’ish, and Larn took a whole different theme. Angband (plus variants) - Apps on Google Play
This version includes several Roguelikes in one, including Sil-Q, the Android port of Moria.
The Android port of Larn (dLarn) is available at - https://download.appsonwindows.com/b/dLarn_free-v3.3-appsonwindows.com.apk?a=azJIZDl2QyttREIxend4L0tyblQwdz09&b=ZmlJL1paUmowSkdDY25XVy9SbGRlTDdreDhhWFc5WWk5NWJORXNrSWN5L1hOamFkWUZsZ21UVVVhSDlwWWtPa2hiT0VIZmQrQ2drTHZoSXJlZ3p4cjNnVlhvWDFSNnNocU1qM0xwcEVKcFk9&c=VkZzUkZ5QjlwQmxrOFJmSWNqR1EvZ3A5MDlSN3I3ZHk4WDFTZ1ZEVnFmQT0&d=4bf63e00
Moria is based on Rogue. Mines of Moria - Apps on Google Play
“Roguelike Classic” is the only APK I know to include direct ports of Moria, Larn, and Rogue to Android. Sadly, it uses .SO libraries that are no longer supported since Android 11. Mines of Moria does not hold very true to the original Dungeons of Moria. uMoria is not available for Android. Finally, I found Sil. This is an Android port of Moria that holds very true to Tolkein’s work, but it is for x86 hardware only. Fortunately, Sil was redone as Sil-Q (silk), and is included in the above Angband apk.
The original UNIX version of Rogue (1978-1980) will not run on modern devices, and the only 2 known Android ports of the 1984-1985 DOS version stopped working at Android 11. The DOS version can be run in an emulator such as MagicDOSBox on Android. The versions up to 1984 were primarily text based, or, if one had a computer powerful enough they could select an ANSI or ASCII sudo graphics mode. It can also be played online. One must register an account before playing. https://rlgallery.org:8080/
A modern Android port can be found in Dungeon Crawl. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb&hl=en
In 2015, one of the largest roundups of Roguelikes took place and more than 700 versions were archived. Roguelike Mega Collection 2015. Over 700 free roguelikes bundled together in a torrent. : foamed : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The anual 7 Day Roguelike Challenge adds about 10 new games each year.
About the same time, Pixel Dungeon was bursting onto the scene for Android and not even mentioned in that archive at the time.
A decade later, and there is now well over 300 version’s of Pixel Dungeon! That makes for over a thousand roguelikes.
Dial-up Multi User Dungeon’s (MUD’s), network roguelikes such as Diablo, and MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft are also evolution’s of the original Rogue.
*Edit
Although Nethack wasn’t a part of PD, it has been a major influence on all Roguelikes. As I mentioned it, I am posting the Android version.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tbd.NetHack
A M.U.D. by definition is text based “graphics” in the style of original Rogue (and ANSII Pixel Dungeon).
Discworld still maintains an active M.U.D. that uses a browser based portal.
Discworld MUD on DecafMUD Client
A tile based M.U.D. would be called a M.O.R.P.G. such as Diablo. As the internet advanced, M.M.O.R.P.G. became standard such as World of Warcraft or Ragnarock Online.
While title based RPGs add eye-candy, MUDs can be run on anything from Android to Atari with minimal resource requirements.
MUDs were after all originally created for UNIX and dialup B.B.S.s. I was a big fan of Zugg’s MUD.
Trying to cram 45+ years of history of one of the most expansive computer games ever is not easy to do in a few paragraphs.
I didn’t even try going into RL genre’s, such as Tacticle RL’s vs Adventure RL’s or Final Fantasy, Gauntlet, Castlevania, Tower Defenders, Rogue-lites, etc.
From my days of working with Tandy and porting Rogue to the CoCo3, to Rogue’s Quest on Windows, to the work I do now on PD’s, I’ve always loved the game.
Dragon articles -
For example, he says:
I found the “Ring Trilogy” . . . well, tedious. The action dragged, and it smacked of an allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler’s Nazi evil. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor’s dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tomes that I took nearly three weeks to finish them.
And then later on:
Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games. The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke . . . poof! Nothing usable there.
In addition, several civil action suits were filed between the two, the most notable when Tolkein sued TSR over copyright infringement.
“During the first few years after the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1973, Gary Gygax, who had the strongest impact on the fantasy elements of the game, denied any direct influences from fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien. Many players recognized immediately that numerous D&D character and creature names came directly from the books. But it took until 1977 for intellectual property lawyers from a firm which had licensed the rights to Tolkien’s work to send a cease-and-desist order, at which point TSR Inc. (then known as Tactical Studies Rules) Gygax’s publishing house, famously changed the names of characters with ties to those works. Thus, in basic D&D “hobbit” became “halfling,” and “ent” became “treant."
Beyond the press, media, and courts, we, the members of Evermoore Knight’s (a group of people who gamed and playtested with Gygax), and I, who did work for TSR, Paladium, G.U.R.P.S. and other gaming systems, knew at a personal level the arguments that took place. Although to the fans the two systems, LotR and D&D, bare a strong resemblance, what inspired them and the creator’s behind them were polar opposites.
(Of course, all that paled in comparison to how much Gygax’s wife would come to want him dead, his life work destroyed, and D&D buried forever. She nearly succeeded too, creating Wizard’s of the Coast and turning D&D and many other board games into indiscernible D20 garbage, wherein if not for a title one can’t tell the difference from D&D, Shadowrun, etc. But that is a whole other matter and unrelated to Pixel Dungeon.)
You are correct in that face-to-face meetings between Tolkein and Gygax were limited. As the articles themself point out, the arguements and lawsuits went well past their meetings and even past their lives.
“Lorraine Dille Williams is an American businesswoman. She was hired as manager of TSR, Inc. by company co-founder Gary Gygax in 1984, and was in charge of the table game company from 1986 to 1997. Williams gained control of TSR in October 1985 when the Blume brothers sold her their controlling shares of the company. It is estimated that as early as 1994, she (and several others) plotted with card game designer, Wizard’s of the Coast, to overthrow TSR. In 1996, an “unexpectedly” high cost of returned (unsold) fiction books and an expensive, unsuccessful foray into the collectible card game market caused a cash flow squeeze, and Williams sold TSR to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.”
Plenty of news articles have been published on this. Not so widely known is how Gail, Gary’s second wife, a materialistic gold digger, was the driving force behind the great killing of board games, and worked with Williams and publicist Rose Estes and Peter Adkinson to take control over all of Gary’s assets and run D&D into the ground, replacing it with card games and the later d20 system.
Ernie, Gary’s son, has given plenty of interviews about how Tolkien and TSR fought, and in company name, continue to fight one another to this day. Too, Luke, another of Gary’s sons, has also reported on how his stepmother sold D&D to WotC for $30M (not the publicly reported $11M) and converted most of it into WotC shares, making Gail the largest share holder of the company and saving it from failure. In 2015, Gail actually sued Gary’s son’s over them attempting to keep D&D going in its classic form. Unlike Gary’s first wife who support him, Gail just wanted money. Ironically, Gail’s hatred of D&D and her subversive share control of WotC to destroy tabletop gaming backfired as millions of fans worldwide attacked her, Tom DeSanto sued her, and some have even tried to kill her. WotC bought out her shares and although many of the lawsuits were dropped, they left Gail nearly penniless.
Gail Gygax and WotC are world wide attributed with the intentional destruction of D&D (the original format) and many table top games.
A great many backstabbing deals took place that the general public doesn’t know about, and most never will.
Hack like it's 1989.
Two of the most famous being Dungeons & Dragons in the States and Lord of the Rings in Europe.
The first computer game based on this fantasy genre' is Rogue for UNIX.
This required 16KB of RAM and in an era before computers had graphics.
Later, once powerful computers had ANSI graphics and 512KB of RAM, the game was upgraded.
A brief evolution of Rogue. Thousands of sites exist on the topic, so I won’t go into a lot of repeat here, but I thought you might enjoy a quick gaming history lesson.
Tolkein (Lord of the Rings and many other books), inspired the game Moria.
Zeb Cooke, and Gary Gygax, creators of Dungeons & Dragons, inspired the game Rogue.
Tolkein, from Europe, and Gygax (mainly credited for D&D), from America, detested one another.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is based upon Pixel Dungeon. Shattered Pixel Dungeon - Apps on Google Play
Pixel Dungeon is based upon BRogue.
Pixel Dungeon (Android)
BRogue is based on Angband. Releases · bilgincoskun/brogue-android-port
Angband is based on Moria and Larn and Nethack. Moria is Tolkein’s world, Nethack is D&D’ish, and Larn took a whole different theme. Angband (plus variants) - Apps on Google Play
This version includes several Roguelikes in one, including Sil-Q, the Android port of Moria.
The Android port of Larn (dLarn) is available at - https://download.appsonwindows.com/b/dLarn_free-v3.3-appsonwindows.com.apk?a=azJIZDl2QyttREIxend4L0tyblQwdz09&b=ZmlJL1paUmowSkdDY25XVy9SbGRlTDdreDhhWFc5WWk5NWJORXNrSWN5L1hOamFkWUZsZ21UVVVhSDlwWWtPa2hiT0VIZmQrQ2drTHZoSXJlZ3p4cjNnVlhvWDFSNnNocU1qM0xwcEVKcFk9&c=VkZzUkZ5QjlwQmxrOFJmSWNqR1EvZ3A5MDlSN3I3ZHk4WDFTZ1ZEVnFmQT0&d=4bf63e00
Moria is based on Rogue. Mines of Moria - Apps on Google Play
“Roguelike Classic” is the only APK I know to include direct ports of Moria, Larn, and Rogue to Android. Sadly, it uses .SO libraries that are no longer supported since Android 11. Mines of Moria does not hold very true to the original Dungeons of Moria. uMoria is not available for Android. Finally, I found Sil. This is an Android port of Moria that holds very true to Tolkein’s work, but it is for x86 hardware only. Fortunately, Sil was redone as Sil-Q (silk), and is included in the above Angband apk.
The original UNIX version of Rogue (1978-1980) will not run on modern devices, and the only 2 known Android ports of the 1984-1985 DOS version stopped working at Android 11. The DOS version can be run in an emulator such as MagicDOSBox on Android. The versions up to 1984 were primarily text based, or, if one had a computer powerful enough they could select an ANSI or ASCII sudo graphics mode. It can also be played online. One must register an account before playing. https://rlgallery.org:8080/
A modern Android port can be found in Dungeon Crawl. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb&hl=en
In 2015, one of the largest roundups of Roguelikes took place and more than 700 versions were archived. Roguelike Mega Collection 2015. Over 700 free roguelikes bundled together in a torrent. : foamed : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The anual 7 Day Roguelike Challenge adds about 10 new games each year.
About the same time, Pixel Dungeon was bursting onto the scene for Android and not even mentioned in that archive at the time.
A decade later, and there is now well over 300 version’s of Pixel Dungeon! That makes for over a thousand roguelikes.
Dial-up Multi User Dungeon’s (MUD’s), network roguelikes such as Diablo, and MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft are also evolution’s of the original Rogue.
*Edit
Although Nethack wasn’t a part of PD, it has been a major influence on all Roguelikes. As I mentioned it, I am posting the Android version.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tbd.NetHack
A M.U.D. by definition is text based “graphics” in the style of original Rogue (and ANSII Pixel Dungeon).
Discworld still maintains an active M.U.D. that uses a browser based portal.
Discworld MUD on DecafMUD Client
A tile based M.U.D. would be called a M.O.R.P.G. such as Diablo. As the internet advanced, M.M.O.R.P.G. became standard such as World of Warcraft or Ragnarock Online.
While title based RPGs add eye-candy, MUDs can be run on anything from Android to Atari with minimal resource requirements.
MUDs were after all originally created for UNIX and dialup B.B.S.s. I was a big fan of Zugg’s MUD.
Trying to cram 45+ years of history of one of the most expansive computer games ever is not easy to do in a few paragraphs.
I didn’t even try going into RL genre’s, such as Tacticle RL’s vs Adventure RL’s or Final Fantasy, Gauntlet, Castlevania, Tower Defenders, Rogue-lites, etc.
From my days of working with Tandy and porting Rogue to the CoCo3, to Rogue’s Quest on Windows, to the work I do now on PD’s, I’ve always loved the game.
Dragon magazine reported on several occassions wherein the two met and banged heads. Although fans rarely saw them argue, it happened.
Dragon articles -
For example, he says:
I found the “Ring Trilogy” . . . well, tedious. The action dragged, and it smacked of an allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler’s Nazi evil. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor’s dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tomes that I took nearly three weeks to finish them.
And then later on:
Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games. The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke . . . poof! Nothing usable there.
In addition, several civil action suits were filed between the two, the most notable when Tolkein sued TSR over copyright infringement.
“During the first few years after the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1973, Gary Gygax, who had the strongest impact on the fantasy elements of the game, denied any direct influences from fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien. Many players recognized immediately that numerous D&D character and creature names came directly from the books. But it took until 1977 for intellectual property lawyers from a firm which had licensed the rights to Tolkien’s work to send a cease-and-desist order, at which point TSR Inc. (then known as Tactical Studies Rules) Gygax’s publishing house, famously changed the names of characters with ties to those works. Thus, in basic D&D “hobbit” became “halfling,” and “ent” became “treant."
Beyond the press, media, and courts, we, the members of Evermoore Knight’s (a group of people who gamed and playtested with Gygax), and I, who did work for TSR, Paladium, G.U.R.P.S. and other gaming systems, knew at a personal level the arguments that took place. Although to the fans the two systems, LotR and D&D, bare a strong resemblance, what inspired them and the creator’s behind them were polar opposites.
(Of course, all that paled in comparison to how much Gygax’s wife would come to want him dead, his life work destroyed, and D&D buried forever. She nearly succeeded too, creating Wizard’s of the Coast and turning D&D and many other board games into indiscernible D20 garbage, wherein if not for a title one can’t tell the difference from D&D, Shadowrun, etc. But that is a whole other matter and unrelated to Pixel Dungeon.)
You are correct in that face-to-face meetings between Tolkein and Gygax were limited. As the articles themself point out, the arguements and lawsuits went well past their meetings and even past their lives.
“Lorraine Dille Williams is an American businesswoman. She was hired as manager of TSR, Inc. by company co-founder Gary Gygax in 1984, and was in charge of the table game company from 1986 to 1997. Williams gained control of TSR in October 1985 when the Blume brothers sold her their controlling shares of the company. It is estimated that as early as 1994, she (and several others) plotted with card game designer, Wizard’s of the Coast, to overthrow TSR. In 1996, an “unexpectedly” high cost of returned (unsold) fiction books and an expensive, unsuccessful foray into the collectible card game market caused a cash flow squeeze, and Williams sold TSR to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.”
Plenty of news articles have been published on this. Not so widely known is how Gail, Gary’s second wife, a materialistic gold digger, was the driving force behind the great killing of board games, and worked with Williams and publicist Rose Estes and Peter Adkinson to take control over all of Gary’s assets and run D&D into the ground, replacing it with card games and the later d20 system.
Ernie, Gary’s son, has given plenty of interviews about how Tolkien and TSR fought, and in company name, continue to fight one another to this day. Too, Luke, another of Gary’s sons, has also reported on how his stepmother sold D&D to WotC for $30M (not the publicly reported $11M) and converted most of it into WotC shares, making Gail the largest share holder of the company and saving it from failure. In 2015, Gail actually sued Gary’s son’s over them attempting to keep D&D going in its classic form. Unlike Gary’s first wife who support him, Gail just wanted money. Ironically, Gail’s hatred of D&D and her subversive share control of WotC to destroy tabletop gaming backfired as millions of fans worldwide attacked her, Tom DeSanto sued her, and some have even tried to kill her. WotC bought out her shares and although many of the lawsuits were dropped, they left Gail nearly penniless.
Gail Gygax and WotC are world wide attributed with the intentional destruction of D&D (the original format) and many table top games.
A great many backstabbing deals took place that the general public doesn’t know about, and most never will.
Hack like it's 1989.
