Forums > Game Forums > Rogue > Public Domain or Commercial?

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Indra was here (20756) on 10/26/2007 7:38 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Version I'm playing says on the main title "public domain version." Released in 1984.

Quote from the readme file: "The public domain version of rogue now distributed with Berkeley UNIX was written by Timothy Stoehr."

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66274) on 10/26/2007 7:54 PM · Permalink · Report

it's another case of mainframe software not being commercial; back in 1984 there weren't a lot of unix users 8)

however, the same people did make a serious push at selling it to popular home microcomputer users through Epyx.

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General Error (4329) on 11/6/2007 4:50 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Hehe, so you followed my advice, Indra :-)

I think you're playing some cracked Rogue version. There's one around which only differs from the Epyx version (or the Artificial Intelligence version) in the copyright string, which says Public Domain instead of (C) Artificial Design / Epyx. (I'm not so sure here & now, I've got all the relevant data at home.)

Anyway, the original Rogue was first released for Unix as public domain, then commercialized by Artificial Intelligence (a company founded by the people behind Rogue to market the game) in 1983, but as it didn't work out so well, they gave the rights to Epyx around 1984/1985.

Then again, you might be playing a Rogue Clone version, because that was written by Tim Stoehr, who has nothing to do with the original Rogue. (EDIT: This was freeware from the beginning, but the beginning was 1986, not 1984).

Yeah, the history of Roguelikes is pretty confusing... :-)