When playing Rogue, I’m almost as into the game as when playing an uptodate game like Diablo. The atmosphere is almost the same. How on earth did you achieve that?

“I don’t know. In a lot of ways, I think playing Rogue is to playing Diablo as reading a book is to watching a movie. When reading a book, you don’t see the characters or special effects or action, but you imagine it in your mind, and the effect of the book is just as strong as the effect of a movie.

The difference is that you get to make up the images in your own head.

Just as some people prefer reading to watching a movie, there are still some (including myself) who prefer Rogue to the newer, more graphically intense games. —I talked with Glen Wichman about Rogue! (Cybergoth)

Found while Googling for information on Rogue, which I found on a computer in the graphics lab at the University of Virginia drama building back in the 1980s.

Long live Rodney the Adventurer, who looks like this: @

(See also “A Natural History of the @ Sign,” which is an amusing read, though where it should cite Rogue, it instead cites NetHack, mistakenly dating it from the 1960s.)