Hey look! I'm an @ sign!

Think mainframes and serial terminals, character based displays, and single letter monsters. Then think of moving your persona around with cursor keys in a 2-dimensional, 2-color screen. Now think "I am an @ sign", because in Rogue, that was what you were.

For those that remember playing Rogue or Hack, you probably also remember the wild and wooly days of hacking mainframes, BBS's, and everything you could find. You also remember when there was no Internet, 300 baud was a fast modem and a color display meant instead of black and white you had green or amber text on your screen.

But for those of you who don't know, Rogue was a character based "action" game played on terminals and later the IBM PC and then Mac. It was also ported to Atari ST and Amiga. While on some of those platforms the character set may have included smiley faces and other symbols, I still like the true-to-the-original look of ASCII characters. And I like being an @ sign, thank you very much.

Rogue, and later Hack (and a whole slew of knock-offs), had all the elements of role playing adventure games. It only lacked graphics, though some might say that is not a negative thing :-)

I keep toying with the idea of writing my own Hack game. I know there are a zillion versions out there already, but it is something I always thought of doing, when I got time. And still I do not have the time. But its still fun to tinker with the idea. Maybe I can embed one in the next cell phone code I work on :-)

Who knows, other programmers like me may have already embedded one in some device you already use.