ToME WikiRogue is the game which started it all.
The purpose of Rogue was to descend into the Dungeons of Doom, defeat monsters and find treasure and come back with the amulet of Yendor. Dungeons of Doom are a randomly generated maze of rooms or corridors connecting them. Each level of dungeon has a staircase leading to a lower dungeon level. The dungeon has traps, secret doors, treasure and of course monsters, which will attack the player character on sight. In the beginning of the game the character is equipped with some food, elf-crafted armor, enchanted (magical) mace, a bow and arrows. The player can get new equipment finding it from dungeon floor or by defeating monsters. Some monsters drop treasure when they are killed. The game featured various kinds of magical equipment, most of them are useful in some way, but some of them are harmful (e.g. cursed). They player can find out if an item is enchanted or cursed and useful or harmful by trying it (which can be dangerous) or using an identify spell.
University of Berkeley was the home of of a particularly popular version of UNIX called BSD (= Berkeley Standard Distribution). The BSD UNIX distribution 4.2 in 1980 included a binary version of Rogue. Suddenly Rogue was available on university computers all over the world. At that time there was no other freely available game like it. Over the next three years, Rogue became the most popular game on college campuses.
Later on Michael Toy and Jon Lane started a company called A.I.Design. One of their first projects was to port Rogue from UNIX to the IBM PC. Marketing and packaging of the game was later sold to Epyx. Rogue was also ported to other machines such as Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, ZX Spectrum. The source code of original Rogue was never released, but you can find several Rogue clones along with source code for them.