Commercial ports of the game for a range of personal computers were made by Toy, Wichman, and Jon Lane under the company A.I.

Along the way, players can collect treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items.

Rogue is turn-based, taking place on a square grid represented in ASCII or other fixed character set, allowing players to have time to determine the best move to survive.

Toy later worked at University of California, Berkeley where he met Arnold, the lead developer of the curses programming library that Rogue was dependent on to mimic a graphical display.

It inspired programmers to develop a number of similar titles such as Hack (1982/1984) and Moria (1983), though as Toy, Wichman, and Arnold had not released the source code at this time, these new games introduced different variations atop Rogue.

The goal is to fight a way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor ("Rodney" spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface.

Unlike most adventure games of the time of the original design, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within are randomly generated.

Toy took interest in the text-based Star Trek game (1971), which represented space combat through characters on screen, and required players to make strategic decisions each turn.

Toy took to learn programming and recreate this game on other computer systems that he could access, including the Processor Technology Sol-20 and the Atari 400.

The two came up with a narrative, that of an adventurer setting out to explore and find treasures in the Dungeons of Doom, specifically the Amulet of Yendor (a renowned wizard in the game whose name is derived from "Rodney" spelled backwards).

[3] Wichman came up with the name Rogue, based on the idea that unlike the party-based systems of Dungeons & Dragons, the player's character was going at this alone.

[3][4] As Toy was more proficient at programming, he led the development of the game in the C language, which generally produced fast, effective code.

[3] For the dungeon, they found initial attempts at purely random generation to be weak, in some cases having a stairway ending up in a room inaccessible to players.

[3][1] The two started testing the game with other students at UCSC, finding that despite the limited graphics, players were filling the gaps with their own imagination.

[3][4] Prior to Toy's arrival at UCB, Ken Arnold had gotten to play Rogue, which had been distributed as an executable across many of the UC campuses.

Among its fans included UNIX's co-developer Ken Thompson working at Bell Labs; Dennis Ritchie had joked at the time that Rogue was "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history".

Lane took advantage of the more graphical Code page 437 character set on PC to expand the number of symbols to represent the dungeon, such as using a happy-face ☺ for the player-character.

They also took steps to avoid potential copyright issues with TSR, the company that owned Dungeons & Dragons at that time, by changing the names of monsters like kobolds that were unique to that game.

[6][1] Toy and Lane initially funded the publishing, distribution, and promotion of the IBM PC version themselves, and though they continued to gain sales, they were only able to break even as they lacked the power of a larger distributor.

Toy and Lane recognized that they could implement improved graphics with the Macintosh version, but neither had art skills to make the icons.

Much of the Macintosh version was developed in concert by Toy, Wichman, and Lane in a cabin at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort.

Wichman enlisted help from an Epyx in-house artist, Michael Kosaka, to create the art on the Atari ST version.

[6] In 1988, the budget software publisher Mastertronic released a commercial port of Rogue for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers,[8] and ZX Spectrum.

This version includes modern features, such as display filters, leaderboards, a choice of soundtracks, new achievements, and a save function.

One such program, Rog-O-Matic, was developed in 1981 to play and win the game, by four graduate students in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh: Andrew Appel, Leonard Harney, Guy Jacobson and Michael Loren Mauldin.

[16] In a test during a three-week period in 1983, Rog-O-Matic had a higher median score than any of the 15 top Rogue players at the Carnegie-Mellon University and, at the University of Texas at Austin, found the Amulet of Yendor in a passageway on the 26th level, continued on to the surface and emerged into the light of day.Ken Arnold said that he liked to make "sure that every subsequent version of Rogue had a new feature in it that broke Rogue-O-Matic".

[17] Nevertheless, it remains a noted study in expert system design and led to the development of other game-playing programs, typically called "bots".

[18] In March 1984, Jerry Pournelle named the version of Rogue for the IBM PC his "game of the month", describing it as "a real time trap.

[17] Toy, Wichman, and Arnold reunited onstage for the first time in 30 years in an event called "Roguelike Celebration" at San Francisco in 2016.