This Roguelike Games page is divided into the following chapters:
There is another excellent Roguelike Games site, which I feel I must mention here. It is maintained by Darren Hebden. Next, have a look at Balrog, another roguelike games site, maintained by Erik Inge Bolsø. You may also be interested in the Tolkien-related games site, maintained by Fredrik Ekman.
I am not the author of any of these games, even if I managed to get some suggestions of mine into NetHack and Moria. So, please, don't send me questions or remarks about these games: look for the author (if I don't mention an author, have a look at the readme file which comes with the game; if that doesn't help, I don't know the author eithe) and as him or her your questions. Note that I haven't played most of these games in more than two years; some I haven't played at all. A notable exception is NetHack, which I have played and still play extensively.
From the Roguelike Games FAQ file:
"A long time ago, on a computer system far, far, away, there was Rogue. Players wandered a dungeon, hacking and slashing at monsters, gaining treasures, becoming more powerful, and living their D&D nightmares.
"Rogue was a good game; people still play it. It was even distributed with many copies of Unix. But rogue is a relatively simple and limited game compared to most of the descendants it has spawned...
"Although the common features of rogue and its many descendants are `obvious' to many people, they are difficult to describe in simple terms. Generally, the games mentioned below are single-user, fantasy role-playing computer games, generally set in a dungeon, run with a simple character-graphic interface. In all of the games, the player controls a single character, who roams around getting more powerful, in order to fulfill a difficult quest. Sword-and-sorcery rule the day. Logistically, they're all free games; executables, and generally sources, are available by FTP."
First and foremost, through this page you can access a copy of the Roguelike Games FAQ (this file is also available in ASCII). It briefly describes most roguelike games (both the well-known ones as their more obscure brothers and sisters), and lists the known locations that you can connect to to get a copy. Most of these locations can also be accessed through one of the home pages below, however.
If you want to have a look at other FAQs than the Roguelike Games FAQ, you could have a look at the list of Usenet FAQs.
A lot of links here are to ftp.win.tue.nl. Most of the files there are accessible through one of the home pages below, but if not, you might find it convenient to connect to the ftp site directly. If you wish to upload some files to me, you can put them on our ftp site, in the /upload directory. If you do, please send me an e-mail notifying me of your upload, since all files in the upload directory are deleted automatically they've been there for two weeks. For more information on our site's upload policy, have a look at this link.
The following home pages are currently available here:
Note that on my own, local, WWW pages - marked with an asterisk (*) above -, all links to binary files that are larger than about 30 kByte have their size mentioned with them. So, if your connection is very slow, you might consider not downloading the larger ones or waiting until the lines are less busy.
There are several newsgroups discussing roguelike games:
You might need a program to unzip an archive you want to download. Currently, I have the following utilities on-line (all MS-Dos utilities are executables, the UNIX unarj are sources):
A short note about these utilities, to give you an idea what they are for, if you didn't know already...
Arj, tar, zip, lha, lzh, and zoo files normally contain more than one original file: these programs serve (among other things) to pack multiple files into one.
Arj, zip, gz, Z, lha, lzh, and zoo files are all in some way compressed, making the original file(s) smaller. Files in this format must ALWAYS be downloaded in binary format.
Uuencoded files, lastly, are files that have been changed from binary format to ASCII format, to allow non-binary transfers of these files, for example through e-mail. Note that this makes UUE files larger than the original file.
Tar and gz or tar and Z are often combined to make tar.gz or tar.Z files: this means that multiple files were first combined into one file, and then compressed to save space.
Unix2dos and dos2unix convert text files from unix format to dos format, and vice versa. CR/LF combinations are replaced by single LF's, and the other way around.
As mentioned before, I haven't played most of these games for at least two years. Please don't send me questions or remarks about these games: send them to the game's author instead. If the author isn't mentioned here, I don't know who it is.