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. The player can get new equipment finding it from dungeon floor or by defeating monsters.
Some monsters drop treasure when they are killed.
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.