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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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So what? The money is going to the company that currently holds the rights to distribute this version of the game. Which is the only way you can get a license to legally play it.
What you linked is an older version that was released for free, not the version that was developed for and distributed by Epyx, which is what they have the right to sell.
Your personal opinions about who deserves to get paid for what don't have any bearing on their legal right to sell the version they have for sale.
That message is there to let people know that if they paid for it, they got ripped off. Just because someone has the legal right to sell something doesn't mean they should, and just because something's legally available for sale doesn't mean people should buy it.
It looks like the Epyx version because it is the Epyx version. They're the same. All the Epyx version added was a title screen image, a nice box, a printed manual, and the convenience of not having to obtain a copy of the public domain version, which wasn't as easy in 1985 as it is today. Other than that, they're identical.
I admit that I may be wrong but it was my belief that the version made for Epyx for the PC introduced those particular character graphics with the smiley adventurer and so on. The free version of rogue was not on DOS at the time, it was on BSD and maybe various unixes. That BSD version has been compiled for dos more recently and is available. You can tell because it uses hjkl for movement unless someone it's a version someone patched. It also has @ for adventurer and generally character graphics like brackets and # and things rather than the more graphical characters.
A complication is that the internet considered the Epyx version "abandonware" and distributed it freely. A thing that confuses me is that the source code of Epyx version 1.48 (not 1.49) is available too.Is this to conform to some licence the BSD version is under? (would that be BSD licence? which does not afaik require src)
Nope, the first version with the CP437 glyphs was Rogue 1.0, published by A.I. Design in 1983. That company ceased to exist, the copyright lapsed, and it entered the public domain. I don't know anything about non-DOS versions of the game, but this is the version I've been playing since the late 90s and the idea that someone's trying to sell it is absurd.
Copyright does not lapse anywhere near that fast.
Meme game? You're saying this as if the game is trash lol. I've played it for 3 hours already, got way more out of it than I paid for. There's more incentive to play a game you paid for than one that's free anyway.
Well, since the whole thing is based on the original public-domain BSD code, it's not entirely clear that the copyright was valid in the first place. What are they going to copyright, the different characters? If anyone can claim to own those, wouldn't it be IBM? Can I download Moby ♥♥♥♥ from Project Gutenberg, change the font, and claim copyright on that version? Sure, anyone can claim anything, but if I try to sue someone for redistributing "my" version of Moby ♥♥♥♥ I'm gonna get laughed out of court. Without litigation it's all a legal gray area that's not worth rehashing now. The ASCII version was PD in 1985, and the smiley face version is PD now. Pixel Games UK (or Code 10 Digital, or Bridgestone Multimedia Group, or whoever) has the right to sell it, but that doesn't mean anything. I have the right to sell Moby ♥♥♥♥ in Comic Sans, but that doesn't mean anyone should buy it.