The Wizard of Yendor commonly known as “Rodney” (“Yendor” spelled backwards), is a powerful enemy in the roguelike

Roguelike

The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...

 computer game NetHack

NetHack

NetHack is a single-player roguelike video game originally released in 1987. It is a descendant of an earlier game called Hack , which is a descendant of Rogue...

. He lives in the valley of Gehennom

Gehenna

Gehenna , Gehinnom and Yiddish Gehinnam, are terms derived from a place outside ancient Jerusalem known in the Hebrew Bible as the Valley of the Son of Hinnom ; one of the two principal valleys surrounding the Old City.In the Hebrew Bible, the site was initially where apostate Israelites and...

 in his tower and holds the Book of the Dead

Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day". Another translation would be "Book of...

. He can curse

Curse

A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity—one or more persons, a place, or an object...

 the player's items, cast powerful spells, and has the ability to return from the dead. In the traditional text mode

Text mode

Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...

 of NetHack, the Wizard of Yendor is represented by a purple “@”.

The Wizard of Yendor originally appeared in the back-story

Back-story

A back-story, background story, or backstory is the literary device of a narrative chronologically earlier than, and related to, a narrative of primary interest. Generally, it is the history of characters or other elements that underlie the situation existing at the main narrative's start...

 of NetHacks predecessor, the Rogue

Rogue (computer game)

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...

 computer game, where he does not appear as an enemy, but is known as the creator of the dungeon. In Rogue, Rodney is the name of the player character

Player character

A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...

 who explores the dungeon. The Wizard of Yendor's first appearance in Hack (another NetHack predecessor) was in version 1.0.2, in which he was the guardian of the Amulet

Amulet

An amulet, similar to a talisman , is any object intended to bring good luck or protection to its owner.Potential amulets include gems, especially engraved gems, statues, coins, drawings, pendants, rings, plants and animals; even words said in certain occasions—for example: vade retro satana—, to...

of Yendor. His common nickname amongst players, “Rodney”, is never specifically mentioned in-game.