Roguelike

• 1. Introduction

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  Roguelike games began with a joke about wasted computer time. Dennis Ritchie quipped that Rogue was "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history." Rogue was a dungeon adventure built entirely from text characters, and it arrived in 1980. Students and programmers through the 1980s and 1990s played it so devotedly that it led to hundreds of variants. Decades later its name still labels a sprawling family of games, from terminal programs to modern indie hits. This documentary follows that family. What exactly makes a game a roguelike, and who gets to decide? Where did the idea come from, and who built the games that carried it forward? Why did a genre that had languished return in a new form?

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• 2. Rules of the Dungeon

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  The @ symbol is the hero. The developers of Rogue chose it to stand for "where you're at," and text-based roguelikes nearly always followed their lead. A dollar sign marks money and a D marks a dragon. Later games added color, so a red D could breathe fire while a green D spat acid. Players issued each command with a single keypress.

  Before any of that, a player builds a character, borrowing the habits of tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. The usual choices are a class, a race and a gender, plus attribute points and skills. The hero then starts on the top level of a dungeon with a simple weapon, armor, torches and food. Along the way come new weapons, armor, magical devices, potions, scrolls, food and money. Combat is blunt, because walking into a monster counts as an attack and the game works out the damage on both sides. Arrows and offensive spells are often available as well.

  Experience points arrive with every kill. Enough of them raise the character's level, which improves hit points, magic and other attributes. When hit points run out, the character dies. Most roguelikes treat that as final, so the player must start over with a new character, and each attempt is called a run.

  A hero cornered by several monsters can wait as long as the player likes, because roguelikes are nearly always turn-based and the game only reacts when the player acts. Exploration works like a fog of war. A torch lights nearby squares, or line of sight limits which monsters can be seen. Stairs link the levels, and the lower ones are harder, which keeps an underdeveloped character from rushing ahead. Most games end when the player claims an item on the deepest level or defeats a particular monster living there. A final score rewards treasure, money, experience and speed, and a ranked scoreboard lets players compare runs.

  Memory shortages explain why no two runs match. Shared mainframes and early home computers could hold only a few dungeon levels at once, so developers used procedural generation instead of storing levels. The generator follows rules set by the developers. Those rules aim to keep every level winnable without special equipment, and to make levels more pleasing to look at. Even the items change. A "bubbly" potion might heal wounds in one game and poison the character in the next.

  Depth comes from systems that overlap. To pass a locked door, a player might pick the lock, kick it down, burn it or tunnel around it. A common phrase about NetHack is "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything," and one example is wielding a cockatrice corpse while wearing gloves, so its touch petrifies enemies. Food works as a clock. Rich Carlson, a creator of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, described this limit as a deadline on how much the player can explore, which creates tension. Hunger also stops players from simply waiting to regenerate health or farming weak monsters on early levels. Some games even reuse the player's dead characters as ghosts or grave markings, and NetHack brings them back as enemies.

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• 3. Rogue and Its Rivals

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  A program called pedit5, written in 1975 for the PLATO system, is believed to be the first dungeon crawl game. It offered random monster encounters but only one fixed dungeon level. Similar PLATO games followed: dnd in 1975, orthanc in 1978, Moria in 1978 and avatar in 1979. Whether they influenced roguelikes is unclear, because there is no evidence that the early roguelike creators ever had access to them. The core games grew up independently, and many developers learned about one another's projects only years after the genre took off.

  Don Worth wrote Beneath Apple Manor for the Apple II in 1978. It is the first known game with the core roguelike elements, and it is recognized as the first commercial one. Inspired by his love of Dungeons & Dragons, Worth adapted the random maze generator from a game called Dragon Maze and added role-playing characters, tile-based movement and turn-based combat. It never matched Rogue in popularity. Rogue spread over ARPANET, which many college students could reach, while Worth packaged and sold his game by hand at local stores or through the mail.

  Jeff McCord's Sword of Fargoal took a longer road. He began work in 1979, building on GammaQuest, a game he made on the Commodore PET and shared with friends while a student at Henry Clay High School in Kentucky. That game grew from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign he had run himself. By 1981 McCord was at the University of Tennessee, working on GammaQuest II, in which players crossed randomly generated levels to find a sword and carry it back to the surface. The more advanced computers at the school, such as the VIC-20, let him expand beyond the PET's tight memory. A deal with Epyx brought marketing help, the new name, and a Commodore 64 with graphics and sound. Sword of Fargoal appeared in 1982 and was a success. When it reached the PC in 1983, its graphics and sound out-shone Rogue's PC release that year.

  At the University of California, Santa Cruz, students Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy wrote Rogue. Toy had played the 1971 Star Trek game and programmed clones of it for other computers. Both admired the interactive fiction Adventure and wanted a way to randomize it. Ken Arnold's curses library let them manipulate characters on a terminal screen, and the pair built a randomized adventure that felt almost graphical. Their story sent players after the Amulet of Yendor. Yendor is Rodney spelled backwards, the name of the wizard they imagined had created the dungeon. The game ran on a VAX-11/780, whose limited memory forced the simple text interface.

  Toy eventually dropped out of school and took a job in the computing labs at the University of California, Berkeley. There he met Arnold, who helped optimize the curses code and add features. Rogue won over college students and computer researchers, including Ken Thompson. It earned a place on BSD UNIX version 4.2 in 1984, though without its source code.

  The game's best-known rule came after a problem. The developers added a save function first, then found players repeatedly loading saved games to get the best results. Permadeath was their answer. Michael Toy said they saw it not as a way to make the game painful or difficult, but as a way to put weight on every decision and make the experience more immersive. Under the later rules, a save only suspends play and is deleted when the game resumes. Backing up save files, known as save scumming, is usually considered cheating.

  Toy and Arnold expected to sell Rogue commercially and were hesitant to release it. Toy met Jon Lane at Olivetti, and together they founded the company A.I. Design to port the games to home systems, with publishing support from Epyx. They later brought Wichman back to help. The Rogue source code itself would stay locked away until BSD version 4.3 in 1986.

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• 4. The Moria Line

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  Brogue is a direct variant of Rogue, but most of the game's descendants fall into two branches named for Moria and Hack. The early imitators had no Rogue source to work from, so they built similar games from scratch and shipped them with their own source code. Other programmers then forked those programs, adding monsters, items and features until several dozen variants existed. Moving to languages with better data typing, including object-oriented and scripting languages, and tidying code into modules made contributions easier to follow.

  Robert Alan Koeneke, a student at the University of Oklahoma, wrote Moria in 1983. He had a VAX-11/780 but no Rogue source, because computer administrators restricted it. So he tried to recreate Rogue with the flavor of the cave maze of the same name in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth stories. The goal was to descend to the depths of Moria and defeat the Balrog, a task much like a boss battle. Levels were not persistent, so leaving one and returning generated a new level. Koeneke added a lasting town on the top level where players could buy and sell equipment. The data structures in the Pascal language let him build a more varied bestiary, and fellow student Jimmey Wayne Todd helped program a deeper character generation system. Jim E. Wilson later made UMoria, short for UNIX Moria, to run on more computers and fix bugs.

  Angband arrived in 1990 from Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at the University of Warwick. Having played UMoria, they wanted more. Working from its code, they added levels and monsters, took the name from Morgoth's massive fortress in Tolkien's fiction, and drew in deadlier creatures from the Middle Earth mythology. The Balrog became a mid-game obstacle, and Morgoth became the final boss. After the pair graduated, Sean March and Geoff Hill took over to bring the game to a public release outside the university. They added a first-visit sense of each level's rewards and dangers.

  Once Angband reached the public through USENET, a group of maintainers called the devteam fixed bugs and weighed suggestions. Turnover among maintainers and a flood of requests left the game heavily forked. At least sixty variants exist, and about half a dozen are still in active development. ZAngband, short for Zelazny Angband, appeared in 1994 and shifted the theme to Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. Its code underlay Troubles of Middle Earth in 2002. That game swapped the Tolkien and Zelazny settings for an original one and became Tales of Maj'Eyal in 2009, while the devteam still maintains the vanilla Angband.

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• 5. Hack and Its Neighbors

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  Jay Fenlason, Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jonathan Payne were students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School when they wrote Hack in 1982. Their teacher Brian Harvey had acquired a PDP-11/70 minicomputer for the school. He let students do what they liked on it, including playing games, as long as assignments were finished by the end of each semester. Harvey took the group to the computer labs at UC Berkeley, where they met Rogue and decided to make their own version as a class project. Fenlason drew up a list of improvements, such as saving a level's layout once the player left it. At a local USENIX conference they asked Toy and Arnold for the Rogue source and were refused, so they wrote the routines from scratch.

  The name came from two sources: the hack and slash style of play, and the programming hack of recreating Rogue without its code. Fenlason could not include every feature he wanted, and his involvement ended after the students left the school. He gave the source to USENIX for distribution on its tapes. Others later found it, built on it through USENET newsgroups and ported it to various systems.

  Mike Stephenson, an analyst at a computer hardware manufacturer, took over the Hack code and improved it. Izchak Miller, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Janet Walz, another computer hacker, contributed suggestions. Calling themselves the DevTeam, they made major changes and named the result NetHack in 1987, partly because they collaborated over USENET. It added a wider variety of monsters borrowed from other mythologies, plus contemporary touches. A tourist class with a flash-bulb camera was inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Deeper levels used pre-defined layouts with some procedural elements. Later versions added branching paths and optional quests that could award an extremely useful item. The DevTeam released the code publicly but carefully controlled who could contribute, to avoid excessive forking, and stayed quiet about planned improvements.

  Thomas Biskup, a student at Technical University of Dortmund, built Ancient Domains of Mystery, or ADOM, in 1994. He had played Rogue and Hack, then found NetHack inspiring but too complex, with elements he thought unnecessary. Starting from scratch, he aimed for a more story-driven game that kept the depth of play. The result linked several dungeons, many generated procedurally, through an overworld map of the fictional realm of Ancardia. Players completed quests in those dungeons while closing unsealed portals that let in the forces of Chaos. In areas touched by Chaos, a character became tainted and gained mutations that could be harmful or helpful. Like NetHack and Angband, ADOM gained a devteam to avoid excessive forking.

  Some early games fit neither family. Noah Morgan's Larn, from 1986, borrowed persistent fixed levels from Hack, and a shop level and rising difficulty from Moria. Where those two grew into games needing many sessions, Larn was meant to be finished in one. It also gave the player a limited number of turns, though ways to jump back in time could extend play. Laurence Brothers wrote Omega in the late 1980s, and it is credited with bringing the overworld to roguelikes before ADOM. Players remember its odd inventory, where an object had to be picked up, counted as held, and then moved to a bag or equipment slot. In 1993, SSI's Dungeon Hack offered randomized dungeons and permadeath under AD&D 2nd Edition rules. Linley Henzell's Linley's Dungeon Crawl followed in 1995, letting experience points improve specific skills such as weapon proficiency or trap detection. One fork of it became Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in 2006.

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• 6. Naming the Genre

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  Around 1993, Usenet readers needed a name. Each popular game had its own newsgroup, and Usenet was the main place where players discussed these games and developers announced releases, sometimes even distributing source code. As Rogue, Hack, Moria and Angband grew popular, someone suggested merging the groups under an umbrella term to help cross-game discussion. Debate began with rec.games.dungeon. and lasted three weeks. The winner was rec.games.roguelike., named after Rogue, then thought to be the oldest game of its type. It was picked as "the least of all available evils." When someone proposed a development group in 1998, the term was already established. The pattern echoes "Doom clone," a 1990s phrase that later became the more generic "first-person shooter."

  The International Roguelike Development Conference met in Berlin in 2008 and tried to pin down the definition. Players and developers wrote the "Berlin Interpretation," a list of high-value and low-value factors based on five canon games: ADOM, Angband, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and Rogue. Its purpose was to judge "how roguelike a game is." Missing a factor does not disqualify a game, and having every factor does not guarantee one. The list did not simply restate familiar mechanics. It said a roguelike should be non-modal, meaning every action is available wherever the player is, and it noted that shops in Angband break this rule. It also said the game should center on hack and slash, with no peaceful options. Fixed levels, like the town in the Moria family, count against the randomness it prizes.

  The low-value factors are subtler. They include controlling only a single character and monsters that behave like the player, picking up items and casting spells. They also include a tactical challenge that may take several plays to learn, dungeons built from rooms and corridors, and status shown as numbers on screen. Open areas and natural features such as rivers count against the interpretation. John Harris of Game Set Watch used the criteria to score some games. Linley's Dungeon Crawl and NetHack scored highest, earning 57.5 points of 60, while Toe Jam & Earl and Diablo earned only about half.

  Diablo, released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1996, sits on the border. Its creator, David Brevik, acknowledged that Rogue, NetHack, Telengard and other roguelikes influenced the design, including its randomly generated dungeons and loot. US Gamer listed Diablo, ToeJam & Earl and Dwarf Fortress as edge cases that stray further but still scratch the same itch. Dwarf Fortress keeps the classic ASCII look.

  The label has since stretched. Many games with some Berlin factors call themselves roguelike while resembling Rogue very little, and some players of the strict kind resent the dilution. In the 1990s and 2000s, they argued, the word separated games that forwent looks for depth from games more like interactive movies. Terms like "rogue-lite," "roguelike-like" and "procedural death labyrinth" try to separate games that keep permadeath and random levels but lack the other factors. Yet stores such as Steam use the roguelike tag anyway. As of 2015, several hundred games on Steam claimed to be roguelikes, and the user-run wiki RogueBasin tracks hundreds more. Ars Technica writer Richard C. Moss suggested the term is really about the idea that "games can be deep, inventive, challenging, and endlessly compelling experiences through their rules and their systems alone."

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• 7. Mystery Dungeon

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  Sega's Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, both released in 1990, were among the earliest known attempts at a console roguelike. Neither lacked ambition, but both lacked the depth of a typical computer roguelike, and neither was successful. Konami's Cave Noire, a Game Boy game released only in Japan in 1991, centered on four distinct roguelike questlines divided into ten difficulty levels. Until 1993, roguelikes had lived mostly on computers.

  Chunsoft had already found success with the Dragon Quest series, which took the computer role-playing genre popular with Western audiences and streamlined it for Japanese players who preferred consoles. Its developers believed the same treatment could work for roguelikes. Koichi Nakamura said the intent was to make Rogue a "more understandable, more easy-to-play version" for consoles. The result was Mystery Dungeon, and the first title was Torneko no Daibōken in 1993, based on the Dragon Quest series. Dungeons grew progressively harder while remaining randomly generated, and permadeath became an option tied to difficulty. Using the Dragon Quest 4 setting and the character Torneko made the game familiar and gave players a story to follow.

  Torneko no Daibōken did not sell as well as the typical Dragon Quest game, but it was successful enough for a second title. Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, released in 1995, used an original character and setting. Chunsoft found it was more creative without an existing property to respect. The company has since developed over 25 Mystery Dungeon games on various platforms. Many span other franchises, including a Chocobo series based on Final Fantasy, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, and Etrian Mystery Dungeon, a crossover with Atlus' Etrian Odyssey. Several became staples of the Japanese video game market.

  A primary difference from Western roguelikes is the lack of permadeath. A Mystery Dungeon hero may die or become too injured, which resets progress to the start of the dungeon, but the games typically provide ways to store and recover equipment from the previous run. Western markets responded less warmly. The target players were younger and had likely never played games like Rogue, and they found the lack of a traditional role-playing save system odd.

  Other Japanese role-playing games borrowed random dungeon generation and were treated as roguelikes when published in the West. Azure Dreams, Dark Cloud, Shining Soul and Baroque are examples. The massively multiplayer game Final Fantasy XIV later added a randomly generated Deep Dungeon inspired by the procedural generation of roguelikes.

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• 8. The Rogue-lite Wave

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  New classical roguelikes never stopped appearing. Dungeons of Dredmor arrived in 2011 and Dragon Fin Soup in 2015, both following the core Berlin rules. A sequel to ADOM won crowd funding in 2012, and NetHack's first major release in ten years came in 2015. Coffeebreak roguelikes, short games often derived from the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge, include DoomRL and Desktop Dungeons, both from 2013. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, also from 2013, and Cogmind, from 2017, kept ASCII art. Dwarf Fortress, from 2006, put the roguelike interface atop a construction and management simulation and became a major inspiration for Minecraft. UnReal World, from 1992, is considered the forerunner of the survival game genre and began with an interface similar to that of NetHack.

  The real surge came from independent developers working outside the old rules. Digital Eel made Strange Adventures in Infinite Space in 2002 and its sequel Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space in 2005. Both are space exploration games with randomly generated planets and encounters, and permadeath. They drew on Starflight and on roguelikes like NetHack, but aimed for shorter, easier-to-replay sessions, like tabletop beer and pretzels games such as Deathmaze and The Sorcerer's Cave.

  Derek Yu released Spelunky in 2008, shortly after the Berlin Interpretation. He wanted the deep play of roguelikes to meet the pick-up-and-play ease of a platformer. Players take an explorer through randomly generated caves with permadeath, and the shifting situations force them to invent strategies on the fly. Developer Jason Rohrer said it "totally revamped my thinking about single-player videogame design." Edmund McMillen, who made The Binding of Isaac in 2011, and Kenny and Teddy Lee, who made Rogue Legacy in 2012, credit Yu with showing how to distill the roguelike for other genres. Jay Ma and Matthew Davis cited Weird Worlds and Spelunky as influences on FTL: Faster Than Light, also from 2012.

  Rogue-lites favor short runs with victory conditions, unlike some traditional roguelikes that can be played indefinitely. That brevity invites repeat attempts, so replayability matters greatly. Many also have a metagame in which reaching certain goals opens up persistent features, such as new characters, items or monsters. Some runs exist mainly to gather resources for that advancement. Daily challenges use a preset random seed so every player meets the same levels and competes on online leaderboards. Players may also enter a seed to replay or share a hard set of levels. Journalist Joshua Bycer noted that many rogue-lites have fixed events, such as a set number of biomes that each end in a boss fight, as in Rogue Legacy.

  Subgenres followed. Action roguelikes combine action games with the formula. Spelunky is a platformer, and The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon are shooters. Vampire Survivors leads a minimalist shooter branch where the character fires on its own while the player picks random power-ups. Roguelike deck-builders resolve combat with cards. Dream Quest in 2014 is considered the first, and Slay the Spire in 2017 made the form popular. Other successes include Dead Cells, mixing a roguelike with Metroidvania platforming, and Crypt of the NecroDancer, built around a rhythm game. Balatro scores poker hands, and Blue Prince adds puzzles to solve a mystery.

  Hades, a roguelite action role-playing game, was built around non-linear narrative that gives players a reason to keep replaying. It drew in players who had been put off by the genre's difficulty. Keith Burgun, developer of 100 Rogues, said players seek "rich play experiences" that more popular titles may not offer. David Bamguart of Gaslamp Games said "The deadly precariousness inherent to the unknown environments of roguelikes gives that investment a great deal of meaning." Fabien Fischer suggested players turned to independent games after tiring of shallow design from large publishers. Newer players also find help in guides and walkthroughs made by other players.

  The 7 Day Roguelike challenge, or 7DRL, grew out of a USENET newsgroup for roguelike developers in 2005. It asks developers to build the core of a novel roguelike in seven days, for judging and play by the public. Entries grew from 5-6 in 2005 to over 130 in 2014. In the spirit of the 2008 Berlin conference, the first Roguelike Celebration took place in September 2016 in San Francisco, where past and present developers discussed the history and future of the genre. It returned in San Francisco in 2017-2018 and 2019, and ran as virtual events from 2020 through 2024.

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