Analysis / Roguelike

Roguelikes have a long and somewhat nebulous history, as they have never really formed a well-defined or coherent genre. Even just defining the word "roguelike" has proven to be a near-impossible task. In this analysis, we explore the history of the genre and look at some of the games that have shaped it over the years.

Rogue and early terminal dungeon-crawlers (1980-)

Rogue, the Trope Maker.

The 1980 dungeon-crawling game Rogue is typically defined to be the starting point for the genre. It was the first popular game to combine random procedural generation with permadeath and codified many principles that became pillars of the genre for years to come.

One of Rogue's innovations was that it was designed to run on green-screen text terminals, and it accomplished this by not having any graphics. However, it was not mere Interactive Fiction - instead, it used text characters to abstractly represent dungeon features and enemies on the screen, arranging them as a grid of tiles. While this can look cryptic to people who don't know how to interpret the characters, the presentation quickly becomes second-nature for players and allows a dungeon of remarkable complexity to be represented with no true graphics at all.

This style of text-based display was, for a long time, one of the defining features of roguelikes, moreso even than features which we now take to be essential like procedural generation or permadeath. The simplicity of the display meant that it was very easy to port roguelikes to other systems, since every system has a basic text mode - in fact, it was even possible to play them remotely over networks, since that's precisely what terminals are for.

In Rogue, the player is represented by the @ (at) symbol, probably because it looks a bit like a person viewed from above. This tradition has been continued by almost every terminal-based roguelike since, to the point that the @ symbol is now often considered a symbol for roguelikes.

Rogue inspired a number of clones over the following years. Since it was a commercial title, the source code was not freely available, so clones were built from scratch - and since they were largely being built by enthusiasts and fans, it was very common for these games to be released freely as open source, which only increased their popularity and proliferation.

Within a few years, two of the major early roguelike families arose:

• Hacklikes: Hack was released in 1984, and was the progenitor of 1987's NetHack, one of the most popular and influential roguelikes of all time. Hacklikes tend to stick closely to Rogue's formula, and focus on adventurous Dungeon Crawling with an aggressive food clock and limited resources.
• *bands: Moria was released in 1983, and may even be the first roguelike game (as in, the first game that was "like Rogue"). It later gave rise to Angband, which itself is the grandfather of an entire subgenre known as *bands. *bands tend to draw more mechanical inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, and usually feature a non-permanent dungeon, infinite resources and very tough bosses, so the games are focused on taking levels in badass until the player is ready to punch dragons to death.

The proliferation of roguelikes continued throughout the 1990s during the rise of the Windows PC era, with two more important titles:

• Ancient Domains of Mystery, aka ADOM: A very deep, yet surprisingly accessible roguelike adventure with more lore and worldbuilding than is typical of the genre. Unlike almost all other roguelikes, the game is closed source and thus has no forks or variants; nonetheless, its enduring popularity means it is often considered one of the pillars of the roguelike genre.
• Linley's Dungeon Crawl: An innovative dungeon-crawler which emphasizes tactical skill and features a flexible multi-classing system, allowing players to approach their character build in any way they desire. The game formed the foundation for the extremely successful Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, another pillar of the roguelike genre.

In modern times, these games are often called "traditional roguelikes" to distinguish them from newer roguelike games. There are a number of tropes and mechanics which are specific to these early roguelikes:

• Dungeon Crawling: Taking their cue from Rogue, nearly all traditional roguelikes take place in a dungeon or similar subterranean environment which consists of distinct floors connected by staircases up and down.
• Turn-Based Combat: Almost all traditional roguelikes are turn-based, with the game time only advancing when the player takes an action.
• Single player: Almost all traditional roguelikes are single-player experiences, and usually single-character experiences too - there's generally only one player character (traditionally represented by the @ character in terminal graphics). Players may be able to obtain pets or allies, but they are never considered part of a unified "party" and are just external entities who happen to follow you around. Some roguelikes offer limited methods of directing or controlling allies.
• Fog of War: Roguelikes very often limit you to seeing only what your character can, which means that most of the dungeon map is hidden until you go and explore it. Some games play with this by giving you alternate ways to see things, such as infravision or telepathy.
• Unknown Item Identification: Most roguelikes randomize the appearances of items on each playthrough, preventing the player from being able to identify what a particular item does on sight. For example, 'a green potion' might be a potion of healing in one playthrough, but a potion of poison in the next. Because of this, identification is often a crucial mechanic and an expected aspect of gameplay. There are often many different techniques a player can use to learn the identities of objects they have acquired: identification spells, careful observation (for example, seeing a monster drink a potion and noting what happens), elimination, or even just blindly using them and seeing what happens. It's typical, after dying, to be revealed that you had an item which could've saved you if you'd known what it was.
• Dungeon Bypass: Most traditional roguelikes do not force the player through a strictly linear path, instead opening up the whole game world and using difficulty as a barrier to progress. It's often perfectly possible to go as deep into the game as you like, at any time that you like - you probably won't survive doing so, but you are certainly not stopped from doing it. This can be used tactically, too; if you are facing a difficult situation on your current level, you can take a risk and escape to the next one, with the caveat that the next level may well be even more brutal than the one you just left. Smart players will know when this risk is worth taking. A common Self-Imposed Challenge is the "Ironman" run, in which you must take every downstairs that you see, even if you're not ready to progress.
• Large enemy roster: Traditional roguelikes often feature an enormous menagerie of monsters and enemies, which will have various abilities, resistances, weaknesses, and defenses. Part of the game strategy will be learning the best ways to fight particular monsters (or sometimes which monsters not to fight), and how to protect yourself from them.
• Random Drop: While most of the time items are just lying around the dungeon, enemies often drop items when defeated too.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Traditional roguelikes generally include a mechanic to encourage players to progress — be it rewarding them for going through levels fast, or punishing them for lingering too long. Hunger is often used to drive players forward in search of food, and roguelike players often refer to this mechanic as the "food clock".
• Bones files: A kind of Macrogame or Player Data Sharing, where data from a previous playthrough can influence the current game - or even some other player's game. This typically takes the form of the dead player's grave or ghost appearing in-game, often with the equipment and attributes that the player had before they died.
• Excuse Plot: Roguelikes aren't typically played for their story. If there's a plot, it's often something like "You're trying to get a valuable item from the bottom of the dungeon".
• Long Runner: Traditional roguelikes, especially the well-known or popular ones, have often been under continual development for many years (sometimes decades), making them extraordinarily large and complex.
• Nintendo Hard: Traditional roguelikes are often notoriously difficult, and intentionally so. Death is expected to be fairly frequent, enough so that the community has developed the acronym "YASD," for Yet Another Stupid Death. It is easily possible to play some roguelikes for years without even coming close to victory.
• Billions of Buttons: Traditional roguelikes tend to have a bewildering array of commands aliased to particular keys - if you're lucky, with memorable mnemonics such as e to eat, although some roguelikes still exhaust nearly the entire keyset even after adding uppercase commands too.
• Many roguelikes are incredible time sinks, which is only exacerbated by the fact that most of them are entirely free.

Adoption of the term "roguelike" (1993)

Although Rogue-inspired games had been popular for many years, the name "roguelike" was not formally introduced until 1993, when Usenet communities were trying to find a way to organize the games into some kind of collective grouping that would make it easier to identify them. Several potential names were suggested, with "roguelike" grudgingly accepted as the best one.

Perhaps surprisingly, even at this time, the notion of a roguelike did not formally include random generation and permadeath as it does today - rather, terminal graphics were still considered one of the highest-value factors. However, people did notice that roguelike games seemed to form a logical grouping, even if they couldn't express exactly what the common factors were. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the attempt to truly define roguelikes as a genre.

The Berlin Interpretation (2008)

By 2008, many more roguelike games had arisen, partly thanks to the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a contest which began in 2005 and challenged entrants to develop a fully-playable roguelike in one week. However, even though the roguelike fandom was continuing to grow, the community still had the lingering problem of how exactly to define the genre.

In 2008, an attempt was made to apply rigor to the definition, called the Berlin Interpretation. This identified a number of factors that the community considered "high-value" for roguelikes at that time. These included:

• Random environment generation: The game world should be randomly generated on each playthrough in a manner intended to increase the game's replayability.
• Permadeath: If you die, you lose your character and must start again from the beginning. (The random generation is intended to make this an enjoyable rather than punishing experience, since you can experience different things every time you play).
• Turn-based: Everything you do takes a single unit of game time, and you can take as much time as you want between each action.
• Grid-based: The game world is represented by a uniform grid of tiles.
• Non-modality: Everything happens in the same game mode - ie. you should be able to take all of the same actions at any point in the game. A violation of this would be a shop menu where you are suddenly limited to only performing in-shop actions.
• Complexity: The game should be complex enough to allow several ways to solve common problems (eg. allowing for improvisation).
• Resource management: Resources are limited and not guaranteed, and must be carefully managed by the player.
• Hack and slash: The game is largely player-vs-world, and the world is typically populated by monsters who must be killed. Diplomacy or monster interrelations are not expected.
• Exploration and discovery: The game requires careful exploration and investigation, with new unknowns and mysteries on each playthrough.

The Berlin Interpretation was specifically intended for traditional roguelikes, ie. dungeon crawlers, and it identified five core roguelikes that it considered to be canonical to the genre: ADOM, Angband, Crawl, NetHack, and Rogue.

However, by 2008, the landscape of roguelikes was already beginning to change due to the rise of indie gaming and the appearance of a new kind of roguelike: the roguelite.

Roguelites (2005-)

Spelunky, one of the first successful roguelites.

With the rise of online game services such as Steam, indie games gained a boost in popularity, and several games experimented with features that had previously only been seen in terminal-based roguelikes - most notably, random procedural level generation and permadeath.

These games were a significant departure from the rigid dungeon-based gameplay of their predecessors, and so were sometimes dubbed "roguelites" to distinguish them from their more "pure" roguelike cousins. Spelunky, released in 2008, is credited as one of the first successful roguelites, combining NetHack-like randomness with retro-style 2D platforming.

Developers began to see procedural generation as a way of creating automatic game content, vastly increasing the replay value of a game, with permadeath mechanics finding a natural place alongside it. Minecraft, which has procedurally generated worlds, started out with a permadeath mode precisely because of Notch's desire to recreate the tension and excitement of early roguelikes.

Roguelite titles started to appear at an ever-increasing rate throughout the 2010s, mashing roguelike-style gameplay with increasingly diverse genres. The Binding of Isaac combined procedural generation with frantic twin-stick shooter action, while FTL used it to create unique space adventures for an intrepid crew, showing that roguelike design principles didn't have to be confined to dungeon architecture. 2022's Vampire Survivors (and games inspired by it) lack or downplay randomized map layouts, but instead offer a random selection of upgrades after getting enough Experience Points. Since these upgrades synergize with each other in various ways, you still get a different experience each time depending on what you are offered and choose, so these games are sometimes considered another subgenre of roguelite.

Although "roguelite" is often used to distinguish this modern wave of roguelikes, for most people the term "roguelike" is still considered the catchall term for all games that use random procedural generation, and thus these games are often simply referred to as roguelikes.