Roguelikes

What it is

A roguelike is a Dungeon crawl in which the dungeon is new every time and death is final. The classic version is turn-based and laid out on a grid. The screen is drawn in text characters: # for walls, D for a dragon, and @ for you. Each level is built by Procedural generation, so no map can be memorized. Potions and scrolls have randomized appearances that must be identified by use or risk. A single careless decision can end a character that took hours to build, because Permadeath means there is no reload. What you carry forward is not the character but your own knowledge. The genre rewards deep, patient play, in which you learn the system rather than the map.

Origins

The name comes from Rogue, written around 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ken Arnold, whose curses library made the screen display possible, later joined them. Rogue spread across campus Unix systems through the Berkeley Software Distribution. Its creators made save files erase themselves when loaded, to defeat what players would come to call save scumming. Rogue was not quite first: Don Worth's Beneath Apple Manor (1978) for the Apple II already had random dungeons, tile movement and turn-based fights. But Rogue traveled across the ARPANET, and it named the family.

Because Rogue's source code stayed closed until 1986, imitators rebuilt it from scratch, and two great lineages grew. Hack (1982), written by high-school students led by Jay Fenlason, became NetHack (1987). Its DevTeam collaborated over the Internet and built rules so interlocking that fans say "The DevTeam Thinks of Everything." Moria (1983), by Robert Alan Koeneke at the University of Oklahoma, sent the player down to fight a Balrog / Balor; it begat Angband (1990) and dozens of variants. Thomas Biskup's ADOM (1994) and Linley Henzell's Linley's Dungeon Crawl (1995) followed. The word "roguelike" itself came from Usenet around 1993. Players consolidating their newsgroups settled on rec.games.roguelike.* as, in their phrase, "the least of all available evils."

Evolution

Japan gave the form its console life. Chunsoft, co-developer of Dragon Quest, released Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon in 1993 and Shiren the Wanderer in 1995. The Mystery Dungeon games softened the genre: death usually strips your progress and sends you back to the start, but items can often be stored and recovered. In the West, David Brevik cited roguelikes, NetHack among them, as models for Diablo (1996), which took random dungeons and Loot & loot tables into real time and to millions of players. Dwarf Fortress (2006) kept the text-mode look for a colony simulation.

Then came the argument over the definition. In 2008 participants at the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin drafted the "Berlin Interpretation." It measured how roguelike a game is against five canon games: ADOM, Angband, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and Rogue. Its nine "high-value factors" were random generation, permadeath, turn-based play, a grid, non-modal play, complexity, resource management, hack-and-slash combat, and exploration with item discovery. Its "low-value factors" included a single character, monsters that play by the player's rules, tactical challenge, rooms and corridors, and numbers on the screen. Missing a factor, the authors stressed, does not disqualify a game.

The document arrived just as the genre escaped its definition. Derek Yu's Spelunky (2008), a platformer with random caves and permadeath, was followed by The Binding of Isaac (2011), FTL: Faster Than Light (2012), Rogue Legacy (2013), Slay the Spire (2017), Dead Cells (2018) and Hades (2020). Red Hook's Darkest Dungeon (2016) applied the same ideas to a gothic party of doomed adventurers. These games kept randomness and death but dropped the grid and the turns. Most also added persistent unlocks between runs.

How to tell it apart

Roguelike vs. roguelite. "Roguelite" (also "roguelike-like," or the tongue-in-cheek "procedural death labyrinth") names games with some Berlin factors, usually procedural generation and permadeath, but not the rest. A roguelite run is short, often built from fixed stages that end in bosses. Crucially, it usually adds meta-progression: currency or unlocks that survive death, so every failure makes the next run a little easier. A traditional roguelike offers no such cushion. The only thing that improves is the player. Steam and the press use "roguelike" for both, which is why the older community still argues about the word.

Roguelike vs. blobber. A blobber is a first-person party crawl through a fixed, hand-built maze. A roguelike is usually a lone hero, seen from above, in a dungeon that changes every time.

Roguelike vs. Action RPGs & Hack-and-Slash. Diablo borrowed the random dungeons and loot but abandoned turns and made death survivable. When the critic John Harris scored it against the Berlin factors, it earned only about half the points.

Where to start

• Rogue (c. 1980): short, pure and still playable.
• NetHack (1987): the encyclopedic classic.
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006): the most approachable traditional roguelike.
• Shiren the Wanderer (1995): the Japanese Mystery Dungeon at its best.
• Spelunky (2008) and Hades (2020): the roguelite, from indie spark to mainstream hit.