Wichman co-designed Rogue, whose random dungeons and permanent death founded the roguelike, and his own account of its making has shaped how the genre remembers its origins.
Life
Glenn R. Wichman grew up inventing his own variations on tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. He chose the University of California, Santa Cruz, specifically to study game design, with the aim of becoming a board-game designer, and that ambition led him into computer science, where he could both play and build games. At Santa Cruz in the late 1970s he met Michael Toy, another student who was writing text adventures in the spirit of Colossal Cave Adventure. The two became friends and roommates and challenged each other with their creations. Toy was the more fluent programmer; Wichman, learning C from Toy as they worked, brought a designer's eye.
Work
Both were frustrated that adventure games offered no reason to replay them. Around 1980, when Ken Arnold's curses library arrived with Berkeley's Unix and let programs position characters anywhere on a terminal, Toy and Wichman realized they could build a "graphical" adventure in text. Their central idea, as Wichman later put it, was that "the program itself should 'build the dungeon', giving you a new adventure every time you played." That is Procedural generation, and it became the soul of Rogue.
Wichman supplied the name. A party of adventurers was the norm in D&D, but here the player's character went alone, so Rogue seemed right, and it was short enough to type easily at a command line. The design settled into a descent through the Dungeons of Doom to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor: ASCII rooms of dots and walls, the player as an @, monsters as capital letters, unidentified potions and scrolls whose effects had to be learned by trial. Playtesting at Santa Cruz shaped the balance, and when testers began reloading saved games to undo deaths, the designers made death stick, a rule Wichman later called "consequence persistence" and that players know as Permadeath.
When Toy moved to UC Berkeley and began working with Arnold, keeping two versions in step became impractical, and Wichman, still at Santa Cruz, stepped back and let them take over development. He returned when Toy and Jon Lane's company, A.I. Design, needed art for the Macintosh port for Epyx. He was wary at first, because the IBM PC release had credited him only with a "contribution," on a par with playtesters, but he agreed, doing the Mac graphics in exchange for a used Macintosh and working with Toy and Lane in a cabin at Squaw Valley. Epyx then asked him to lead the Atari ST version, for which he enlisted Epyx artist Michael Kosaka. The commercial Rogue sold briefly and then faded; in Wichman's view it failed partly because it was essentially the same game already available free on Unix systems. Epyx went bankrupt in 1989.
Wichman went on to a long career in commercial software, contributing to Microsoft Bookshelf, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Quicken, and creating the Macintosh shareware games Toxic Ravine and Mombasa.
Legacy
Wichman's short online memoir, "A Brief History of Rogue," has been a primary source for historians of the genre, and his phrasing of the design goal, a new adventure every time, is the clearest statement of what a Roguelikes is. The games that grew from Rogue, such as Hack and its successor NetHack, kept its conventions, including the @ for the hero, and in the 21st century its principles resurfaced in countless "roguelites." In 2016 he joined Michael Toy and Ken Arnold on stage at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco, the first time the three had appeared together in about thirty years. As he observed of the commercial failure, the game itself hardly mattered: Rogue and its descendants lived on.
Marginalia
- Wichman chose UC Santa Cruz because he wanted to study game design and become a board-game designer.
- He named Rogue, reasoning that unlike a D&D party the player's adventurer went alone, and that a short name was easy to type.
- He called the design principle behind Rogue's permanent death "consequence persistence."
- By his own account he did the graphic design for Mac Rogue in exchange for a used Macintosh computer.
- He later worked on commercial software including Microsoft Bookshelf, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Quicken.
Quick answers
- Who is Glenn Wichman?
- The Santa Cruz student who dreamed of designing board games, co-designed Rogue with Michael Toy, gave it its name, and later drew the Macintosh version's graphics in exchange for a used Mac.
- What is Glenn Wichman known for?
- Glenn Wichman is best known for Rogue.
- Why does Glenn Wichman matter to fantasy and games?
- Wichman co-designed Rogue, whose random dungeons and permanent death founded the roguelike, and his own account of its making has shaped how the genre remembers its origins.
