Michael Toy

Life

Michael Toy grew up in Livermore, California, where his father was a nuclear scientist. Once a year his father's workplace held a family day on which visitors could use the facility's mainframe to play games, and the young Toy fell for the text-based Star Trek game of 1971, which drew space battles in characters on the screen and demanded a strategic decision every turn. He taught himself to program so he could recreate it on whatever machines he could reach, including a Processor Technology Sol-20 and an Atari 400.

In the late 1970s he enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. On the campus's PDP-11 and then its VAX-11 he explored the games circulating over the ARPANET, and was captivated by Colossal Cave Adventure. Soon he was writing adventure games of his own, and trading them with another student, Glenn Wichman, who was doing the same. The two became friends and roommates. By Wichman's account Toy was the stronger programmer, while Wichman had the sharper sense of design.

Work

Toy and Wichman shared a complaint: adventure games were the same every time, so once solved they were finished. Around 1980 Ken Arnold's curses library, part of Berkeley's BSD Unix, let programs place characters anywhere on a terminal screen, and the pair saw how to draw a dungeon with it. They designed a Dungeons & Dragons-flavored descent through the Dungeons of Doom in search of the Amulet of Yendor, whose name is "Rodney" spelled backward. Toy led the programming in C. Every level was assembled by Procedural generation from a three-by-three grid of rooms joined by corridors, magic items were disguised until identified, and monsters were letters of the alphabet stalking an @ that marked the player. Wichman named it Rogue. When playtesters reloaded saved games to escape death, a practice later called Save scumming, they made the save file delete itself on loading, so death became permanent: Permadeath.

Around 1982 Toy's devotion to Rogue cost him his place at Santa Cruz, and he moved to a job in the computer lab at UC Berkeley, taking the code with him. There he sought out Ken Arnold, who helped optimize the screen handling and improve the level generation. Rogue was distributed with Berkeley's Unix, including the widely used 4.2BSD of 1983, and became a fixture of university computer rooms, played even by Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Toy and Arnold also wrote the game's guide, A Guide to the Dungeons of Doom.

Toy then took a consulting job with Olivetti, where he met the system administrator Jon Lane. Together they founded A.I. Design to sell Rogue commercially, first porting it themselves to the IBM PC, then working with Epyx, which funded versions for other computers. Toy took the lead on the Macintosh port and wrote the Amiga version, while Wichman, brought back for the Mac graphics, handled the Atari ST. Sold through catalogs, the commercial game started well but faded; Epyx went bankrupt in 1989 and A.I. Design dissolved. None of the authors grew rich from Rogue.

Legacy

Toy's later career moved into mainstream software. He was one of the Netscape engineers followed in Code Rush (2000), the documentary about the company's final year of independence and the rush to release the Mozilla source code by March 31, 1998.

Rogue itself became a genre. Because its source was not public for years, admirers recreated it from scratch, producing Hack and Moria; Hack grew into NetHack, and the whole family took the name Roguelikes. Its ideas of randomized levels, permanent death and one more try run through Diablo, Darkest Dungeon and the modern "roguelite." In 2016 Toy, Wichman and Arnold appeared together on stage for the first time in some three decades at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco.