Roguelike games have grown in popularity over the 40 years the genre has existed, even though they implement ideas that might seem anathema to popular

ASCII art + permadeath: The history of roguelike games

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2021-06-15 13:00:07

Roguelike games have grown in popularity over the 40 years the genre has existed, even though they implement ideas that might seem anathema to popular gaming: extreme randomness, ASCII graphics, permadeath, enormous complexity, and more. Yet these days, you can just about sneeze and hit something that has at least been influenced by roguelikes.

And so, in the spirit of game genre histories past—we've done real-time strategy, city builders, first-person shooters, simulation games, graphic adventures, kart racers, and open-world games—let's take a look back at how we got here and what it all means. We'll tour the roguelike evolutionary tree, starting from Rogue itself and progressing all the way to modern games with "roguelike elements."

No one quite agrees on the exact definition of the term beyond its literal meaning ("a game like Rogue"). One way to define these games would be to say that roguelikes are randomized dungeon crawls with little or no story, where you're really fighting the dungeon as much as—if not more so than—the monsters inside it in an endlessly repeating struggle to master its layouts and contents and the systems that define its nature before you die and it regenerates anew.

But some people have tried to nail down the definition more narrowly. For instance, consider the Berlin Interpretation's "high-value factors," which were agreed on at the International Roguelike Development Conference 2008. (Yes, there's an annual conference for roguelike developers, as well as another one for players.)

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