It's true that Rogue will very likely never come up in conversation between casual gamers who feel more comfortable sticking to yearly iterations of Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. However, it's also true that roguelike trappings have left their mark on some of the most popular mainstream games. Enter the roguelike-like, a type of game influenced by roguelike systems such as permadeath and procedural generation, but not strictly a roguelike.
Matthew Davis and Justin Ma are the co-creators of FTL: Faster Than Light, an indie game where players board a spaceship, travel through space, battle enemy ships, and experience procedural content such as exploding stars that force the player to make careful, tactical decisions. One wrong move, and permadeath rears its ugly-yet-oddly-enticing head.
In 2012, I interviewed Ma and Davis for a short book entitled Anything But Sports: The Making of FTL. Davis speaks to the emphasis he and Ma placed on death as a learning tool when they drafted their list of features for the game. "I think games have lost the idea that dying matters. Which was actually all that [I wrote] down: 'Dying matters,' this concept that dying does punish the player."1
Justin Ma agrees: "When you're making these decisions, if there isn't this sense of impending doom and pressure from making mistakes, there isn't as much impact. We knew we needed to have permadeath."2
The rise of FTL caused many members of the games press to label it a roguelike, which in turn sparked debate within the roguelike community: what is the defining element, the sine qua non, of a roguelike? Is it the presence of procedural generation? Permadeath? Turn-based gameplay? Text-based graphics?
Respected members of the roguelike community weighed in. Darren Grey, co-founder and co-host of the Roguelike Radio podcast, argues that the definition of the genre should be flexible. "Turn-based play isn't necessary to make a roguelike, I believe. I enjoy those mechanics, but some games have played with that. For instance, FTL is real-time, but lets you pause and give commands at any point. That actually works really well. It gives you a complete roguelike feeling, a control over time."
Besides incorporating permadeath and procedural generation, Davis and Ma saw the advantage in giving players time to sort through all possible decisions and their consequences. Ma acknowledged that "for some reason, if you pump up the intensity but you [are allowed to] pause the game, it's still a very intense experience. You can pause the game and stare at everything, and still your heart is pumping because you can see all these problems. While it's paused, you have time to consider, like making a chess move."
Davis and Ma were no strangers to roguelike games when they set out to write FTL. They appreciated the genre, but did not expect any game carrying its DNA to make splash in mainstream circles. Roguelikes, and roguelike-likes, were punishing, as infamous for scaring players away as for providing deep gameplay experiences unlike those in any other type of game. To say FTL defied the odds and their expectations would be a gross understatement. Twenty-four hours after launching a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, set at $10,000—the amount they needed to finish the game—they had raised $20,000. They rode that momentum to a windfall of more than $200,000 and wave after wave of positive coverage that lasted through the game's release in 2012.
"The game's random nature ensures that while there's a singular objective in your sights, all the way at the other side of the sector map, what you're really doing is telling a new story every time," writes Eurogamer editor Dan Whitehead in his review of the game. "It's the very definition of a game that is all about the journey rather than the destination."3
Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo series—created at the now-defunct Blizzard North studio—is inarguably the most popular example of roguelike systems writ large in mainstream gaming. While speaking to him for my Stay Awhile and Listen series of books, Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik explained that he thought up the premise of Diablo after immersing himself in roguelikes during his college years. "Roguelikes always convey an overall goal for what you're trying to do. In Moria, you have to kill a Balrog or something. So you work on making your way down, and the game gets harder and harder as you go down. It's a very simple game concept. Everybody understands that as you go further down, the game gets harder. Just saying, 'Hey, there's a bad guy down on level 20' or whatever was easy to convey to players."4
Diablo started out as an homage to roguelikes: a single-player, turn-based RPG with procedurally-generated dungeons and weapons, but with graphics instead of text characters. At the behest of the principals at Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo's publisher, the Blizzard North team stripped away the genre's esoteric trappings, leaving a graphical, real-time game that could be played solely by clicking a mouse. No keyboard required. "So easy your mom can play it" was the guiding manifesto that influenced every design decision made by the Blizzard North team.
As much fun as millions of players had clicking their way down through dungeons, procedural generation made up the core of Diablo and drove the game to the top of bestseller lists. "Fundamentally, roguelikes are about randomness, so having the random levels was always a key concept to replayability. That's what we wanted first and foremost: a game you could play over and over again that would be different every time," says Brevik in Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I.
Blizzard Entertainment's principals agreed with Brevik and his two co-founders, Max and Erich Schaefer, that generating levels would be instrumental to the game's success. Selling them on the virtues of permadeath was an uphill battle. Brevik relayed his passion for the mechanic to me in our interviews. "Part of the way a turn-based game becomes compelling and exciting is when you're done to your last few hit points, you're up against a tough monster, you have a bunch of things you can do, and you're sitting there thinking about it. You're like, 'Should I use this potion? Should I swing at this guy? What should I do, here? If I make the wrong choice, my guy's dead. I've spent twelve hours building this guy, I haven't slept tonight, and I'm going to make a bad choice right now.' And you do. You do, and you die, and you cry all night or all day, and then you come back and play again."
Blizzard Entertainment refused to budge: permadeath had no place in Diablo. For Diablo II, released in 2000, Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment reached a compromise. Hardcore, a mode of play where characters could only die once, would become available after players had completed the game with a regular, revivable character.
Erich Schaefer stated bluntly that he was an advocate of permadeath. "We made Hardcore happen, and everybody loved it, but there was controversy, especially from Blizzard South, thinking that once [players] actually died, they'd hate us, hate Blizzard, hate Diablo. But we kept fighting back, saying, 'No, they'll know what they're getting into. Yeah, dying will suck, but it will add a lot of excitement for some people.' I think it was a great decision."5
Players and members of the gaming press agreed. "Let me put this as simply as I can," wrote GameSpot editor Alex Sassoon on May 14, 2012, two days after the release of the highly-anticipated Diablo III. "If you're playing Diablo III and not playing Hardcore, you're doing it wrong. [...] It's more challenging, it's more exciting, and, above all, it's just more fun. You have no idea how attached you can get to a character until you've gone through 90 levels of Hardcore Diablo II with them, battling bosses [and] fleeing from lightning-charged cow kings. Diablo III is gloomy and atmospheric, but the tension only becomes real when death carries a penalty. Actual jeopardy is nearly non-existent in games these days; we've been coddled with auto-saves, checkpointing, and infinite lives, and gaming is the poorer for it."6
During a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) conducted with game designers from Blizzard Entertainment in early June 1012, just a few weeks after the release of Diablo III, senior designer Wyatt Chang released statistics on the percentage of players going through the game as Hardcore characters. "The data I have on hand is from yesterday, at which time 4.1% of the characters are made in Hardcore."7
On its own, 4.1 percent may seem a trivial amount. But consider the math Chang used to reach that conclusion. On day one of Diablo III's availability on PC, Blizzard announced that 4.7 million players logged on to Battle.net to play the game.8 One week later, Blizzard had sold 6.3 million units.9 By July, "more than 10 million people [had] played Diablo III."10
Since the Reddit AMA took place approximately one month before Diablo III hit its 10 million player base, we'll round down a little and presume that around seven million players had logged on around the time of the AMA. Per Chang's numbers, 4.1 percent of seven million works out to 287,000 players—a nontrivial number, and one that grew in the months and years following. "Hardcore is a super exciting way to play so it's very important to us. We take into account Hardcore for every design decision," Chang confirmed during the AMA.
Procedural generation and permadeath are not just popular among players. Developers have embraced them, too. Ido Yehieli is the creator of Carinal Quest, a roguelike game that strips out more complex systems such as unwieldy control schemes so that players can concentrate on exploration and combat. Yehieli was drawn to roguelikes because of the genre's focus on gameplay over graphics. "It seemed like something I could do by myself compared to all the other games I was playing at the time, like StarCraft, which I had no clue how to make," he told me.11
Procedural generation gives programmers more freedom to focus on systems. In a linear game with set, static levels, a game system may break down if players cannot use it effectively in a certain area. An even more nightmarish scenario: designers could decide to scrap or overhaul a system, rendering level architecture built with that system in mind worthless. But procedural games craft different areas every time, forcing players to change up strategies and taking the pressure off of level designers.
Equally compelling, generating content procedurally translates to game assets that can be reused. For Diablo, Blizzard North's artists concentrated on making dozens of tiles showing stone floors and walls. From there, the algorithms took over, rearranging tiles in different ways every time, and eliminating the burden of crafting static levels dependent on specific gameplay. "I think every designer now has to ask themselves, at the start of any game project these days, 'Is there any way I can procedurally generate any of my content without the quality suffering enormously?' Any answers to the affirmative must be taken seriously. The value-to-cost ratio is just too high," said Tanya X. Short, developer of roguelike-like Shattered Planet, in an interview for Gamasutra editor Christian Nutt's "'Roguelikes': Getting to the Heart of the It-genre" article published in 2014.12
Nutt named his article well. Pull up the Steam digital distribution platform, run a search for roguelike games, and you'll pull up over a dozen pages of search results, all sortable by tags such as "Perma Death" and "Procedural Generation."13 More than Rogue, more than NetHack, more than Diablo, the powerful and flexible systems conceived in roguelike games are driving innovation in games—and will continue to do so for years to come.
"A game is basically content that you churn through, and I think video and computer games are a much more profound thing than that," says John Harris, a roguelike historian and author of the @Play series of articles that explore the finer points of roguelike design. "Exploring rules to produce very deep games that keep players interested for a very long time—that's really what Rogue is about. Exploring those rules through procedural generation, simple rules with profound consequences—not just roguelikes, but all games are basically that."14
Rogue. Moria. NetHack. ADOM. These and the other roguelikes chronicled across the pages of Dungeon Hacks originated on gigantic computers that have long since been unplugged and donated to museum exhibits. Yet the roguelikes conceived on those systems persist—and they disprove the notion that video games must boast state-of-the-art graphical technology to capture interest.
Angband has thrived since its inception in the 1990s. Thomas Biskup and his small team have been rolling out new versions of ADOM and ADOM II since the culmination of his Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. Both games boast updated graphical veneers, although players who swear by text-based graphics can switch over to the familiar overlay of hash symbols, dashes, and "@" signs if they so desire.
NetHack, dormant for over twelve years, is due to receive an update—the first since version 3.4.3 released in December 2003. "Despite a lot of opinions to the contrary, we aren't dead and we haven't given up on the game," DevTeam founder Mike Stephenson wrote on nethack.org in April 2015.15 True to form, he declined to specify a release date. "To do so would break a long-standing NetHack tradition, but there is a more important reason. Given the amount of time since the previous release, and considering what's been integrated into it, knocking the bugs out of it may not be as easy an exercise as in the past, so we're loath to commit to a date and have something throw us off."
News of NetHack's resurrection stirred Internet forums into a frenzy. Every update to Angband and ADOM is met with excitement. Players flock to message boards to swap stories of "Yet Another Stupid Death," and to post screenshots of narrowly-won (or lost) battles down in the deepest, darkest dungeons.
If you were new to the roguelike scene, you would be forgiven for asking why. Why do these games, with their primitive graphics, inscrutable systems, and punishing consequences continue to thrive more than thirty-five years after their origination?
One reason is immunity to ageism. Hardware is inherently and inexorably anchored to Moore's Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that technology would double its capabilities every two years. That ultra-fast, ultra-expensive microprocessor or graphics card you scrimp and save for today will run the games at a slideshow-like crawl in a mere twenty-four months, give or take a few. Moore's Law has long dictated hardware shifts in the games industry. From the 1980s through the 2000s, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sega released new game consoles every four to five years in a bid to hold the attention of consumers tempted by newer, shinier boxes. Games lauded as technological marvels in their heyday now appear antiquated. Historians and diehard fans still play them, but the mainstream public moves on year by year, console by console.
Even compared to early video games like Pong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, the graphics in Rogue were rudimentary at best. Yet historians such as Harris argue that Rogue was never intended as a graphical showpiece. "You don't hear as much about it, but in some ways, Rogue is still the best roguelike because its different systems fit together the best. It's a game designed in such a way that you can't rely on any one thing. You can find an item that puts one part of the game completely out of play. You can find a ring of slow digestion, and food never becomes a factor. But you do want to put on other rings. No one item will make Rogue an instant win because almost all of the items are random."
Moreover, graphics can pose a distraction. Adventure games like Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, and Maniac Mansion were celebrated in the 1990s, but even the most ardent players commiserated over pixel hunts, the need to click on a specific pixel hidden in a densely-packed background in order to progress.
Angband and NetHack may require you to know what a "/" represents versus a "*," but once you decipher the symbols, your imagination, a graphics card that never becomes obsolete, fills in the rest, generating a gameplay-driven experience that never goes out of style.
Harris's enthusiasm for Rogue hits on the central reason why classic roguelikes live on: complex, interconnected systems. Many games, especially those predicated on telling a story, are analogous to amusement park rides. You follow a carefully constructed path, leaning into twists and loops engineered to move you along at a deliberate speed. And then the ride is over. You could go another round, but that sense of nervous anticipation as your carriage clanks slowly up a hill, the sight of the park spread out far below you, the rush of exhilaration as the carriage plunges down and shoots you through twists and turns—those can only be experienced for the first time once.
In Angband and other roguelikes, player agency—the player's ability to interact with the game world, and the extent to which he or she can manipulate it—feeds into procedural content generation to create a brand new experience each and every time. Erik Osheim, a member of Angband's DevTeam, describes one of his favorite tales of player agency. "There's someone who famously starts out with no weapons or torch. He goes down blind into the dungeon and finds everything he needs. In some ways, that's kind of a gimmick because you just keep doing that, dying over and over until you stumble on a torch. But if you come up with any challenge, there's probably a player who can do it."16
Harris opines that "the better [roguelike games] make you rely on what you find a lot more. You're not guaranteed to find the good stuff in order, or you might find the really good stuff early, or you might have to do without it because you never find it."
Additionally, roguelikes can appear to be sentient. That is precisely what endears the genre to Grey. "For me, it's about a playable, thinking game, almost a board game-y feel where it's fresh every time you play. Procedural content does that. Permadeath ties in with procedural content because it forces you to restart all the time and forces you to see the procedural elements of the game."17
Of course, procedural content is not the end-all, be-all factor. Players can slay as many monsters as they like in Rogue, but extra layers of challenge—such as food to prevent starvation—add to the genre's potential for inexhaustible gameplay possibilities. "You don't have an infinite amount of time to explore this space, and that's what makes the dungeon meaningful," Harris explained. "If it was just a space you moved around in at no cost, it's not interesting. But if there's something, some time limit, something that forces you to explore efficiently—that's interesting. Solving impromptu puzzles, figuring out the most efficient and safest way to explore a space—that's interesting. Also, the items you find, the random resources with which to explore the space and overcome the dangers. All these systems working together are what make [roguelikes] interesting."
Harris and Grey are fervent supporters of roguelikes, which may not make them the best spokespeople for the genre. In 2012, TIME magazine editor Lev Grossman listed NetHack as one of the periodical's All-TIME 100 Video Games. "The character classes alone give you a sense of the game's depth: you can play as an archeologist, a barbarian, a caveman, a knight, a samurai, a Valkyrie, a tourist, or half a dozen other options. NetHack is a demanding game — its difficulty and quirkiness have kept it a cult phenomenon — but it's more compelling than most of the chip-melting, big-budget graphical RPGs being released now."18
Grossman makes a fair point. Roguelikes will never fall out of vogue for the hardest of hardcore players who commune on message boards and write new flavors of Angband for fun. But the genre has yet to gain a foothold in the mainstream.
Harris argues that players should not let the genre's difficulty deter them. "Games aren't jobs. The way to enjoy roguelikes is to just play. If you enjoy it, fine. If not, maybe they're not for you. Once you get into them, though, there's so much there, and it's about the experience you have before you die. It's like, 'Okay, this is going well. This is very interesting—and I just died. But before I died, things were very interesting. I died in unexpected places.' If you can get into that and think of roguelikes as random story generators, where you're the protagonist of a story of your own making, that's awesome. I don't know of any genre of game that does it better than roguelikes."