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The history of the roguelike genre: from Rogue to Binding of Isaac

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We give tribute to the game, which became the progenitor of the whole genre. Her name is Rogue .

The prevalence of Roguelike games has been growing throughout the 40 years of the genre's existence, even though it has implemented ideas that seem like an anathema to popularity: a high degree of randomness, ASCII graphics, permanent death (permadeath), huge complexity and much more. However, today a step cannot be taken without stumbling upon a game that at least was not influenced by roguelike.

In the spirit of stories about gaming genres (we already talked about real-time strategies [ translation ], urban development games , first-person shooters [ translation ],simulators [translation: first and second parts], graphic adventure games [ translation ], racing on maps and open world games [ translation ]) let's now begin to understand how we came to this and what it all means. We will take a tour of the roguelike evolutionary tree, starting from Rogue itself and going all the way to modern games with roguelike elements.

But first, we need to answer an important question.

What is a roguelike?


It is impossible to find an exact definition of this term, except for its literal meaning ("a game like Rogue "). It can be said that roguelike is a journey through randomized dungeons with almost no plot or with its complete absence; the player fights both the dungeon itself and the monsters inside, repeating this process endlessly in order to master the schemes, contents and systems that determine the nature of the game until it dies and starts over.

But some people tried to narrow this definition. One can take for example the “high-value factors” of the Berlin interpretation , which were adopted at the 2008 International Roguelike Development Conference (International Roguelike Development Conference 2008). (Yes, there is an annual conference for roguelike developers, as well asone more for the players .)

The agreement states that in roguelike there must be permanent death (permadeath) - this means that when the character dies, then he is finished; Reboot is not possible. Also in the game there must be random / procedural generation of levels, step-by-step movement along the grid (which usually takes place quickly), complex interactions between the character, objects and the world, the need to manage limited resources for survival, a sense of exploration and discoveries with each passage - you win thanks to the skills and luck, not remembering. And the game should be focused on the confrontation between the player and the environment, that is, the player must first kill the monsters (or run away from them), and not make friends with them.

In addition, there is a clause in the agreement stating that the player should be able to use any team anytime, anywhere, but even some “canonical” roguelike violate this rule in aboveground maps and on purchase screens, so there isn’t much to say about that worry

How did we come to this? Well, it all started, of course, with Rogue . But even this game was not created in a vacuum.


Pedit5 .


The first rule of Pedit5 is not to talk about Pedit5 . (So ​​stop ...)


The Game of Dungeons .


Always select “Flail”. (The Game of Dungeons)


Beneath Apple Manor is actually the first game that combines all the elements of Rogue (and adds color to the graphics).

Rogue


Although they did not directly influence Rogue's creation , the Pedit5 dungeon wandering games ( c . 1975) and the dnd or The Game of Dungeons (1975) for the Plato system were the first computer games to attempt to recreate the dangers of traveling through the dungeons of the desktop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (1974). Pedit5 consisted of 40 or 50 rooms and connecting corridors located on the same level, which the players explored, collecting prey and trying not to be killed by the monster. The dnd was pretty much the same, with the exception of the multi-story dungeon (which became harder with each level), hidden under the floor of traps and a battle with the boss at the end.

The Colossal Cave Adventure (1977) of Will Crowther and Don Woods had no roguelike mechanic attributes except permadeath, but this game set the theme and tone. It was an adventure taking place in a system of underground caves (“a labyrinth of winding narrow passages similar to each other”), filled with wealth and threats lurking around every corner. The game had an inventory system, a lot of humorous ways to make problems for itself and die, it stimulated the search for creative solutions to problems. But once you have mastered the maze, the game ceases to be interesting. Due to the invariable layout of the rooms, the winners had no motivation to start the game anew.

Beneath Apple Manor (1978) was the first game to combine all the elements of Rogue. It had a randomly generated dungeon up to 10 levels deep, drawn either by graphics or text, customizable complexity and scope like a “fog of war” (when exploring the levels, they opened gradually). The basic cycle of the game consisted in exploring rooms, opening doors, collecting objects and treasures, battling monsters with the help of various teams in the D&D style . The game even featured the coveted prize - the Golden Apple, hidden somewhere under the mansion.

The only problem is that in essence it was not Rogue . Or, more precisely, in the Beneath Apple Manorthe wrong people just played. Perhaps this was due to the low prevalence of Apple II (until 1983, when this computer began to compete with the IBM PC and Atari systems), which limited the popularity of the game; or maybe it was due to its name, or marketing, or a combination of several factors. It is impossible to say why, but this game has not received wide popularity.

The story is funny. New ideas and innovations are strong only because of their scale and influence, and sometimes something has to be invented twice (or even several times). In this case, it happened just like that. The Beneath Apple Manor was forgotten, but its concept was invented (independently) anew shortly after.


Canonical Rogue was released on all kinds of platforms - for example, this screenshot was taken in the version for Amiga .


Rogue on Atari.


Rogue in DOS.


Rogue on Mac.

Rogue


In 1980, students at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy, teamed up to create a game that randomizes the maze layout and monster / item layout in the Colossal Cave Adventure . They also wanted to have elements of D&D and the popular 1970s text game for mainframes Star Trek , in which players had to destroy all the Klingon warships in the galaxy before the time ran out.

Using a Unix software library called curses, which was a kind of text-based drawing tool, a couple of developers created an adventure in the underworld in which they had to travel from level to level, each of which consisted of nine or less rooms connected by corridors , in search of the Amulet of Yendor. In fact, they did not look for the Amulet, it was just a bait, a narrative reason for descending into a dangerous dungeon. When starting a new game, levels, scrolls, weapons, and the location of objects were randomized. The purpose of the items was unknown (unless you had an identification scroll) until the player dared to use it, at the risk of inflicting unintended damage on himself.

Developers distributed executable versions of their Rogue gameacross all campuses of the university of california. It had 26 types of monsters - one for each letter of the alphabet (uppercase), and the player’s character was indicated by the symbol “@”, which could move no faster and no slower than monsters. Performing any of the actions - moving in one of the directions, reading a scroll, looking for traps or picking up an object - the player spent one move.

Actions were tied to various keys: “w” - use weapons, “W” - put on armor, “t” - drop weapons, h, j, k and l - move, and so on. And death, which easily overtook even experienced players, was permanent - the user had to focus on mastering the mechanic, and not on the design of game levels. (When a group of players started copying the save data to fool, Toy and Wichman changed the code; after the reboot, the battle was deleted.)

When Toy transferred to Berkeley in 1982, they, together with curses developer Ken Arnold, made additional improvements, which made the game more more popular. So much so that in 1984 Roguewas officially added to BSD Unix version 4.2, due to which, thanks to ARPANET, the game got to the computers of universities, research laboratories and commercial companies around the world.

This ensured Rogue's long life , but by some lucky chance it also led to much more serious consequences.

Birth of roguelike


Initially, Hack (1980-82) was an attempt to recreate Rogue , from memory, because the creator of the game, Jay Fenlason, was desperate to play Rogue , but did not have access to it. But thanks to the help of his classmates, Hack quickly evolved from a crude Rogue clone into a Rogue- inspired game . This was probably the first Rogue - like game . In a conversation with Dungeon Hacks author David Craddock, Fenlason said he was trying to make the game “as exciting as Rogue, ” while also featuring improved monster AI and level design.

The game had complex algorithms for generating labyrinths and dungeons, about twice as many types of monsters and more complex interactions between characters, objects and monsters. And the most important thing was that she went beyond a bunch of classmates. In 1982, Fenlason sent the cassette with the game code to the USENIX association. At the beginning of the source code file, he placed a statement giving permission to use, modify and distribute the program while retaining its copyright.

Two years later, in December 1984, a Dutch mathematician and programmer named Andres Brower found this tape in the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) archive. Intrigued, he began to play. Soon hackcaptured him in the same way as Fenlason: not as a game, but as a programming task. Over the next few months, he published four new versions, each of which added new features to the original in accordance with reviews and suggestions from colleagues from CWI and fans of the game in Usenet.

He added new monsters, including a long worm, which was divided into two worms, if you hit it anywhere between the head and tail, as well as animals that could fight along with the players. He also added cookies with predictions, paths that return to previously visited dungeon levels, shops, character classes (fighter, knight, caveman, wizard, tourist and archaeologist - each of them had his own starting inventory), the ability to leave notes on the floor and many other features. (My favorite addition: the player could eat corpses in order to have a chance at such opportunities as invisibility or magic resistance.) Then Andres lost interest and stopped developing.

Meanwhile, without the knowledge of Brouwer and the multitude of Hack playersfrom Usenet, another game inspired by Rogue was gaining popularity in Oklahoma . Her story was very similar to the story of Hack . Robert Coeneke, a student and laboratory assistant at the Department of Computational Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, created his own version of Rogue from memory . This version had the theme of “Lord of the Rings” : the ominous Balrog, the Curse of Durin , became her guard of treasures in the deepest nooks of the dungeon.


Hack


Moria


If we already mentioned Hack , then I must say that Moria is like him.

Robert named the Moria game after the huge demon-seized mines of Middle-earth Moriah. Moria doubled the maximum depth of the dungeon, from 26 levels to 50, and moved the movement from the H, J, K, and L keys (which were selected for Rogue because they moved the cursor in vi) to an alphanumeric keyboard.

In addition, Moria got rid of many of the limitations of Rogue., for example, from its grid of rooms measuring 9x9 (they turned into interwoven and wriggling labyrinths, stretching over several screens). Monsters moved at different speeds, which depended not only on their class, but also on the level of the dungeon - the deeper the player went down, the higher the chance was to meet a fast monster that would tear you apart before you could make a move. This added a new tactical element: if you want to survive, then you need to take into account the difference in speeds.

Like Hack , Moriabenches appeared (a special scroll allowed to teleport between the city and the current level of the dungeon) and character classes. Koeneke came up with various ways to fill 26 letters of the alphabet with different meanings (for example, the color coding of monsters) in order to fit as much gameplay and dozens of monsters into the text graphics as possible, mainly from the standard set of RPG and fantasy (undead, huge animals, ogres, golems, etc.) .d.).

Before stopping development at the end of 1986, Koeneke managed to give one of the monsters a name in honor of the first player who defeated Balrog, create a set of special templates for treasure rooms guarded by especially strong monsters, add a map mode that allows you to see where you are, and realize the ability digging ore that could be sold in the city.

ThoughMoria and Hack are commonly referred to as sources for the creation of the roguelike genre, there are other simple roguelikes released during this period that I will briefly mention. Mission: Mainframe (1983-1987) replaced Rogue's fantasy surroundings with science fiction: instead of the Amulet of Yendor, a computer mainframe appeared, and the malicious operator of which turned into the main boss guarding it. Monsters were office workers, weapons and objects — office supplies — and in hassles, one could win with weapons, exchanges, tricks, practical jokes, dodging, or a “strategy” acquired in the lobby library.

Advanced Rogue (1984-1986) was essentially Rogue with simple benches, other monsters and “various” magic items and an expanded implementation of the concept of cursed items, complemented by blessings that allow you to enchant an item or remove the curse from it.


NetHack on Amiga.


Surprisingly, when playing in Windows XP NetHack looks almost no different.


Author Larn refused to use food and added a second dungeon.


Angland at DOS.

Diverging paths


Neither Moria nor Hack have stopped growing after the departure of their creators. Both games continued to live, albeit not in their exact form, but in spirit, under new names. And here our story becomes more complicated.

After Brower lost interest in the game, other people took up it, and soon, in July 1987, Hack spawned NetHack. It was the same game, only more expanded, with weapons taken from mythology and new classes such as ninja, archaeologist and tourist. A few years later, they were supplemented by special levels and areas, for example, a castle with a tower, in which the powerful (although initially too weak) Vlad Kolosazhatel, branching paths, alignment system (law, neutrality or chaos) affecting the characters were located , as well as many objects of the game. And, as if that were not enough, the game also has a meta-game for identifying randomized objects, from which you can compose a whole encyclopedia.

Nethackwaited for the player to die often and quickly, in the most painful, humorous or stupid ways. Her predecessors seemed to enjoy providing players with all kinds of meaningless and original ways of dying, but NetHack experienced (and continues to experience to this day) a particular pleasure.

Over the course of several years, fans of the game came up with the abbreviation YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death, “another stupid death”), describing deaths that became indirect or side effects of the player’s actions (for example, you kicked something inanimate, having little health, or in you hit a reflection of your own magic ray), or as a direct result of random events.

But NetHack developed Rogue's legacynot alone. The Finnish game SpurguX (1987) threw a player into a quarter of a modern city and gave him the task of finding a special bottle of cognac. Weapons were objects of the real world, and monsters were replaced by all kinds of bosses, animals and enemies.

Larn (1986 onwards, as it were ) was almost a roguelike genius child. Drawing inspiration from both branches of game design - from Moria and Hack , as well as from the “big daddy” Rogue, it combined unchanged levels (that is, a limited number of objects and monsters with the generation of the dungeon scheme at the first start) with a city on the surface, benches, generation of objects, the strength of which depends on the depth of the dungeons, with a time limit of 300 “mobiles” ( otherwise, the character’s daughter will die), stimulating players to delve into the dungeon, and also had other elements of all three of their predecessors in this genre.

Nevertheless, Larn remained a unique game. She abandoned the concept of food - an essential element of Rogue designand became the first roguelike with several dungeons (namely two), each of which had great variability in the form and size of the levels. In the city on the surface there was a bank in which it was possible to receive interest on the gold put on deposit, as well as a university in which new skills were studied. Another tricky move was invented - the game with each passing became more difficult, a tax was added from new adventurers, depending on the earnings of their predecessor.

Umoria (1987 onwards), as you might guess, drew inspiration directly from Moria . Up to the point that it was based on the source code of Moria 4.8 and kept the version numbering. She greatly expanded the influence of Moria, but I don’t know about the serious changes or additions that she made to the genre during her 30-plus years of development, except for indirect influence through many varieties of the game.

Angband (1990 onwards, but until 1993 only inside the University of Warwick) took Umoria 5.2.1 as the basis . The game was named after Angband , another place in Tolkien's Middle-earth, and aimed at expanding Moria in size and scale, because it was not yet too deep and complex. Angband Developersreworked the behavior and abilities of monsters, adding an interesting touch - inanimate creatures, named after the player’s previous characters. The game punished the leisurely, constantly adding new monsters to the current level of the dungeon. (In addition, a lot of new things and their ways of using them appeared in it, the description of which would take many pages.)

The result was a roguelike, the passage of which could take weeks , not minutes or hours, as in ordinary roguelike. Like Moria , an Angband player never feels safe. Danger is everywhere, it threatens everything around, no matter what level the character is and how much time the player spends on previous walkthroughs.

Various important differences appeared in various branches of the genre. Angband levels were regenerated each time they were visited, and NetHack levels were generated only at the beginning of the game. This created a subtle difference in strategy and attitude — NetHack ’s focused, meaningful accuracy against unlimited, well-thought-out exploration of the Angband world . In addition, in NetHack, players had internal abilities that could be obtained by eating items / creatures, but in Angband they were not: in this game, a more complex system of resistance to different types of attacks was used. In angbandany resistance given by wearing items is combined with the temporary stability obtained by drinking a potion. But like in NetHack , all this served one purpose - to avoid sudden death when meeting with an unexpected powerful monster.


Despite appearing in 1988, Omega has retained the tradition of ASCII graphics from previous roguelike.


UnReal World relied on real history and folklore ...


... and he also had graphics!

Alternative ways


Omega (1988) dared to move away from the standard formula. It retained permadeath, sophisticated keyboard controls and ASCII graphics, but a rich above-ground world and many other RPG elements also appeared. It had cities, guilds, shops, houses (which you could penetrate to steal items), quests, a plot, several dungeons, plus a humorous character creation process. Before starting the game, you had to answer what your grades were when entering college, talk about your hobbies, IQ, whether you smoke, do you often have accidents, do you like sports and video games, what You can reap weight, and also give answers to a bunch of other bizarre and funny questions.

Then, according to the plot, after a seemingly ordinary check of the file system, the player was pulled into the computer, and bam - he ended up in City of Rampart with a character whose characteristics were created in accordance with the answers to the questions.

Then the player was likely to die, because Omega , like most roguelike, was difficult, and the various flaws of the character without any doubt led to a terrible or comical death. But if the player managed to survive long enough to explore the game's systems, he soon found that he could receive poverty benefits (if the player called himself poor when asked about income), or that using items put into inventory caused a lot of funny problems. And that you can create and set your own traps (and then fall into them yourself).

Omega also became one of the first roguelike in which there were locked doors - this innovation was present in the Mike's Adventure Game: A Dungeon Adventuring Game , released in the same 1988. The latter was almost indistinguishable from the port under the Rogue dos game, except for these locked doors, torches on the walls that could be lit and extinguished, as well as the possibility of monsters falling into traps (in this way they made sounds and warned the player about their location).

The Dungeon Revealed (1987) had the usual Mac interface and allowed you to select commands from the menu bar if the player forgot the keyboard layout. But apart from this and the lack of permadeath, plus the gradual narrowing of the rooms when going down into the depths, nothing seriously distinguished it from its predecessors.

This cannot be said for the “survival” roguelike UnReal World(1992 onwards). Today, the game takes place in Finland of the Iron Age and is a mixture of real history and local folklore, but earlier it was more like traditional medieval fantasy, in which the player searches a dungeon consisting of 15 levels in search of keys to the gate of the mysterious tower. Like Omega , the game had an above-ground world that could be explored, but in earlier versions it remained much more modest. There were also class-specific skill menus in the game — warriors could fight without weapons, priests could identify scrolls and spells, thieves could sneak and steal, and hunters could find herbs and food, plus make their arrows. (Of the fun features of the game, mention may be made of a hiccup received by a player.)

Future versionsmade additional innovations, for example, systems of the seasons and weather, new survival and crafting skills, more complex in-game cultures, agriculture, marriages and various improvements (for example, more extensive wastelands in which you could wander and die), emphasizing the severity of this ancient the world of the “far north”. Gradually, the main goal of the game changed: instead of “victory”, the player sought to maintain the existence of his character as long as possible, despite all the troubles.

Ragnarok , or Valhalla(1992-1995) also actively used Scandinavian folklore and, in particular, Scandinavian mythology. The game looked in its own way at the roguelike concept, adding a few ready-made quests and a convenient character transformation function. The character could change the class, race, gender, number of eyes and fingers, and in the sage’s class one could even write a scroll to move the most powerful monster into the body on the map (however, he had to kill his old self to get his items).


The Shareware model has become an important part of the history of roguelike, Scarab of Ra .


Who needs one species, if you can get four at the same time, as in Moraff's Revenge .

Change the angle


Although some predecessors of Rogue used bit / pixel graphics and first-person view, Rogue and almost all of its descendants firmly adhered to worlds drawn in ASCII / text mode and with a top view (only a few provided the possibility of a graphic tile mode). The developers considered this style more flexible and expressive, without worrying about how repulsively meaningless it looked to the uninitiated.

But some developers began to search for sources of inspiration beyond the genre. In 1987, the newly hired Apple programmer needed to learn Mac software development. The management allowed him to take the creation of the game as such an educational project. Scarab of raReleased next year as shareware, Rogue combined with the first-person maze game MazeWar (the original version of which was written in 1973, but the programmer Rick Holzgraf knew only the 1980s version for Xerox Alto); in addition, the game contained an unusual twist - there was absolutely no violence in it.

Monsters (which should have been avoided, not killed) and objects were drawn by hand and filled almost the entire screen. The player could navigate through the maze in the theme of Ancient Egypt with different “speeds”. High speeds saved food and oil for the lamp, but increased the risk of falling into a trap or awakening a sleeping animal, and low speeds were safer and allowed the character (automatically) to draw a map of the labyrinth to simplify moving and returning back.

DOS players met their first first-person roguelike that year, it was Moraff's Revenge , the debut game of the legendary shareware game developer MoraffWare. The authors of the game were unhappy with the standard first-person view, so Moraff's Revengesimultaneously showed the player four sides, each of which was on a separate panel on the right side of the screen, plus a separate map with a top view in the left half of the screen.

The game itself was a simple roguelike, after finding the fountain of youth at level 70 returning the player to the very beginning (the dungeon was generated anew). The characteristics of the player after completing a successful passage were saved. To complicate the gameplay, the game had special monsters, with each hit forever reducing the level of experience.

Commercial RPG Dungeon Hack(1993) also had a first-person view along with procedurally generated dungeons (the settings sliders allowed changing parameters such as the number of traps and holes, food availability, monster complexity, etc.), and the optional permadeath, but this made playing the game even easier , to the point that she began to look more like an Eye of the Beholder with roguelike elements than a real first-person roguelike.

Mystery Dungeon and Japanese roguelike


The advent of Rogue in Japan was delayed only briefly - the game first appeared in 1986 on the PC-88 home computer, but its impact on Japanese game developers can be traced in other ways that are not related to various variations of NetHack and Angband .

The first Japanese roguelike I managed to find was Fatal Labyrinth , released on the Sega Genesis in 1990 (in North America in 1991). In the same year, it was adapted (and not ported or trimmed) under the Game Gear and Master System called Dragon Crystal . This version was more like rogue lite because it lacked permadeath.

ThoughFatal Labyrinth has an isometric view and graphics in the style of typical JRPG, it plays almost like Rogue . It has randomized dungeons, items that may turn out to be good or bad, and their effects are unknown until first use. Plus, there are scrolls of identification, curses, food (however, food is consumed automatically when selected, and if you are inaccurate, you can die from overeating), and much more.

But the battle system was different: in most roguelike the player can move and attack diagonally, but here only four directions are used, and monsters are slower than the player; however, they may strike a farewell blow if a player tries to get out of close combat. In addition, monsters always know where you are (as you know where they are), and in the case of wakefulness can go straight to the character.

About Fatal Labyrinth soon forgotten, but the company-developer of Dragon Quest called Chunsoft did not allow the influence of roguelike disappear from Japanese game design. Soon, she released the Dragon Quest IV spin-off titled Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon (Torneko's Big Adventure: The Dungeon of Mystery , 1993), sold only in Japan. Players ran a merchant named Torneko (or Taloon) on his journeys through mysterious multi-level dungeons in search of items for sale in a shop he wanted to open.

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Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon

The company wanted to influence the roguelike in the same way that Dragon Quest influenced the RPG, and to some extent it worked. The Mystery Dungeon series now has over 30 games, most of which are in one of four sub-series: Dragon Quest, Chocobo , Pokémon, or Shiren the Wanderer . In fact, they created a completely new genre that gained great popularity in Japan. I will not describe them in detail, but simply give a short list of several important games:

The first Mystery Dungeon seemed to have a split personality. It was Dragon Quest IVwith completely safe cities and castles, in which you could communicate with other characters, buy and sell items; and at the same time it remained a roguelike with a new look at permadeath - death was not the end of the character, but rather the end of the attempt to go through the dungeon in the current version of the dungeon. After death, the player appeared again, ready to try to get through the newly generated version of the dungeon, as if the previous attempt was just a dream.

If the player managed to get out alive, then the city became larger, and Torneko got access to a larger set of items that could help him in his next trip to the dungeon. Thus, thanks to moving back and forth, the two parts of the game complemented each other until the character gained enough good equipment and experience (plus learned tactics and strategies) to win.

After Torneko's Big Adventure proved the success of the concept, the place of this series of games in history was strengthened by Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer (1995) for Super Famicom (in 2006 there was a version for Nintendo DS in Japan, and in 2008 - throughout the rest of the world). The second part of Mystery Dungeon borrowed elements of NetHackfor example, dungeon shops and locked rooms, as well as helper characters similar to NetHack tame beasts . Also in the game there was a wonderful set of manually created (non-random) dungeon puzzles that opened at the 99th level, a completely randomized dungeon test (up to the names of items that were known in all other modes), which also served as an amazing tutorial on the game.

Let's jump over several versions of this series of games: Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon ( Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon ; 1997) was the first game in the series to have surpassed a million copies, which was undoubtedly due to the connection with the Final Fantasy universeand that the player controlled the chocobo, which was helped by his mugle friend. This time, the Final Fantasy active time battle (ATB) system was used , in which attacks before filling the ATB scale were carried out with reduced power and accuracy.

The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team and Red Rescue Team (2005) attracted widespread attention to the Mystery Dungeon series outside of Japan. Despite the mediocre reviews, both parts were sold in total around the world with a circulation of more than five million copies. All 380 monsters from the Pokémon series were present in them , their movements and abilities were surprisingly well adapted to such an unusual style of play. However two rescue teamso simplified the Mystery Dungeon formula that the series could hardly be called roguelike. Even the effect of death was greatly reduced: the player lost his items and money, but retained all experience points for the next attempt.

Chunsoft was (and still is) the most prominent Japanese-style roguelike manufacturer, but the success of the Mystery Dungeon series opened the door to dozens of other games that either mimicked or inspired Chunsoft's approach to the genre.

Azure Dreams (1997), Climax Landers (1999, known as Time Stalkers outside of Japan ), Lufia: The Legend Returns (2001), Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja (2006), Guided Fate Paradox (2013), as well as many other games owe their existence to Mystery Dungeon , and some of the more popular games like Parasite Eve (1998) , Vagrant Story (2000), and Final Fantasy XIV (2010 onwards) contain references to this series. But all this does not apply to the topic of our article, so we will move on.


In 1994, Ancient Domains of Mystery made progress in the roguelike genre.

Ancient Domains of Mystery


While Mystery Dungeon set the roguelike on a new course, Ancient Domains of Mystery , or ADOM (1994 onwards), proposed a new transformation of the basic roguelike formula. Someone calls her NetHack from an alternate universe. The game developer took NetHack and turned it into something unique, with a strong Omega influence , elements of Angband and Larn , as well as computer RPGs.

The game had a plot - something about fighting the forces of chaos to restore balance, and quests that fit well into the game itself, which took place on a vast territory filled with many cities, dungeons and spaces. Chaos was not just a metaphor for evil creatures breaking free; he became a kind of radiation, energy (basically unnoticed), capable of causing bad and good mutations (which, in turn, influenced the outcome of the story), gradually “corrupting” the character.

Games of the Roguelike genre like to make the player’s decisions become important and affect the gameplay, but such influence usually focused on the main character and his immediate environment. In ADOMactions had much larger and longer-lasting effects. (Honestly warning: if you kill cats, you will receive a well-deserved curse.)

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (1995-2005) chose the best ideas for this and other games, getting rid of the plot and the terrestrial world. She became an improvement game by adding a whole bunch of changes and patches to roguelike in NetHack style . Her skill system, for example, increased character skill levels separately from core attributes (such as HP and MP). Killing monsters added points to the "experience pool", from which the skill level increased after the player pumped the use of this skill for a long time. (The number of required exercises depended on the skill level, as well as on the giftedness of the character, special rules and random elements.)

Soon, the game gained a reputation as one of the best roguelike, especially after its fork Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006 onwards) became the main version. (Later we will come back to this.)


Toejam and Earl is probably the most charming game that actively uses roguelike elements.


The game that turned roguelike into mainstream entertainment was Diablo .


What is it, Dwarf Fortress ? Come on...

Cross pollination


Step by step roguelike, and especially the so-called “roguelike elements”, began to penetrate the realm of popular games. I’m not sure which analogy will be more correct: that they “infected” the game mainstream or that they “got dusty” from other genres, but since the 1990s, more and more roguelike design elements began to appear in the development of commercial games.

The fun, satirical action adventure game for Sega Genesis ToeJam & Earl (1991) was probably the first game to hide its roguelike roots under a vibrant picture and many cunning design twists. Instead of going down deeper into the dungeon, the player had to climb (by elevator) to ever higher islands floating in the sky - the levels were not limited to walls, but to the edges of the islands. It is particularly noteworthy thatToeJam & Earl did not possess any of the attributes of a traditional roguelike - no spells, scrolls and character characteristics, no weapons and items, except money and “gifts”, in which randomly generated bonuses were hidden (some of them had negative effects).

Here we see an example of a game that is not dedicated to obtaining a mysterious artifact or defeating a mysterious creature. In it, a couple of rapper aliens are trying to collect fragments of their crashed space ship in order to return home. And despite the lack of constant violence, the game was very difficult. But what I liked most about her was that she moved away from the subject of simple survival. ToeJam & Earlshe wanted the player to enjoy, take his time and rejoice, wander around the world and playfully run away from earthly enemies. (I do not want to say that ordinary roguelike did not allow them to behave like that, they just seemed more intense and dangerous, more pumped up with adrenaline compared to the serene ToeJam & Earl .)

Diablo (1996), which was greatly influenced by Moria / UmoriaDue to its excellent appearance and friendliness to beginners, it made roguelike mainstream - a mouse-driven interface, isometric graphics and procedurally generated quests did not let you get bored. But without the depth and complexity of traditional roguelike, it degraded to pure, thoughtless grinding - the player for many hours only did that he fought fiercely with monsters.

DoomRL (2002 onwards) went in a different direction. The authors took the popular Doom first-person shooter , a game almost exactly the opposite of roguelike, and figured out how to turn it into a roguelike. The most noticeable difference from the standard roguelike was the active use of Doom remote attacks. Guns. All kinds of weapons, the pros and cons of which were copied from the original (for example, you have to spend a turn to reload the shotgun - an obvious reference to the Doom automatic pump action shotgun ).

In addition, the selected bonuses and health are applied automatically, and after exceeding the maximum HP, the player receives temporary super health. Walls can be destroyed by any exploding objects (triggered by the actions of a player or monsters). And all these destruction created by the player is accompanied by real sound effects from Doom .

Desktop Dungeons (2013) and Road Not Taken(2014) demonstrated the flexibility of roguelike even more, turning into puzzle games (becoming “not really roguelike” at the same time). Hand of Fate (2014) crossed the roguelike formula with a hybrid collectible card game / action RPG, and Nuclear Throne (2013) created an unexpected combination of roguelike and shooter. After her, this mixture of genres became fashionable, and small indie companies released many games in it.

However, the most difficult hodgepodge is most likely implemented by Dwarf Fortress(first public release in 2006), creating an unlimited roguelike adventure mode that used sophisticated world generation systems (among them were the dwarven epic pedigrees, their history and culture, regional biomes, complex climate systems, and much more). But there was a main game mode in it, combining roguelike logic with the lives and deaths of residents in an extremely detailed colony management simulator.

Fresh blood


The development of roguelike elements has led some indie developers to start over - to learn the lessons learned from the previous 20-30 years of roguelike and get rid of unpleasant and optional parts.


Roguelike has become so popular that there are now even a few mobile games, such as 100 Rogues .

Brogue (2009) retained the ASCII graphics of the past, but complemented it with a kaleidoscope of colors - it cannot be said that color ASCII was a new idea, but in this game it was implemented artistically, with shading and animations. Brogue simplified the mechanics, eased the learning curve and made the interface more convenient - it was a deliberate return to Rogue's elegance . The game abandoned character classes, shops, all characteristics of the characters, with the exception of strength and health, and all that was not mandatory for the roguelike gameplay. And it turned out a great project that retained the taste and atmosphere of Rogue, updated and improved for modern systems.

100 Rogues (2010) was also aimed at redefining Rogue as a modern game, this time on the iPhone, with bright, cartoony animated pixel art, ironic cutscenes and just a dozen dungeon levels, but with Brogue elegance .

Tales of Maj'Eyal , or ToME 4 (2010 onwards) demonstrated a more sophisticated way to upgrade roguelike. The game began life as a variant of Angband called Troubles of Middle-Earth about 20 years ago, but the version of Maj'Eyal was rewritten from scratch, adding an entourage of "high fantasy", tile graphics and optional mouse control.

The game offered a lot of quests and a non-linear plot, plus a huge above-ground world, in-game chat (despite the fact that the adventure takes place alone), several dimensions that you can navigate through, and an MMO-style skill system that departed from experimenting with shuffling inventory of traditional roguelike (they were still present, but to a lesser extent). And for those who wanted roguelike without permadeath, the game has two alternative modes: exploration (unlimited lives) and adventure (limited lives, but in the process of passing you can pick up additional ones).

Dungeons of Dredmor (2011) became another project for beginners in the genre thanks to easy humor and cartoony graphics, plus a relatively friendly and accessible interface. Darkest dungeon(2016) rethought the player’s stress (and constant dying cycles), turning it into the mechanics of a roguelike adventure, this time taking place under an inherited family estate. It was this stress mechanics called the “Affliction” that the game was different from the rest. Stress is growing due to lack of food, lack of light, deaths, injuries and the like, both from the observed and the experienced. All this can cause effects that affect the ability of the characters to carry out the tasks entrusted to them (for example, fight, escape or eat).


During the recent revolution of indie games, some of our favorite games were actively borrowed from roguelike (or even became examples of this genre). For example, Spelunky, one of our favorite games of 2012.


… The Binding of Isaac. Ars Technica.

Roguelike-like(-like?)


Based on such examples of mixing genres as ToeJam & Earl and Diablo , indie developers brought us a lot of new intergenre and "not quite roguelike" games. Examples of such games include such obvious non-roguelike as Spelunky (the original of 2008, remade by the same developer in 2012) - in fact, a simplified traditional roguelike combined with a fast platformer, and the Infinite Space series about space exploration (2002 and 2005). There were other games that refused permadeath or were too simple to satisfy the building requirements of the “police roguelike”.

I already said in this article (and especially in the section on cross-pollination) that such games have always been. Mention is also made of one of the first shareware roguelite for DOS The Dungeons of Silmar (1990), which had tile graphics and fun classes like a percussionist, baseball player and werewolf. If a player died in a dungeon, of which there were many, then the game automatically threw him to the beginning of this dungeon, taking all the experience and objects accumulated during his passage.

Castle of the winds(1989-93) also deviated from the roguelike tradition, dropping permadeath and choosing to control the mouse (rather than the keyboard), but it became an excellent introduction to the genre with tile graphics, a standard roguelike storyline surroundings, hundreds of spells and scrolls, as well as a simplified version of conventional systems roguelike.

Relatively recently, The Binding of Isaac (2011) combined the immediacy of Zelda and Smash TV with the traditional and roguelike mood, complementing all this with reflections on morality in Christian theology. The game has permadeath and the main character Isaac has a death diary; she borrowed from Spelunky the transformation of roguelike ideas into something completely new - an active shooter for the joystick.

FTL: Faster than Light(2012) transferred the newfound roguelike-like trend into the science fiction spacecraft control genre. The main contribution to roguelike, along with the permadeath element, was the feeling of the game, the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. Everything can go wrong very quickly, but if you make the right decisions and use the resources, this is not fatal.

Despite its name, Rogue Legacy (2013) looked more like Spelunky paired with Metroidvania. This is a cruel and smart game about manic repetition of actions and procedurally generated platform environments. It is curious that in it the player takes responsibility for the ever-changing family tree. If you die, and this most likely will happen sooner or later, then your character will be replaced by one of his children, who has the same armor, level, abilities and features (for example, bald head, color blindness, dwarfism and even elecophophobia ), which also a recently deceased parent, plus random genetic variations (because we never become an exact copy of our parents).

Stayin 'alive


Many of the first roguelike are still alive - they are not only constantly played by fans, but they are also constantly supplemented by developers. NetHack , for example, underwent more than a dozen iterations before December 2003, before finally getting the optional tile graphics, character races (not just classes) and monster items (and, among other things, a branch of levels built on the basis of Sokoban).

Meanwhile, NetHack itself split and branched into many variations, which is documented in the NetHack wiki . Of the more than two dozen variations of NetHack , the most notable were SLASH'EM / SLASH'EM Extended and UnNetHack(the first was a mega-extension of NetHack (more than 26 thousand types of monsters!)), with funny additions like The Guild of Disgruntled Adventurers ; the latter was characterized by increased randomness and a much larger number of items (as well as interface improvements).

Angband also continues to live, both in the form of the main game, support of which is still ongoing, and in many derivatives - among them the most outstanding, perhaps, were ZAngband (1994 onwards) in the theme “The Amber Chronicle” and the Tales already mentioned above of Middle-Earth / Tales of Maj'Eyal . ADOM

Developmentalso continues, despite the ten-year gap that ended in 2012 with the Kickstarter campaign to revive the game on modern platforms. At the time of writing, ADOM comes in the free version of “Modern Classic”, as well as in the paid deluxe version, which has a research mode, a story mode of traditional RPGs and a hardcore roguelike mode.

And the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006 onwards) continues to push forward Linley's Dungeon Crawl legacythanks to the many improvements created by fans that increase the convenience of the game, for example, the functions of automatic research and food consumption, redesigned interfaces of different gaming systems, player-defined training tasks, improved mouse support and many small changes that reduce the monotony and the number of uninteresting choices .

To summarize: endless transformations


It seems quite appropriate that the genre born on the basis of a game that sought to ensure endless replayability through random permutations itself evolved into something infinitely diverse. Today we have roguelike, roguelike-like and non-roguelike with roguelike elements that can satisfy any desire. The development of the genre was reflected in its own principles: hundreds of new branches, like a maze of interwoven moves similar to each other, but still different, with ideas tested over and over again in various combinations, branched out from each game.

And thanks to initiatives such as the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge , which provide a constant influx of new roguelike ideas, we are confident that the genre will continue to evolve in completely different directions.

But even given the enormous breadth, depth, and variability of the roguelike genre, I venture to suggest that Rogue may not be the greatest legacy of Rogue . I believe that this is rather an idea, a philosophy. Rogue showed us that games can be deep, inventive, complex, and exciting thanks to their very rules and systems. And we still continue to discover how true this was.

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