This is my third and final entry for the Archdruid Gaming Decades: The 80's contest. Archdruid Gaming is a great community that supports gaming-related content here on the Steem blockchain, and you should definitely go check them out if you're not familiar with them.

---

Rogue is a game that managed to define a whole genre around itself. Rogue wasn't the first game that we would consider a roguelike (games that share defining features with Rogue), with other games like Beneath Apple Manor and Sword of Fargoal proceeding it, at least in terms of development, if not publication.

However, it would go on to be a lot more successful than its predecessors, and become a more prominent influence on successors.

I was too young to catch Rogue when it first came out, and my first exposure to roguelikes came in the form of a roguelike named Tales of Middle Earth, or ToME for short.

I had been attracted to it because even as a youth I enjoyed reading Tolkien's work, but shortly after I discovered it I quickly started playing other games within the genre (most notably Joseph Hewitt's GearHead and Dead Cold, which stuck with me particularly well).

Rogue probably contributes as much to modern game design as any other video game does. Even though it is not as well-known as many of the other games of its day, it pioneered many concepts that would go on to be incredibly important.

Screenshot of Rogue running on a modern system via the DosBOX emulator; this is the 1984, not the 1980 version.

Unfettered Growth

Rogue had a few things going for it that made it quite influential, like the fact was distributed freely when it was first created for Unix. It got ported quite frequently to other systems, and many people had the ability to play it.

This is one of the reasons why I managed to encounter it myself, since Tales of Middle Earth (whose successor, Tales of Maj'Eyal, is still around and going strong) was available free to download for childhood computer following the tradition of Rogue.

You can also run a roguelike on any computer you can find. Believe me; you can run a roguelike on it. When I was a kid, the fact that I enjoyed roguelikes so much was fantastic, because with the exception of Dwarf Fortress (which runs in real time) I've never had a roguelike tax a system so much as to become painful to play.

Roguelikes still have a strong tradition of being free, though this is not as universal as it once was, especially as many of the games become more complicated and there is more market interest.

Emergent Gameplay

One of the things that Rogue has in droves is what is known as emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay refers to a situation in which there is no scripted content that determines what the player will do. This is sort of a simplification of the concept, since it still relies on rules that are programmed into the game itself, but it is one that is close enough for our purposes.

Take for example, Rogue's basic concept. The goal is for the player character to descend into a dungeon, get a magic artifact and return. This is the main "scripted" story of the game, and it does not change.

The actual play experience, is built on emergent principles. While the story is always the same, player's face different challenges every time. The rooms and levels of the dungeon are randomly generated, each with its own hazards.

This essentially means that the game is made up of a series of parts and those parts can be recombined in a variety of fashions. From the design prospective this has the benefit of providing some light reductions in the amount of content that needs to be created. Because things are semi-randomly combined, it is only necessary to create enough elements and interactions so that they can be placed in ways that are new two players on each playthrough. It is not even necessary for every experience to be novel, merely that a sufficient amount of any particular playthrough feel different so that the player does not noticed the repetition.

For instance, one can make fifteen enemy families, with three versions of each. For instance, a game might have a bandit, a bandit archer, and a bandit magician. These could be placed independently, as a group to play on each other's strengths, or within special rooms (later roguelikes with capitalize on this more than Rogue did, with themed levels).

By creating such a family of encounters, one can balance the difficulty of the game so that it is possible to have a meaningful progression from weak to strong challenges that challenge the player's skill and strategic abilities, while still maintaining a central theme.

Though interactions in Rogue were relatively simple, the fact that they were made up of distinct combinations placed together and that these combinations could include so many different elements meant that it was possible to see entirely different content on different runs of the game. Players could keep playing after having beating the game, something which the high difficulty of roguelikes makes especially challenging, and still get a meaningfully different experience.

Simple Representation

One of the things that I find interesting about Rogue, as someone who designs games primarily for the tabletop where storytelling is done in the theater of the mind rather than via graphical representation, is its abstract representation of the game world.

Abstract representations leverage the human mind's ability to visualize. By being focused on showing where things are rather than the things themselves, developers of roguelikes could create seems that were far to complex to represent in other games of the day. In addition, once systems became Aavanced enough to depict more advanced scenes, many developers lacked the tools to create content would make such representations appealing.

A realistic scene requires realistic art assets.

This is one of the reasons why roguelikes have continued to be popular even after technological limitations have made much more graphically advanced games possible. Not only can things be implemented before graphical representations of them are completed, but these graphical representations do not even factor into the game itself. Developers are free to create games that follow design patterns rather then having to follow the limitations of hardware.

As a game designer I credit roguelikes for much of my early understanding of games. I have already mentioned that Tales of Middle-earth was an inspiration to me, and one of the reasons why it was so inspiring is because I had to actually interact with the numbers behind the game in a way that most other games did not require of me. To play most roguelikes well requires one to actually look straight at the design itself. Modern roguelikes, like Cataclysm, often obscure much information from the player to provide a challenge, giving them qualitative rather than quantitative descriptions of the world, but even this holds a similar level of depth.

Later I would discover more challenging games, like Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has the unique honor of requiring new users to follow written guides not only in how to play, but on how to interpret the interface and the world. While avid players of roguelikes are probably familiar with what most of the icons stand for, it implements a fully 3D world, and simulates a settlement of dwarves with more precision than any other game out there.

This would not have been possible had the developers of Dwarf Fortress been required to create actual representations rather than using simple text characters to represent elements in the game.

Undiscoverable Depths

Here I must shed the skin of a game designer and discuss my experience as a player.

What I love most about roguelikes is the very simple fact that they are self-knowingly complex. Games like Cataclysm and GearHead allow players to craft their own vehicles and customize their characters to extreme degrees compared to what you would find in other games. Cataclysm and Dwarf Fortress both simulate deep levels of information that you rarely see in other games, like the ability to suffer many types of injuries on individual body parts.

As someone who works with tabletop role-playing games, which generally allow people to do more than any other sort of game in terms of the depth of rules and being able to rely on later interpretation to help fill gaps and push beyond the original design comes, I am often astonished by how incredibly deep a roguelike can get.

This is because it has the Perfect Blend between the machine execution of video games and the human theater of the Mind. In addition, they typically take place in a turn-based fashion. This is not a universal rule, as there are examples of games which take place in real time, like Dwarf Fortress, which can pause as well as run in real time.

Roguelikes are not afraid to have complex interactions and depths of information that require the player to assess and analyze information outside of the core environment of the game, consulting reference indexes and character sheets to make sure that they are up-to-date on information.

Modern Successors

While I consider myself something of a roguelike purist in terms of classification, I do enjoy the sorts of games that generally get the sometimes derogatory label of roguelite.

One of these games, Supergiant Games' early access title Hades, has been a frequent play of mine recently, and it is a game that I tend to play well dictating text for posts like this. This subgenre keeps many of the Core Concepts, like procedural generation, and often features enough difficulty that Mastery of the game requires many exposures to its content.

The defining distinction tends to be two-fold. First, these modern derivatives rely more heavily on Graphics & Art, which means that they by necessity have less diverse content send their text precursors. Second, the modern game tend to focus more heavily on player skill and less heavily on strategic decision making. This doesn't set the game like FTL or Into the Breach, which are often classified as strategy games don't have a strategic player, simply that their method of execution is different. They're less reliant on the Deep unknown depths, which generally makes them more accessible to the audience. Another common trend is that more of the content is scripted, though the presence of scripted content not necessary defining or is not necessarily incompatible with roguelikes (e.g. both ADOM, a true roguelike, and Hades, a roguelite, have boss-fights against pre-defined bosses).

Wrapping Up

If I had to say why I love roguelikes, I'd say this:

They're awesome.

If you want me to explain it in more depth, it's simple: they're games that have a tremendous cutting-edge approach to design (and have since the 80's, with early roguelikes, and continue the trend to this day), you can see how they work, and they're a great reflection of a community that enjoys doing what it does. I'm not as involved in the communities that make roguelikes as I was when I was younger, but I recall there being a very strong spirit of cooperation and a positive community that you don't see in a lot of anonymous corners of the internet.

The whole movement is built on Rogue as a foundation, and it is a solid one.

Bonus Trivia

Rogue was based on a library called curses, which allowed people to print graphics to a console window (at the time, this was all most operating systems displayed) by manually writing each character of a terminal. This library is still in use by roguelike developers.

5 Roguelikes To Check Out

This is the top five roguelikes that an outsider should get familiar with to get what I consider a good view of the genre. It's heavily shaped by my tastes and experiences, so there are big and interesting ones I'm overlooking to give my personal favorites that would also be, in my opinion, relatively cool to people who don't play roguelikes.

Most of these games have a graphical mode, allowing one to play them without having to have a whole lot of experience reading ASCII.

GearHead (I recommend 1, but 2 is also great; Caramel is still early in development, so I don't recommend it, though Hewitt's development blog has a great read)
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
Tales of Maj'Eyal
Dwarf Fortress
Ancient Domains Of Mystery