Permadeath is the rule that a dead character stays dead. The game keeps no save to go back to, or deletes the one it has, so a mistake cannot be undone by reloading. For a home-computer player of the 1980s that was nothing new: most action games had no save at all, and losing the last life meant starting again. What Rogue added was a long game that could be saved and still could not be cheated, because loading a saved game deleted it. The first reviewers of the home versions explained the rule to their readers and, in the same breath, told them how to get round it. The word came later, and one of its first appearances in print was the wrong way round: a Spectrum cheat that made a game’s enemies stay dead.
Fast facts
- The rule, as printed: “when you restore a saved game, the saved game is then deleted; if your character subsequently dies, you must start over at level 1” (Compute!, January 1987, on Epyx’s Rogue).
- Earlier still: Family Computing, January 1986, on Rogue for the IBM PC: “Once a character dies, you must start over again.”
- The workaround: copy the save file outside the game. Both Computer Gaming World (1986) and Compute! (1987) printed how.
- The word: “permadeath for nasties”, a reader’s POKE in Your Spectrum, December 1985; “perma-death” and “permanent death” in the online role-playing debates around 2000; “permadeath” in Edge by 2011.
Lives, and a word from a cheat column
On an 8-bit home computer, an action game usually gave the player a set number of lives, and when the last one went the game began again from the start. Magazine hacking columns existed largely to change that number. Your Spectrum’s “Hacking Away” pages for December 1985 are typical: “infinite lives” for Pheenix, Jumping Jack and others, and a set of POKEs from a reader, Keg Davies of Lancashire, for Glug Glug that included one to set the number of lives “from 1 to 11”. The last POKE in his list was labelled “permadeath for nasties”. It made the enemies, not the player, stay dead. It is an early printed use of the word, meaning the rule turned round.
The rule in Rogue
Rogue began on university Unix systems around 1980. Michael Toy and Jon Lane’s company, A.I. Design, converted it for the IBM PC. Epyx then published it for the PC and other computers. The Rogue and roguelike entries tell that story. Family Computing’s software guide for January 1986, which reviewed the PC version, stated the rule in one sentence: “Once a character dies, you must start over again.”
When Epyx brought Rogue to the Amiga, the reviewers had to explain the save rule to readers used to reloading. Roy Wagner, Computer Gaming World’s Amiga columnist, in August 1986: “The game can be saved, but if you die your saved character is lost.” Robert Stumpf in Compute! in January 1987, more fully:
The greatest annoyance is that when you restore a saved game, the saved game is then deleted; if your character subsequently dies, you must start over at level 1. I realize this is in keeping with the rules, but it’s highly frustrating when it happens for the fourth or fifth time below the tenth level (and it will).
Both then printed the workaround. Wagner: “it is possible to copy your saved character file for later use as needed. This is done outside of the program using direct DOS commands.” Stumpf gave the exact method: save the game to a DOS-formatted disk in the second drive, then copy the file back to the Rogue disk before restarting. “This leaves you with a character backup in drive 1, in case you don’t make it back.” Players later called this save-scumming, and it is as old as the first home versions.
The rule on 8-bit machines
Robert Jung’s A-Rogue, a type-in BASIC listing in Antic in May 1987 for 8-bit Ataris, kept the rule on purpose. Jung had played the original “on a mainframe at the University of Southern California”. His version allowed one saved game per disk, and “[L]oad an earlier game. Once loaded, the file is deleted so you can’t use it again.” Its other one-way rule was the staircase: “after you descend, you can’t go back up.” A game ended “when you die in battle, starve, [Q]uit, or you find the Jewel of Taldra”.
Rogue itself reached the ZX Spectrum in 1988 as a Mastertronic budget game at £2.99, written by Icon Design. CRASH gave it 63% and called it “a very rare attempt at a Dungeons And Dragons game”.
Hardcore and Ironman
The words “permanent death” and “perma-death” came into regular use in arguments about online role-playing games, where a character might represent months of play. In January 2000 Computer Gaming World’s role-playing columnist Desslock reported that Sierra had shelved the design of Middle-earth Online and that its most controversial ideas would go: “No feature was more contentious than ‘permanent death’ for characters.” Online developers, he wrote, had been reluctant to adopt a system “so punitive to player mistakes”, though he thought it could, at least as a server option, make for a more accountable world. In November 2000 PC Zone reported that the online world Atriarch, in which a killed non-player character was “truly dead and gone”, was nevertheless “not advocating ‘perma-death’” for players.
Single-player games made it an option. Writing in PC Gamer in January 2004, Desslock praised “a hardcore or Ironman setting, in which characters are typically killed permanently if they fall in battle”, and traced the idea back: “Character perma-death was a key feature of classic RPGs such as Rogue and Nethack (which inspired the Diablo series)”.
The word
By 2011 Edge could use “permadeath” without explaining it. When a reader wrote in December 2011 asking for games that kept “my irreversible mistakes”, the editors replied: “We admire your commitment to the Iron Man cause. Perhaps permadeath should be an option in all games?” In May 2012 the magazine described Capcom’s original Steel Battalion as a game that “continually threatened players with permanent death by intentionally wiping saves”.
Edge’s Christmas 2013 feature “And Stay Dead” opened on “Permadeath just won’t die” and defined it as “permanent consequences for mistakes”, adding that in practice it is about “how a game handles data: consequences are only permanent if you can’t simply reload an old save”. Its examples were Spelunky, FTL, Don’t Starve and the Ironman mode of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, whose director Jake Solomon told the magazine: “That’s why permadeath is so affecting, because if you don’t have it, you know the game isn’t authentic. If a strategy game didn’t let you lose, you wouldn’t feel any joy at eventually beating the system.” The feature also noted what the newer games shared, “a dash of procedural generation”, the other half of Rogue’s design. Not everyone was persuaded. Tom Francis, who made Gunpoint, told Edge: “I’ve always hated having to repeat myself in games.”
Roguelites
The games that followed Spelunky kept permadeath but softened what it cost. Players called them roguelites: each run still ended for good, but money, skills or story often carried over to the next one. Wireframe summed up the wave in 2020: “Spelunky assembled new levels to explore each time you played, and hundreds of rogue-lites followed suit.” In Supergiant Games’ Hades (2020), dying became part of the story: “Every time you die, you go home,” the magazine’s review explained. The roguelike entry follows that line in more detail.
Sources
- Your Spectrum, issue 21, December 1985: “Hacking Away” (POKEs for Glug Glug from Keg Davies, including “permadeath for nasties”; infinite lives for Pheenix and Jumping Jack).
- Family Computing, vol. 4 no. 1, January 1986: software guide entry for Epyx’s Rogue, reviewed on the IBM PC (“Once a character dies, you must start over again”).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 30, August 1986, p. 26: Roy Wagner on Epyx’s Amiga Rogue, the lost save and the DOS workaround.
- Compute!, issue 80, January 1987: Robert J. Stumpf, review of Rogue: A Dungeon Adventure for the Amiga (the deleted save; the backup method).
- Antic, vol. 6 no. 1, May 1987, pp. 30–31: Robert Jung, “A-Rogue”, type-in listing and instructions.
- CRASH, issue 55, August 1988: review of Mastertronic’s Rogue for the Spectrum (£2.99, Icon Design, 63%).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 186, January 2000: Desslock’s role-playing column (Middle-earth Online shelved; “permanent death”).
- PC Zone, issue 95, November 2000: Atriarch preview (“not advocating ‘perma-death’”).
- PC Gamer (US), vol. 11 no. 1, January 2004: Desslock, “Hardcore Stakes in the RPG World” (Ironman settings; Rogue and NetHack).
- Edge, issue 234, December 2011: letters page (“Perhaps permadeath should be an option in all games?”).
- Edge, issue 240, May 2012: Steel Battalion (“intentionally wiping saves”).
- Edge, issue 261, Christmas 2013, p. 66: “And Stay Dead” (Jake Solomon, Tom Francis; Spelunky, FTL, Don’t Starve).
- Wireframe, issue 32, February 2020: “hundreds of rogue-lites followed suit”; issue 44, October 2020: Hades review.