A roguelike is a game made in the image of Rogue. The player’s character, drawn as an @ sign, goes down through a dungeon that the program builds afresh for every game, meeting monsters shown as capital letters. When the character dies, that character is gone. There is no reloading an earlier save, and the next game starts again at the top of a dungeon nobody has seen before. From a Unix game of around 1980 the idea grew into free games worked on for decades, a Japanese console series, and after 2008 a wave of commercial hits that brought it to players who had never heard of Rogue.
Rogue
Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman started Rogue on the Unix timesharing system at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It depended on a new screen library, curses, written by Ken Arnold. Wichman remembered that “being a creative pair, we immediately set about seeing what kind of fun we could have with the new curses library.” When Toy moved to Berkeley he worked on the game with Arnold, and Rogue went out with the 4.2 release of BSD Unix, which, in Wichman’s words, made it “available on university computers all over the world.”
The random dungeon was the point. Toy told Edge in 2001 that the problem with writing text adventures was that “it is not that fun to play your own game. You already know all the solutions to the puzzles.” Rogue made a new world every time, so even its authors could be surprised. Getting it to work was harder than it sounds. “We originally wanted something very freeform, where a room could be anywhere, and there could be any number of rooms,” Wichman said. “We couldn’t figure out how to do it. We ended up settling on a nine-room tic-tac-toe grid.” (The procedural generation entry shows how that grid is filled and joined.) Balance came from playing: trolls first appeared so early that they killed everyone, so they were moved deeper. As Arnold put it, “We didn’t so much design the game as discover it.”
It was hard to win. “I personally know probably a half-dozen people who completed the game without taking advantage of a bug,” Wichman told Edge. “I am not one of those people… My wife has beaten it.”
Toy and Jon Lane set up a company, A.I. Design, and ported Rogue to the IBM PC. Lane noticed two signs that the game might sell: a survey of his network found Rogue using more processor time than anything else, and Dennis Ritchie of Unix was quoted as saying that Rogue had wasted more CPU time than anything in history. The PC version’s first copy protection made the game sabotage pirated copies, so that the player’s headstone read “killed by the copy protection mafia”. Epyx took over the marketing and packaging and released versions for other computers; it was shipping Rogue for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1986. Computer Gaming World’s Amiga columnist described the goal that August: go down 26 levels to find an amulet and bring it back up, knowing that “if you die your saved character is lost”. Commercially, Wichman wrote, “success eluded us”. The game’s source code was later released under a BSD licence, which is how the dungeon generator can still be read today.
Before Rogue: Beneath Apple Manor
Rogue was not the first game to build a new dungeon for each game. Beneath Apple Manor, written by Don Worth and sold by The Software Factory for the Apple II, was advertised in Creative Computing in April 1980 as a game to “explore an underground labyrinth, fighting monsters and finding magical treasures”. Computer Gaming World’s 1991 survey of role-playing games dated it to 1978, noted that “each new game created a random dungeon over which you had some control, such as choosing the number of rooms per level”, and admitted that, written in BASIC, “it was terribly slow even by the standards of the day”. It is Rogue’s name, not its, that the genre took.
Hack and NetHack
Rogue’s influence travelled with its players. NetHack’s own history file says that Jay Fenlason wrote the original Hack with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jon Payne; later accounts date it to 1982 and place it at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts. Andries Brouwer rewrote it heavily and posted versions to Usenet, and Mike Stephenson merged the variants into NetHack 1.4 in 1987. A team of volunteers, the DevTeam, took it on from version 3.0, and they have kept at it ever since. NetHack 5.0.0 was released on 2 May 2026.
NetHack piled detail on Rogue’s frame, and it stayed a game for a particular kind of player. In 1999 Demis Hassabis, who had recently founded Elixir Studios, wrote in Edge that one of his team described playing NetHack in its original ASCII form “as the pinnacle of gaming”, and predicted that it “will never have anything more than a small but dedicated following of the hardest core gamers”.
Moria and Angband
A second line started in Oklahoma. Robert Alan Koeneke became hooked on Rogue at the University of Oklahoma and, when he moved to a department that did not have it, wrote his own for VMS computers, which he called Moria. James E. Wilson later converted it to C for Unix as UMoria. In 1990 Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at the University of Warwick built Angband on UMoria, as a larger and more Tolkien-flavoured game. It has passed through several maintainers since and is still being released.
Consoles and Japan
The idea reached consoles in the 1990s. Sega’s Fatal Labyrinth (1991) first appeared on its Meganet online service before coming out on the Mega Drive. In Japan, Chunsoft built its Mystery Dungeon games on the same rules, and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (2005) gave them what Retro Gamer called “a cute new spin”. The magazine described Chunsoft’s series as “massively popular, providing an easy introduction to the sub-genre”.
The Berlin Interpretation
As more games borrowed from Rogue, players argued about which ones deserved the name. In 2008 developers at the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin wrote down a working definition, posted to Usenet by Jeff Lait on 16 September 2008 and known since as the Berlin Interpretation. It named five games as the canon, ADOM, Angband, Crawl, NetHack and Rogue, and listed features to weigh. It was not meant as a checklist: “Missing some points does not mean the game is not a roguelike. Likewise, possessing some points does not mean the game is a roguelike.”
| High-value factors | Low-value factors |
|---|---|
| Random environment generation | Single player character |
| Permadeath | Monsters are similar to players |
| Turn-based | Tactical challenge |
| Grid-based | ASCII display |
| Non-modal (“movement, battle and other actions take place in the same mode”) | Dungeons |
| Complexity | Numbers (hit points and other statistics are deliberately shown) |
| Resource management | |
| Hack’n’slash | |
| Exploration and discovery |
Roguelites
The same year, the definition began to matter less. Derek Yu’s free PC game Spelunky (2008) put a new cave under the player on every visit, but it was a real-time platform game. Edge found in 2012 that it was “procedural, then, but it still feels handmade”. Wireframe later summed up what followed: “Spelunky assembled new levels to explore each time you played, and hundreds of rogue-lites followed suit.” Players took to calling these games roguelites: they kept the random layouts and the short, lethal runs, but dropped turns and grids, and often let something carry over from one run to the next.
The carry-over became the new games’ signature. In Rogue Legacy (2013) the player’s manor “doubles as a skill tree”, so money earned on one run unlocks skills and classes for the next; Retro Gamer gave it 97%. Wireframe grouped Slay the Spire with a wave of card and dice games whose structure “borrows liberally from the roguelike”. Supergiant Games’ Hades (2020) made death part of the story. “Every time you die, you go home,” Wireframe’s review explained: the hero returns to a hub in the underworld, “a constantly evolving place full of exposition, improvements”. “Death is inevitable, but really it just acts as impetus to start over,” the reviewer wrote, and gave it 94%.
Meanwhile the traditional games carried on. NetHack and Angband are still being updated. In 2003 Edge argued that Rogue’s addictiveness remained “uneclipsed by imitators such as Diablo”, and that with its random dungeons it was “the definitive desert island videogame”.
Sources
- Glenn R. Wichman, “A Brief History of Rogue”, 1997 (web, secondary; the co-author’s recollection): curses, Toy’s move to Berkeley, BSD 4.2, A.I. Design, Epyx, commercial failure. https://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html
- “The making of… Rogue”, Edge, issue 98, June 2001, pp. 118–121: Toy, Wichman, Arnold and Jon Lane on the random dungeon, the nine-room grid, trolls, winning, the CPU time, the copy protection.
- Edge, issue 128, October 2003, p. 60: Rogue as “the definitive desert island videogame”.
- Michael Toy, Ken Arnold and Glenn Wichman, Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, source code (BSD licence; copyright 1980–1983, 1985, 1999).
- Atari ST User, vol. 1 no. 6, August 1986: Epyx shipping Rogue for the ST.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 30, August 1986, p. 26: Roy Wagner on Epyx’s Amiga Rogue and on Hack.
- Creative Computing, April 1980: The Software Factory advertisement for Beneath Apple Manor.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 87, October 1991: Scorpia’s survey of role-playing games, Beneath Apple Manor (1978).
- “Beneath Apple Manor”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Don Worth as author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_Apple_Manor
- NetHack DevTeam, “history”, in the NetHack 3.6.1 source distribution (web): Fenlason and his collaborators, Brouwer, Stephenson and NetHack 1.4 in 1987, the DevTeam. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Source:NetHack_3.6.1/dat/history
- Andries Brouwer, “Hack” (web, secondary): Hack’s 1982 origin at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/games/hack/hack.html
- NetHack DevTeam, “NetHack 5.0.0” release announcement, 2 May 2026 (web). https://www.nethack.org/v500/release.html
- Demis Hassabis, “The trials of a start-up developer”, Edge, issue 77, autumn 1999.
- RogueBasin, “Moria” and “Angband” (web, secondary): Koeneke, the University of Oklahoma, UMoria, Cutler and Astrand at Warwick in 1990. https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Moria and https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Angband
- RogueBasin, “Berlin Interpretation” (web, secondary): the conference, Jeff Lait’s post of 16 September 2008, the canon and the factors. https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation
- Retro Gamer, issue 119, 2013, p. 99: Rogue Legacy review, 97%, with Beneath Apple Manor, Fatal Labyrinth and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.
- Edge, issue 244, September 2012, p. 88: Spelunky review.
- Wireframe, issue 32, February 2020: SuperMash review (“hundreds of rogue-lites followed suit”).
- Wireframe, issue 36, April 2020: “Roll with it”, on card and dice games including Slay the Spire.
- Wireframe, issue 44, October 2020, pp. 102–103: Hades review, 94%.