Permadeath

Permadeath is the rule that a dead character stays dead: the saved game is deleted on death, or on loading, so the player cannot reload and try again. The rule came to home computers with the ports of Rogue in 1985-86, and the first reviews described both the rule and the disk-copying trick for getting round it. “Permadeath” as a word is later; Edge was writing features on it by 2013.

Fast facts

• Where the sources first describe it: Epyx’s Rogue for the Amiga, reviewed in Computer Gaming World (August 1986) and Compute! (January 1987).
• 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!).
• The workaround, as printed: copy the save file outside the program (both reviewers mention it).
• The word: “permadeath” is the term Edge used in 2013; the 1980s reviews have no name for the rule.

The rule in Rogue

Rogue was a mainframe game before it was a product. Antic’s 1987 account: “among the earliest and most famous adventure games developed on mainframe computers by anonymous programmers fooling around after official work hours”, which “went beyond the all-text ‘Original Adventure’ format and used simple character graphics”. Roy Wagner in CGW told the same story with a sequel: the name “got locked up for commercial distribution” and the freely modified version “came to be known as Hack, the latter is in the public domain”. Both games “use very simple character graphics and display techniques so as to maintain compatiblity with a wide range of computers and typically dumb terminals”.

When Epyx sold Rogue for the Amiga, the reviewers had to explain the save rule to readers used to reloading. Wagner: “The game can be saved, but if you die your saved character is lost.” Robert Stumpf in Compute!, 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 procedure — save to a DOS-formatted disk in drive 1, copy the file back to the game disk before restarting — “This leaves you with a character backup in drive 1, in case you don’t make it back.” The practice that later got the name save-scumming is as old as the first home port.

The rule in a clone

Robert Jung’s A-Rogue, a type-in BASIC listing in Antic (May 1987) for 8-bit Ataris, reproduced the rule deliberately: one save slot 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”.

The word

The 1980s reviews describe the rule without naming it. Edge’s Christmas 2013 feature “And Stay Dead” treats “permadeath” as an established term and defines it as “permanent consequences for mistakes”, adding that in practice it is a question of “how a game handles data: consequences are only permanent if you can’t simply reload an old save”. The feature’s examples are Spelunky (Derek Yu), FTL, Don’t Starve and XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s Ironman mode, whose director Jake Solomon is quoted: “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.” It also notes what the descendants share, “a dash of procedural generation”, the other half of Rogue’s design.

See also

• Rogue
• NetHack
• Roguelike
• Spelunky
• Difficulty design