History of Roguelikes and Roguelites: From Rogue (1980) to Hades

"Roguelike" is one of the words you see most often in game descriptions today. Yet the games it originally referred to were turn-based dungeon crawlers in which you moved one square at a time on a screen made up entirely of letters and symbols. Now the label is attached to action games, card games, and shooters as well.

In this article, we go step by step through where the word "roguelike" came from, how a genre born in 1980s university computer labs spread to Japanese console games and to indie games from the 2000s onward, and why the separate term "roguelite" came about. We'll also look at a table of landmark titles and the genre's design traits.

What Is a Roguelike?

Roguelike means "a game like Rogue." A traditional roguelike is a role-playing game with the following characteristics.

• The dungeon layout and item placement are generated anew each time you play (procedural generation).
• When your character dies, your saved progress is lost and you start over from the beginning (permanent death, or permadeath).
• It's turn-based: time passes only when the player acts.
• You move one square at a time on a grid.

Most are set in high fantasy worlds influenced by tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Exactly how to define the genre is still debated. That's why, at the International Roguelike Development Conference held in Berlin, Germany, in 2008, developers and players created a standard called the "Berlin Interpretation." It took five games, Rogue, NetHack, Angband, ADOM, and Crawl (Linley's Dungeon Crawl), as reference titles and listed random generation, permadeath, turn-based play, grids, resource management, and more as "high-value factors." Missing one of these factors doesn't mean a game isn't a roguelike; the standard was designed as a yardstick for gauging "how roguelike" a game is.

Origins: Rogue, Born on University Terminals

Rogue, the game that gave the genre its name, was created around 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, then students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ken Arnold later joined the development. They enjoyed the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure but were disappointed that it played out the same way every time. So, using Ken Arnold's curses library, they made a game that drew its map in characters on the terminal screen and produced a different dungeon every time.

On screen, the player was shown as the @ symbol, gold as $, and dragons as D. The goal was to retrieve the "Amulet of Yendor" from the deepest part of the dungeon. When Rogue was included in BSD Unix 4.2 in 1984, it spread widely among computer users at universities and research institutions.

Permadeath was intentional from the start. When a save feature was added, players kept reloading until they got an outcome they liked, so the developers introduced a rule that one death ends the game. Michael Toy explained that the point wasn't to make the game painful but to give weight to every choice.

In fact, there were similar games before Rogue. Beneath Apple Manor, made by Don Worth for the Apple II in 1978, is considered the first commercial roguelike, with random dungeons and turn-based combat. However, because Rogue could spread through university networks, it left a far greater mark. The term "roguelike" itself took hold around 1993, when several game discussion groups on Usenet were merged into one and the name rec.games.roguelike was chosen.

The 1980s–1990s: Hack and Moria, Two Branches of Variants

Rogue's popularity spawned countless derivatives, which fall into two broad branches.

The Hack line: In 1982, Jay Fenlason, then a student at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in the US, and his friends created Hack. Developers who inherited this code collaborated over Usenet and released NetHack in 1987. NetHack is famous for its vast combinations of items and situations, to the point that the saying "The DevTeam thinks of everything" was born. ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery), created in 1994 by Germany's Thomas Biskup, was influenced by NetHack while strengthening story and quests.

The Moria line: In 1983, Robert Alan Koeneke at the University of Oklahoma created Moria, based on Tolkien's world. Its distinguishing feature was a town with shops on the surface. In 1990, students at the University of Warwick in the UK created Angband, an expansion of Moria, and dozens of variants later branched off from it.

Most games of this era had publicly available source code, and a culture of other developers modifying the code and releasing new versions helped the genre grow.

Japan's Take: The Mystery Dungeon Series

Until 1993, roguelikes were a genre enjoyed almost exclusively on computers. The leading example of bringing them to consoles is Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" series. Chunsoft, which had refined Western-style role-playing for Japanese console players when making Dragon Quest, set out to do the same with Rogue. The result was Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon for the Super Famicom in 1993, followed by Shiren the Wanderer and spin-offs of the Pokémon series, among others.

Unlike Western roguelikes in the Berlin Interpretation mold, the Mystery Dungeon series was less strict about permadeath. Falling in battle sent you back to the dungeon entrance, but the games offered ways to store items or recover them. This approach resembles the "something remains even when you fail" structure of the roguelites that came later.

Around the same time in the West, as graphical games became mainstream, text-based roguelikes went relatively quiet. Still, David Brevik, who made Blizzard's Diablo in 1996, has said he was influenced by the random dungeons and loot structure of games like Rogue and NetHack.

The 2000s Onward: The Rise of the Roguelite

From the late 2000s, indie developers began mixing roguelike elements with other genres. These games kept procedural generation and permadeath but dropped turn-based play and grid movement in favor of real-time action or platforming. Some fans of traditional roguelikes argued that calling such games roguelikes would blur the word's meaning, so the terms "roguelite" and "roguelike-like" came into use.

A game often cited as the turning point is Spelunky, released by Derek Yu in 2008. A platformer about exploring randomly generated caves, it sought to combine the depth of roguelikes with the easy controls of platformers. It was followed by Edmund McMillen's The Binding of Isaac (2011) and Subset Games' FTL: Faster Than Light (2012), among others, greatly broadening the genre.

A major hallmark of the roguelite is meta-progression. Each attempt (run) is short, and even when you fail, some currency or unlocks remain, making the next attempt a little easier. Cellar Door Games' Rogue Legacy (2013) demonstrated this structure clearly, with the descendants of a dead character inheriting their wealth to upgrade the castle.

Landmark Games at a Glance

Design Traits: Why You Want to Play Again

Roguelike and roguelite design share several common principles.

1. A different game every time: Procedural generation was originally a technical solution to avoid storing every floor on computers with little memory. As a result, no two runs are the same, so the games can be enjoyed for a long time.
2. Choices with something to lose: Because of permadeath, a single potion, or whether to descend one more staircase, becomes an important decision.
3. Growth through accumulated knowledge: Your character may vanish, but you as a player learn monster patterns and item effects. In traditional roguelikes, the same potion came in a different color each game, so you had to identify it anew every time.
4. Stories that emerge from combinations: As multiple systems overlap, situations arise that the developers never scripted. The culture of players sharing these experiences with one another is also part of the genre.
5. Short runs and meta-progression (roguelites): Keeping each run short and granting rewards that persist even after failure eases the difficulty and carries you into the next attempt.

The differences between traditional roguelikes and roguelites can be summarized as follows.

Roguelikes Today

Roguelike elements now appear in almost every genre. MegaCrit's Slay the Spire popularized the roguelike deckbuilder with card-based combat, and 2014's Dream Quest is cited as the first example of the format. Motion Twin's Dead Cells combined the Metroidvania with the roguelite, and Vampire Survivors, with its simple format in which the character attacks automatically and the player only moves and chooses upgrades, spawned many similar games. The genre has also expanded toward cards and puzzles, as with Balatro (2024), which is built around poker hands.

Supergiant Games' Hades is credited with drawing in even players who shied away from difficult genres by making the cycle of dying and trying again part of the story itself. Its sequel, Hades II, went through early access in 2024 and was fully released in 2025.

Meanwhile, the traditional style hasn't disappeared. Games close to the Berlin Interpretation, such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, are still being developed, and NetHack has continued to receive updates. The "7-Day Roguelike Challenge (7DRL)," which began on Usenet in 2005, is held every year and has become an event that nurtures new developers.

The history of roguelikes is a buildup of answers to the question, "How can we make the same game fresh to play again and again?" That question, which began in dungeons drawn with text characters, is still being answered in different ways across many genres today.

References

• Roguelike — Wikipedia
• Roguelike — Wikipedia (Korean)
• Rogue (video game) — Wikipedia
• Berlin Interpretation — RogueBasin
• Spelunky — Wikipedia
• Hades (video game) — Wikipedia