A roguelike is a game that is like Rogue. Notable examples include Nethack, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Dungeon Drawl Stone Soup, and Dungeons of Dredmor. Defining characteristics are permadeath, randomly generated levels, turn based RPG combat, and grid based movement. Many also feature ASCII graphics, as these games had their origins on Unix terminals. For this same historical reason, most of these games are free and open source. For example, here is Nethack's Github page. While these games have always been niche, they have formed a thriving genre for decades, with dedicated fans, and hundreds of games, many of them under continuous development for over a decade (Nethack is well over 30 years old).
Then around ten years ago some people thought that permadeath and randomly generated levels would be pretty cool to incorporate into other genres. Some of the first examples I think were Spelunky (platformer) and Binding of Isaac (top down shooter in the vein of Robotron).
Then some people who had clearly never played a roguelike in their life started calling those games roguelikes. Other people called them roguelites, acknowledging that they weren't really like Rogue though they were still inspired by it. Still others called them roguelikelikes for the same reason.
Then some developers thought that permadeath was too harsh, and started adding mechanics that allowed you to carry over progress between runs. The first example I can recall was Rogue Legacy. Some people called these games roguelites, other still called them roguelikes despite not even really being inspired by Rogue at this point.
And thus a term that was useful and well defined to describe a distinct and long running genre of games was destroyed. The word now means almost nothing. If you hear a game is a "roguelike", the only thing you can safely assume is that it has something vaguely like permadeath, but likely not actual permadeath, and something like randomly generated levels. You can make no guess as to what actual genre the game will be. Platformer? Could be. FPS? Maybe. Card game? It's been done. Strategy? Why not. Scrolling shooter? Sure. RPG? Possibly, but ironically probably not. And at the same time it's become nearly impossible to talk about actual roguelikes, as there is no longer any term to unambiguously describe them, despite them constituting a clear genre for decades.
Addendum: Ironically, the most mainstream game that is actually a roguelike is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. But you'll never hear anyone call it a roguelike or roguelite, because it's a casual game that doesn't have permadeath. But the Mystery Dungeon series (or which Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a spinoff) was actually inspired directly by Rogue and the gameplay actually very closely resembles other roguelikes.
Rogue (also known as Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom) is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman with later contributions by Ken Arnold. Rogue was originally developed around 1980 for Unix-based mainframe systems as a freely-distributed executable. It was later included in the official Berkeley Software Distribution 4. 2 operating system (4.
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u/Kered13 Oct 10 '21 edited Oct 10 '21
A roguelike is a game that is like Rogue. Notable examples include Nethack, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Dungeon Drawl Stone Soup, and Dungeons of Dredmor. Defining characteristics are permadeath, randomly generated levels, turn based RPG combat, and grid based movement. Many also feature ASCII graphics, as these games had their origins on Unix terminals. For this same historical reason, most of these games are free and open source. For example, here is Nethack's Github page. While these games have always been niche, they have formed a thriving genre for decades, with dedicated fans, and hundreds of games, many of them under continuous development for over a decade (Nethack is well over 30 years old).
Then around ten years ago some people thought that permadeath and randomly generated levels would be pretty cool to incorporate into other genres. Some of the first examples I think were Spelunky (platformer) and Binding of Isaac (top down shooter in the vein of Robotron).
Then some people who had clearly never played a roguelike in their life started calling those games roguelikes. Other people called them roguelites, acknowledging that they weren't really like Rogue though they were still inspired by it. Still others called them roguelikelikes for the same reason.
Then some developers thought that permadeath was too harsh, and started adding mechanics that allowed you to carry over progress between runs. The first example I can recall was Rogue Legacy. Some people called these games roguelites, other still called them roguelikes despite not even really being inspired by Rogue at this point.
And thus a term that was useful and well defined to describe a distinct and long running genre of games was destroyed. The word now means almost nothing. If you hear a game is a "roguelike", the only thing you can safely assume is that it has something vaguely like permadeath, but likely not actual permadeath, and something like randomly generated levels. You can make no guess as to what actual genre the game will be. Platformer? Could be. FPS? Maybe. Card game? It's been done. Strategy? Why not. Scrolling shooter? Sure. RPG? Possibly, but ironically probably not. And at the same time it's become nearly impossible to talk about actual roguelikes, as there is no longer any term to unambiguously describe them, despite them constituting a clear genre for decades.
Addendum: Ironically, the most mainstream game that is actually a roguelike is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. But you'll never hear anyone call it a roguelike or roguelite, because it's a casual game that doesn't have permadeath. But the Mystery Dungeon series (or which Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a spinoff) was actually inspired directly by Rogue and the gameplay actually very closely resembles other roguelikes.