Roguelike Games

These genre is named after Rogue, a game developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman in the early eighties. Roguelike games will have some or all of the following characteristics:

• They are RPGs, though usually light RPGs. The original Rogue had no character creation, later derivatives usually introduced a choice of race and class, but stat increases at level-up remain fixed. You control a single character only.
• A good part of the game will be dungeon crawling, and these dungeons are randomly created whenever a new game is started.
• They have turn-based play, but in a unique way that feels very similar to real-time: Whenever you move, all the NPCs move too.
• Very often the game will have ASCII graphics. For some, optional graphics were created later (Moria and NetHack, for example).
• In most cases, the game will be an open source, GPLed project. Some, however, have been shareware (Alphaman), retail (Ragnarok), or free, but close-sourced (ADOM).

Most of the games have been situated in a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired world, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek anachronisms like the expensive camera in NetHack. The post-apocalyptic Alphaman is the only exception, still I do not see this as a rule. It is true for most RPGs.

Some Roguelike Games

• ADOM
• Alphaman
• Angband
• Moria
• NetHack
• Ragnarok
• Rogue
• Zangband

General Pages

• The Roguelike Games Home Page by Boudewijn Waijers went down in late 2003, but is now back. Unfortunately, all FTP links are broken.
• The Guide to Roguelike Games is a good introduction.
• Dungeondweller is a homepage for roguelike development, it is also a roguelike game.
• Old CRPGs has many versions of Rogue and many roguelike games for download.
• Home of the Underdogs has a list of all the roguelike games they discuss on their page, freeware and commercial
• Roguelike Gravey@rd is the place for all dead roguelike games.

Homepages of Specific Projects

• SLASH'EM (Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic) is mainly a graphic conversion of NetHack, featuring a semi-isometric view vaguely reminiscent of Ultima VI. Binaries are available for DOS, Mac, Unix and Windows 32.
• The UnReal World is a unique graphical roguelikish RPG taking place in the far North ages ago. It brings you realistic game world with lots of historical traits as well as northern folklore, beliefs and way of life.

  One of the most underrated Roguelike RPGs ever made, The UnReal World (UrW) is a captivating, but very difficult, role playing game set sometime in the Iron Age. What sets UrW apart from other Roguelikes—and most other RPGs for that matter—is the unique historical setting and realistic factors. The game is set in a very realistic gameworld, full of elements from Scandinavian mythology and folklore. Instead of standard AD&D character classes, you play as member of one of the ten Scandinavian cultures with authentic occupations, including a fisherman, a hermit, a trapper, or even a tradesman. The gameworld is huge and is randomly generated each time you play, thus ensuring virtually unlimited replayability.—Home of the Underdogs

  The UnReal World is a Finnish project. It features a combination of rather simple graphics with photographs at 800×600 and runs on a 486.
• Castle of the Winds is one of the very few games developed for Windows 3.1 (nearly all the others are ports of some kind). Originally shareware, the designer has now decided to release it for free.
• Scallywag: in the Lair of the Medusa is maybe the first attempt at a roguelike in 3D.

Games Inspired by Rogue

Quite a number of games that would not be called roguelike have taken inspiration from this type of game. I list a few.

Of course, Rogue and Nethack have themselves taken many things from Dungeons & Dragons. Are the cockatrices, for example, that can petrify you and that I reencountered in Final Fantasy, Nethack originals or are they from D&D? I don't know.

• Diablo: Well, most of all the randomly created dungeons. The "Rogue" character class is probably a kind of hommage.

  Yes, Nethack, the most evolved descendant of Hack, Rogue, and the rest of the great tradition of multiplatform ASCII dungeon games, which have eaten such vast quantities of college mainframe CPU time over the years. It's from these games, in turn, that Diablo descends. Blizzard took the random dungeons, the heaps of items and monsters, and addictive hack-slash-and-hoard-treasure gameplay as the basis for their game. Add nifty graphics and multiplayer components, and bingo, a million-seller.—David Smith

• JauntTrooper – Mission: Firestorm

  Released only for the Macintosh, Firestorm is a sci-fi Roguelike that is has even more depth than Thunderbolt. While the plot does not differ much from the typical sci-fi cliche we are all used to, the beauty of Firestorm lies in a huge gameworld and a staggering number of options. Almost every problem you encounter can be solved in more than one way, and there are hundreds of monsters to kill, high-tech gadgets to use, and dozens of skills to improve.

• Dungeon Hack: Once again, the random dungeons. The name might be a reference to NetHack; then again, it might be not.
• Mysterious Dungeon is a series of games in random dungeons with a rogue-type turn-based system featuring characters from popular console RPGs (Chocobos from Final Fantasy, Torneko from Dragon Quest IV).