Editing Roguelike (section)

==History==
<i>Rogue</i> is a free (but then closed source) video game that was made by academic geeks without friends (or with the [[Satanic_Panic|wrong kind]]) way, <i>waaay</i> back in 1980 to indulge their [[Murderhobo|RPG fantasies]], and of course it wasn’t called a roguelike back then. Even calling it a "video" game is pushing it: being just text, it would run on any basic library catalogue computer, shell account or even dumb serial terminal, i.e. anything <i>not</i> meant for gaming. Hence the appeal. Players competed against each other indirectly via a high score table and when their character died, their savefile was deleted. Being that this was Unix, it was almost impossible for anyone not a BOFH to un-delete it, making decisions and death permanent. Also, as systems at the time didn’t have much RAM or drive space, dungeons were procedurally generated from a random seed each time: you could play as long as you wanted and would never run out of dungeon.

<i>Rogue</i> was commercialised for home 8-bit systems and some basic graphics added. Its popularity meant it would be followed by a similar but code-wise unrelated <i>Hack</i> and <i>Moria</i>, followed by <i>Angband</i>. Open-sourcing of these really opened the floodgates; overnight, there were literally more than a hundred variants of varying origin and quality, taking aspects from every RPG franchise. [[Diablo|<i>Diablo</i>]], being allegedly heavily influenced by Nethack itself, went on to influence the [[Dungeons_%26_Dragons|D&D]] tabletop, like some glorious moebius loop of [[awesome]].

By the 90s, variants were everywhere on Usenet, and someone came up with the name Roguelike to group similar games that were <u>not</u> <i>Diablo</i>. By the end of the decade most of the interest in them had petered out (much like Usenet itself), though a few like <i>Ancient Domains of Mystery</i>, <i>Angband</i>, and <i>Nethack</i> continued to be developed as a niche.

Nobody is really quite sure when the term roguelike came back into fashion and it seemed every new game wanted to call itself one to be noticed. For purists, a roguelike still had to have the aspects listed in the section above. For everyone else however… ehhh, [[skub|your mileage may vary]].