Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 184: PC Roguelikes

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

By patron request, we delve into the cryptic history of what might be the world's most complex genre: PC roguelikes. Genre aficionado Steve Tramer walks Bob and Jeremy through the unforeseen consequences of Rogue, Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, and more!

This week in Retronauts, we stretch the definition of text adventure to the breaking point. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this week, we are taking a patron request from John Gibson, who said, you guys need to talk about rogue likes. And I said, okay. And so now we're talking about rogue likes, except the problem is that Bob and I appreciate rogue likes intellectually, but haven't played a lot of PC rogue likes. So to accommodate for the fact, oh, by the way, Bob. Hi, I'm Bob Mackey. There you go.

I like rogue, but I don't have any. experience with rogolikes. Is she your favorite X-Men? I think I had a special feeling for her as a kid growing up. But I want to say that I think what I like are rogolites, L-I-T-E-S. But unfortunately, that is not what this episode is about. We will get to those. Oh, I know.

I'm just letting you know my experience. But I appreciate roguelikes on an intellectual level as you do, Jeremy. Right. But fortunately, we do have a special pal. You're in Seattle, right? I am in Seattle. Yes. So Skyping in all the way from Seattle.

battle the home of Skype is none other than Stephen Tramer, person who does not work on Skype. Thank God. Well, I didn't say you work on Skype, just that Skype is owned in Redmond. That's all. It is, but I don't know if you know. I became a Microsoft employee last year. Oh, yeah. Is it okay for you to be on this podcast? We might say mean things about MS. I don't know. We just badmouthed Skype. Yo, let me tell you guys something about working at Microsoft and what people say about Skype there. Pretty much the same thing that the rest of us say.

I've got to log in with my hotmail account. Yeah, it's pretty much the same thing that everyone says, except even meaner. I don't know. I said some pretty mean things. Yeah, I am here because I played a lot of these games in the 90s and early 2000s. Okay. Well, that's retro, so it's good. Like, you meet our definition.

I personally didn't really know what a rogue-like was until, I guess, like, 2004 when the game Nightmare of Druaga came out, or PS2, and it was one of those that no one up wanted to play. So I said, I'll write about it. And it turned out to be really addictive and really good and fun and interesting and also very difficult. And so that kind of opened my eyes to the world of roguelikes. But it's been difficult for me to go back to true PC roguelikes, the Aski-type games, and

that's what we're going to talk about this episode. So I'm more of like an outsider perspective on this. And you, on the other hand, were an old-seasoned veteran by the time I was even discovering what the genre was. Yeah. So the main reason for that is, as a teenager, I didn't have a lot of money but also owned a Macintosh, which was kind of weird for a family that didn't have a lot of money. And we got like those weird shareware discs that used to get shipped out in the mail in the mid-90s. And one of them that I got had a copy of Moria on it. and I just played the hell out of that thing.

And then a little later on, I got into Ang Band, and then I did, I played a little bit in that hack, but not very much. And we're going to talk about all this stuff. We are. But, yeah, I played these games almost nonstop for something like 10 years. Okay. So you definitely know what you're talking about when it comes to these. How many PC Rogelikes have you completed?

How many have you ascended in? Oh, my God. zero, I think. Okay. Because I was never a Nathak player, that's the one that's actually the easiest to get an ascension in, from my understanding. I played, when I was playing Ang Band, I think the furthest depth I got was like 78 or something. Out of 100? Yeah, no, 100 is where you fight Belrog.

And I think that was the level where I drank in unidentified potion that was a potion of death that immediately ended my game. And then I stopped playing for a very, very long time. Yeah, I can see that. But, you know, that is kind of the fascinating thing about roguelikes is that you can invest so much time in a single game. And then just one bad turn can completely strip those dozens of hours away and you're left with nothing. There's no way to continue.

No way to do a mulligan on that last floor. It's just done. Yeah, there was a – so that's where the policy. of save scumming kind of came in, which is you would go and make a copy of your save at some point, so there's something bad happened, you could go and restore it. And

true players were never saved scummers. I don't think that I ever saved scummed, but I think that people did tend to do it. I think there was a lively discussion about whether or not you should do it to learn the rules of the game, which kind of fits into like the

net hack spoiler territory where in order to be really good at playing NetHack, you had to read this enormous document that told you everything you could do in the game and what was good and what was bad. So. Yeah, there's definitely, there are different schools of thought about roguelikes. But first, I guess we should say, what is a roguelike? We've been using this term, which I think is a pretty common term, but not everyone necessarily knows what a roguike is. So why don't we start there? Steve, how would you define the term roguelike?

So I would personally define a rogue-like as it's a top-down, turn-based action-adventure game with procedurally generated content and perma-death. One that descends from the game rogue. That's probably something worth mentioning, hence roguelike. Yeah, that descends from the game rogue because games like ZZT also kind of fit into that paradigm. And ZZT is not considered a rogue-like, which has always struck me as a little strange. but it's also not a game that's explicitly descended from rogue. Now ZZT is the one by Epic, is that right? Yeah, that's the Tim Sweeney game.

That was Tim Sweeney's first game. And look at him now, a multi-billionaire. He's on top of the world with the Fortnite's. All the kids are loving that deep, deep ZZT descendant. Yeah, yeah. When you really stop and think about it, Fortnite does, at least in its original incarnation, maybe not so much the Battle Royale,

But the original concept behind Fortnite really does owe a lot to ZZT. Yeah, which is really bizarre to think about it because you're really not wrong about that thinking about it. Yeah, I guess, you know, the idea is that if you take something very complex and you just keep sanding down the edges and eventually you'll come up with something simple and dumb enough for everyone to like. Yeah. Rogue likes, on the other hand, are not simple and dumb enough for everyone to like. No, unfortunately not. But yeah, so in addition to that personal definition I have, there is actually a formal definition of what a roguelike means that was written up at a conference in Berlin, the International Roguelike Developer Conference of 2008.

I think it's amazing that that that even exists and that it's so formal that they attach a city to it. It's like the Paris Accords. Yeah, it's truly, like until I found this definition a couple of years ago through the writer of at play, who's name escapes me. John Harris, yeah. We're going to be referring to John Harris a lot in this episode. And I kind of wish I had invited him along, too. We were supposed to have a fourth seat here. And he had to bail out the last minute because his wife is sick. So if I had known, I totally would have invited John along as well. But he's going to be here in spirit because, yeah, his at play column is something that I stumbled across, you know, a few years after discovering

Nightmare of Duraga. And it really made me realize, wow, there's a lot going on in this genre so please yeah there's a there's a whole bunch in there and his at play work covered mostly the games descended from roguelikes that ended up on consoles um he also wrote a really great history book uh at play if you've managed to get a copy of that i think it's only e pub i see it's very good yeah so the the berlin interpretation has a lot of those stuff they've divided it up into what they consider high value and low value factors uh the high value factors are random environment permanent death, it's turn-based, grid-based. Non-modal, which means that everything is always essentially in a combat mode, that they are complex games. They involve resource management. They are hack and slash games and also have an exploration and discovery component. And they identified their low value factors as single player.

Monsters are similar to players in that they have roughly the same capability. that there's a tactical challenge, it has dungeons, everything is represented by numbers, and it uses an ASCII display. Okay. So that's a lot of rules. That is an enormous number of rules. And if you start thinking about it,

a lot of the high value factors associate with some of the graphical games that descended ultimately from rogue, like Diablo. Like under the high value factors, as they're written in the Berlin interpretation, the original Diablo and Diablo 2 are roguelikes. But you say there's also a counter argument. Yeah, so there was this weird counter argument because this interpretation showed up in 2008, which is around the time of demon souls, right?

Ooh. When suddenly people started applying the term rogue like to these games that had static content, that were where players and enemies had different skills and abilities, which were sort of multiplayer. They certainly weren't turn-based because it was the language that people had to describe these games that had permadeff. And we can also talk a little bit about

how Spalunky changed the way that people, the term roguelike entered the modern vocabulary anyway. So that was why the Berlin interpretation kind of was formalized. And effectively the counterarguments that people started making like in blog posts and stuff was this doesn't really matter because the term roguelike now just means something completely different than what it

originally did it no longer means a game descended from rogue it means a game that has basically two factors permanent death and challenge which is completely bogus and I did an interview with Derek you like several years ago that that never got published where he talked a little bit about why he he chose to use the roguelike-like term for Spalunkey, which is that it is not a rogue-like. It doesn't have any. It's not turn-based. It doesn't have Asky graphics.

It's not a top-down game. It's an action game that has random generation of permadeath. Right. But it also has, you know, like persistent elements. You know, once you open a door, it's permanently open. And it has a lot of stuff that's lifted from NetHack, like the systems, interaction stuff. and especially the shopkeeper stuff. Yeah, there's, you know, the complexity of roguelike lends itself to people taking slices of those games

and adapting them into, you know, sort of stand-like games. I don't think it would be possible to make a game in the sort of the mold of Spalunky where it's an action game and have all the intricate systems of NetHack or Angband or Dwarf Fortress. Like, that's just, there's so much happening in those games. I don't think it's possible to manage those in a different context. But, you know, you take out, say, 10 elements or systems that you really like and figure out how do I make those work, you know, with a run-and-jump platformer or a spaceship management game or a trade sim or a farming game. Like all of a sudden, you know, you get these games that are very heavily influenced by rogue-like. that aren't the real thing, but there's no denying the influence and the fact that they are, you know, evolutionary steps of video gaming and that they've taken a concept and extrapolated it, which is great. That's how things evolve.

Yeah, and I mean, Derek also said, like, straight up, the reason why he invented, when he wanted to make a game like Spelunky that had all of those systems interactions was because, like, like me, when he was a teenager, he spent a ton of time playing Moria. And he fell in love with these games that felt like they were infinite and endless and challenging where you would see these really surprising things happen because enemies would start interacting with each other in weird ways. Items and spells and terrain would collide in particular manners, especially in NetHack, which has just so many insane rules, that if you weren't completely spoiled on the game, you would probably see something new every time you play. it, and that was a feeling that he really wanted to recapture in an action game. I was going to say that in the beginning I said I like rogue lights, L-I-G-H-T, but I feel like I really just want to say these modern rogue likes are just an evolution. Like if you call something a platformer today, you're not applying the rules of

Super Mario Brothers to it. I feel like we were saying it is an evolution. Even Super Mario Brothers was an evolution of, you know, Donkey Kong. Yeah, it's true. But yeah, I just, I think the more granular you make these demarcations, the more resistant and people already using them just because it's too complicated. So I get the resistance to call something like Spolunkie a rogue-like, but I also feel like for pure simplicity,

if you call something a roguelike, what it evokes is very similar to what the modern roguelike is. Right. And on top of that, you know, I think part of the problem here is that of all the genres to start dicking around with the semantics in, roguelikes are probably not the ideal one because just the nature of the games lends itself to being extremely particular and very, very specific. So I can see why the audience there would, you know, have that sort of possessiveness and also the demand for precision. So I'm a little sympathetic. The term itself literally just means like rogue.

And rogue was a game. Right. And we're going to probably talk about rogue and describe it. Exactly. So, yeah, with that in mind, I guess the question is, how pure does a rogue-like need to be to count? as a roguelike. So that's a really interesting question. Yeah.

At what point do people tweak a rule and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's not a rogue like? You know, I've never really put a lot of thought into what that is like, but I do think that there's, like, I do think that Spalunky is kind of that demarcation, where you change the presentation of it enough that it is no longer recognizable as a game descended from that lineage. you understand that it has the ideas presented from that lineage, but it's not part of it anymore, if that makes sense. It's no longer a game based on rogue, but it took the ideas from rogue and repackaged them as something else.

That makes sense. Yeah, for me, I don't have enough of a connection to the genre to really care. And, you know, there are some people who look at Shear and the Wanderer and say, oh, that's not really a rogue-like. It's, you know, looking past the graphics, it has perceived. assistance to it. Like, you can save things in a warehouse and use them in a future session. So it's not really permadeath because there is, you know, the ability to store some items and you only lose what's on your character at the time of your death. So that's not a roguelike. But I don't think you, like, it seems insane to look at Shear and the Wanderer and say, oh, that's not a roguelike. I really like the idea of roguelike's being interpreted through different genres. Like Spalunkey is the platformer rogue like and the binding of Isaac is the Zelda rogue like. And there are so many more, so many others. And I think. think, but most of them are just sort of patterned after the Shiren the Wanderer, um, Torneco games, right?

And then in terms of Japanese stuff? Mystery Dungeon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Mystery Dungeon itself is a series. Yeah, that's right. That's been licensed. It started out as a licensed game and has been licensed out to other franchises.

Was Torneco first or was it? Torneco was first. Yeah, Torneco was the first one. And then I think that the Shiren games started after they lost the Torneco license. Yeah. We can talk about that in the future episode, but, but basically, um, it started out as a dragon quest spin-off. And then Chunsoft and Enix went their

separate ways and they took all the elements of the mystery dungeon Torneco game and just said okay, well, we've got our own hero now and we can do a roguelike without any dragon quest elements and that became Shiren. But then they've also lint out the mystery dungeon name

to Pokemon to Final Fantasy. I feel like there's been a few others that are just escaping. Etterine Odyssey? Yes, Etriam mystery dungeon. How did I forget that? Nightmare of Duraga actually was Mystery Dungeon. So, yeah, there's a lot of kind of evolution there, which is his own separate thing. But for this episode, we'll talk just about, you know, the ASCy games, the ones on PC that you can download for free. They're open source.

Everyone's sharing them and building on them and improving them. Yeah. So let's go ahead and get it right into those then. Yes, sir. So before we actually So before we actually start talking about rogue likes, I do want to go a little bit into the prehistory of rogue likes because like's, Because like RPGs, you need to kind of get to the pre-consumer side of things to really understand where these are coming from. And like RPGs, rogue likes owe a lot to the Plato platform, which if you've listened to the wizardry episode, the interview I conducted the spring with Robert Woodhead, one of the co-designers of wizardry.

Plato was a system, a shared computing system. It was nationwide, but it was based in, I want to say, the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and it was incredibly advanced for its time. It was in the early 70s, and like I said, it was a shared computing system, and it used pretty advanced computers. It had these terminals. There were 512 by 512 pixel flat panel displays, like capable of generating graphics. So kind of like dumb terminals that you would have seen in a back.

or a Unix system in the 80s, 90s, even into the current century, but far more advanced. And this was an academic environment, but of course people would get on there and start to play around and start to create their own games. And the Plato system evolved right around the same time that Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion came out and Dungeons and Dragons debuted. So naturally a lot of the people who were in college playing around with Plato were also in college reading these books and playing D&D and tabletops. So naturally a lot of the early Plato games owed a lot to Dungeons and Dragons. And so you got these proto-RPs in this very sort of closed exclusive system that was only, you know, there was like, I think, 200 terminals around the country or something like that.

but they were shared, and so people were using them and collaborating, and they would show up in classrooms and people would just, you know, spend their free time missing around and build on these things. And so that's kind of where the rogue like got a start, although, you know, it obviously didn't properly begin until Rogue for Unix in 1980. But in the, like the five years leading up to that, four or five years, five six years, you have five games that I saw listed online as sort of, sort of major influences on rogue in different ways. And none of these games have all the elements of, you know, a proper rogue-like. But you can definitely look at them and say, oh, yeah, I see where Rogue might have taken influence from these. So the first of these, as far as I can tell, just reading different articles and resources, the first of these to actually make it out and be available to play was called the dungeon,

a.k.a. Petit 5, which was created by a guy named Rusty Rutherford. There was a game called D&D, which is different than Richard Garriott's D&D. And supposedly that was created in 1974, but Rutherford, in an interview, said that he created Petit 5, the dungeon, specifically because he kept hearing, oh, D&D is coming, and it was in development, supposedly, but never actually showed up on Plato. So in 1975, he was finally just like, you know what, I'm going to do my own. But these games are very, very primitive and simplistic, although they don't use ASCII. They use actual graphics on a high-resolution screen, which is kind of impressive. It's like a monochrome amber on black. So the dungeon was a single-player-only game.

It was a single-level dungeon that had just like a few basic skills and abilities. You could cast spells, you could attack things. But there was the ability to save so you could play across multiple sessions because again, this was a shared resource, the computers, so everyone was jockeying for time. So it wasn't realistic to, you know, use, like expect someone to play an entire session in a single sitting because that just time was a resource that no one had. And this game openly used D&D as its base. So Steve, you said you'd never really heard of the Play-Doh stuff, right? Yeah, I've never actually heard of these things before. This is really interesting. I always

thought that the primary antecedent to the rogue games was actually colossal cave and beneath the apple manor. Well, definitely, definitely those have some influence. Yeah, because I remember reading at some point, like many, many years ago, that kind of the colossal cave story took off in a couple of branches. It took off towards the interactive fiction branch with your zorks and your what-nots. And then it also took off towards the X-Whorks. exploration and generation branch, which would have been Rogue. So it's really interesting to find out that there was this entire computer system that hosted these games that I don't know if any of the creators of Rogue played them. Maybe they did, because I'm trying to remember if they made them when they were students in the late 70s and early 80s,

or if they made them when they were graduate students or faculty. Rogue was created when they were still students. Yeah, they were created. Yeah, early 19th. Yeah, I can't remember. They were undergrads. Yeah, I can't remember the exact details. But, you know, Rogue eventually saw commercial releases.

And one of the creators, I can't remember which one basically stepped out of the project and said, you know, I can't keep working on this because I've got to finish up my studies. So he handed it off. I want to say, I don't. remember which one. But one of them basically stepped back because he was a student. Yeah. I think that might have been, that might have been Michael Toy. Could be. Yeah. It was either him or Glenn Witchman because I think Ken Arnold stayed on the Roke project for quite a while. Right. So in any case, I feel like there probably was some influence here. If nothing else, these ideas would have started to trickle out into, you know,

beyond Plato and into other other projects, such as beneath the Appleman. manner. So let's see. Also, the next on the list was D&D, which obviously takes this name from Dungeons and Dragons. It was designed by Gary Wisenhunt and Ray Wood. Supposedly, it's the first game that ever had a boss. And this had a multi-level dungeon with a quest to find two relics. Let's see. So, like, there's not a lot to say about these games, but after that was Orthank, orthunk, whatever. So clearly, Lord of the Rings inspired in addition to being D&D inspired, it is, according to the blog, CRPG Addict, the most complex of the Plato dungeon crawlers.

It was built on the dungeon, pit at five, with identical game mechanics, but it had an improved display. And if you ever look up a graphic of this, it's got a multi-windowed display. Because, again, the Plato system had a high-res 512 by 512 plasma screen, which is crazy. Like, that's enormous resolution for something in the 70s. You know, you look at the Atari 2,600 and it had like 200 by 112 resolution or something ridiculous like that. So there's a lot of detail in here, but it does sound just reading the CRPG addict of this game, of this game, their review. It sounds like this game was really obtuse and it's almost impossible to get anywhere at the beginning.

Like you have to go into the dungeon, kill, you know, go up and fight something, hope you survive, escape, save, go back down, keep doing that until you level up. And then once you hit level two, you're like, okay, I won't instantly die if I make the wrong move. But very slow and difficult. After that, there was Moria, obviously, again, named after Lord of the Rings. And this was interesting because it was the, I think, the first RPG with a first-person view. So this was a huge influence for wizardry. Basically, Moria inspired Ubliet, which then inspired wizardry. So there's like a direct lineage into, you know, the classic dungeon crawler RPG, first-person RPG.

But the really interesting thing about Moria to me is that it had cooperative multiplayer, up to 10 people could play at once in this RPG from the 70s because that was kind of the Plato thing was that it was networked. So it could be collaborative. So you could have a game where 10 people were digging into this dungeon to kill stuff to fight. It had a fatigue system that required players to seek food and water. This was not a rogue game, so, you know, you could save. You could create camps where you could store your food and your gold and other things to relieve your burden, you know, your inventory burden. There was an aging feature, so your character would age with the passing of time and eventually die.

And if you wanted to, you could pass your possessions to an heir, sort of like rogue legacy, which came, you know, 40 years later, there was permanent death, you know, with a legacy system, a persistent shared world, and a dungeon of 242 floors of 48 by 42 squares. There's even guilds in this game. It's crazy how involved and elaborate this game is. Like, it's – I don't know if it's been lost to time because, you know, I think – I can't remember what company eventually acquired. all the rights to Plato, but they just sort of like took everything into possession. But it's an amazing piece of history.

I would love to play this game sometime. It sounds amazing. I'm surprised I've never heard of it until now, just based on how ambitious it was, and the fact that I had graphics and 10 players at once in a what would them be an MMO RPG. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. I mean, modern RPGs of this type are way more balanced, but they kind of top out of four characters per party if you're like in a dungeon,

and this is all dungeon. Yeah. I mean, the reason you haven't heard of this is because it was on Plato and it was not like widely available for PCs. It happened in the 70s and this closed academic system. So it's just like this almost like a tide pool of video game evolution. It's just baffling to read about it and think, wow, I can't believe people pulled all that off in the 70s. Yeah, they're called workstations, right? These computers?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's what they call. Yeah. Workstations are terminals. I think the history of those games. in terms of the broad knowledge begins and ends with things like Colossal Cave and Hunt the Wumpus

and that's kind of it and was Zork one of those? Yeah, that's basically like those three games and I know things exist I know things exist beyond that but it's only when you have to dig deeper and go into these blogs and stuff

where you find out about them. Right. Well, the thing with Plato and we're kind of getting off track here but that's okay. The thing with Plato is that you know, the Plato system

came to an end basically And because it was so sophisticated, so advanced and powerful, it wasn't something that could just like trickle out and find a natural successor. It was sort of this amazing creative dead end and nothing, you know, ideas from Plato passed on to other platforms. But the software itself didn't because there weren't systems that could really handle it that were structured that way. So it's just one of the great lost stories of computing. And I think also you don't hear too much about it because. The Plato system was based in Chicago, and most of the history of the games or the computing industry is told through Silicon Valley.

And that's where, you know, the narratives come out. That's where the tech press is. That's where the companies that are currently dominant are. So all these things that happened in like Boston, in, you know, Dartmouth and in Chicago, they've kind of been, I wouldn't say, swept under the rug, but because they weren't. immediately relevant to Silicon Valley, to the people in California, then they're just kind of forgotten about, I think, except for, you know, stories from the people who were there. Yeah, and it also looks like the time then Plato would have been really ascendant in the late 70s when a lot of these games were getting made was when Unix was starting to show up as the

primary timeshare system at universities, especially in California, where a lot of the roguelike, blah, blah, blah, ecology comes from. But, yeah, this sounds like a really super fascinating game, and I hope that it's preserved somewhere. It looks like that the Plato rights were owned by a company called CDC, and I'm really wondering when that company was liquidated and who, if anyone, actually has preserved all that software. Yeah, that's a great question. And then finally, on the Plato platform, there was Avatar, which actually is not relevant that much to rogue likes, but I do. think it's interesting because monsters could sometimes join the party. You would fight a monster and it would be like, hey, your charisma's high. I like you. I'm going to join up. So it's like a precursor to Megami Tensei and Pokemon, which is interesting. All right, so having talked about these, this sort of extended preamble of Plato games,

I do want to talk about sort of the first two games in this lineage, the proper lineage, and the first is Beneath Apple Manor from 1978, a game programmed by Don Worth. Is this something you've played, Steve? I've never actually played beneath Apple Manor. Okay. So this is probably the earliest rogue game. I mean, it is the earliest rogue game. I think it's the only one on this list that I've never played.

Okay. Well, I haven't played it either. But, again, there's a great review of it, a very detailed review on CRPG Addict. That's CRPG Addict. blogspot.com. And this game predates Rogue by a couple of years, but CRPG Addict says the similarities to

rogue seem way too specific for there to be no influence for Beneath Apple Manor not to have influenced rogue. But it's a much simpler game. Like it only has five monsters. You know, you've got a slime, a goblin, a cobald, I can't remember what else. But each of them

could carry negative effects. Like they would get stronger as you fought. And also they had negative effects that they could impact the player with, such as slimes could dissolve armor, and there was one enemy that could sap your stat values, like permanently decrease your strength and that sort of thing, and that's stuff that you see in rogue likes. So, you know, those mechanics definitely carried over into the roguelike genre, but it has a lot of things that are kind of, you know, innovative and interesting, like you could select the difficulty

level, you did have the option to use graphics as opposed to just ASCII text. And basically, anytime you play, you generate the level, like, you generate the world, basically. So it did have the procedural generation. And the idea was that anytime you reached the end of one floor and went to the exit, you could save there and you could also spend experience points to level up or gold at a basically the stairs functioned as a shop so you could buy stuff there. So it does really seem like a sort of proto rogue type game with a lot of ideas that would show up in the genre. Anyway, so with all that said, the original rogue, the original rogue were finally to it debuted in 1980 and this was

created by Michael Toy and Glenn Witchman, originally for Unix Systems, but they quickly ported it to other computers. The original team released it for IBMPC themselves, but then the publisher Epix stepped in, and they

mostly did like sports stuff, but they must have seen something in this game because they said, hey, we want to help you publish and port this game on other systems. So it hit actually I don't think it hit consoles, but it hit computers, you know, Apple, Macintosh.

I know that it had commercial releases in Japan because I have seen a vintage rogue strategy guide in a Japanese game shop. It was like 20 bucks so I didn't buy it. But at the same time, here was also, it's an ASCII strategy guide in Japanese, so I couldn't have read it. But the fact that there was a strategy guide for this game in Japan that long ago clearly shows that, you know, it spread. It made it out into the world and had some fans.

Yeah, I see Rogue having a huge subtle influence on almost all Japanese game design, just reflecting upon all of the roguelike elements and things that I've always loved. Like, oh, that was a kind of a rogue-y thing in this game, and that was a very rogue-like thing in this game. Yeah, and I think it feels a little like wizardry in that way. It's one of those games that when it was released, stateside, like, Rogue was an enormous commercial failure. Like, it never sold very many copies. I don't think that it tanked epics, but they definitely regretted licensing. it, but it found at least like a cult following in Japan in the early Japanese game industry along with wizardry. So it influenced like a ton of stuff, it feels like. Yeah, I agree.

So you have played this one, right, Steve? The original rogue, yeah. Okay, well, I've been talking a lot, so now I'm going to stop talking. Tell us about rogue. I can tell you a little bit about rogue. It's one of these that I haven't played a whole lot of. I mostly ended up playing it, out of historical interest in, I think, like, it was around 2010, 2011, there was actually a version of it released for the iPhone. Rogue Touch, which is no longer available because that App Store is terrible. But it's really interesting because the mechanics of Rogue actually translate fairly well to a touch interface because they're fairly limited. It's a single-screen dungeon where you move in the cardinal directions. Maybe you use a couple of

couple of items, and all combat is done by moving into an adjacent figure. So it's actually a really good fit for platforms like that. Even though it's not a particularly deep game, it feels like there's some level of tactical depth in how you need to manage your food resources, especially. Food is the big limiter in Rogue, because a lot of the things that these games have, in terms of resource constraints is food or water or some combination of it.

And that functions as the game's timer, essentially. You can only waste so many turns resting to restore HP and mana, or you can only dance around an enemy without letting it hit you for so long, things like that. And the food items in Rogue are incredibly rare,

which is what makes that game particularly difficult to ascend. And some of the earlier levels, it actually has a pretty smooth onboarding process for a game of this vintage. Like monsters in the early floors are not particularly complicated. They don't have a lot of hit points.

You kind of learn the basics by just doing a ton of runs and dying on the first five or so floors, I think. And then kind of when you get the hang of it, It gets pretty easy to progress up until about, like, floor somewhere in 14 or 16. If I remember right, there are 26 total floors in the game. And that's the point where the food limit starts to hit you. And then you start re-evaluating how you play the game, which is what is worth spending time on?

To the point where is it actually worth taking the 10 extra turns to go down a hallway and pick up an item, and then backtrack to get to the exit. So that's where a lot of the resource management stuff for rogue games comes from is actually that intense limitation of rogue. Yeah, so we should talk a little bit about what procedural generation actually means. In the case of rogue, what it means is that when you start a game, basically the game program, like, creates a dungeon for you. And you said there's 26 levels, and it creates, you know,

So those 26 floors, it determines what kind of monsters will show up on those floors, what items will show up where, and what kind of items will show up. So, you know, things like scrolls and potions, you can't just pick those up and say, oh, this is a potion of healing. You get a green potion. And in each game, it's random what the green potion does. So you have to identify it. And you have to like map out the floor each, the dungeon each time you play because it's never the same. The one sort of limitation of the original rogue is that dungeons are designed on a three by three grid. So there's always going to be like nine rooms or, you know, eight rooms in an empty space.

But you kind of get a feel for how the layout's going to work. But then there's different hallways that link the rooms. And you don't know what's going to be in a room. You don't know what the room is going to be. It could be, you know, there's like a bat. and there's nothing to worry about. It could be there's some cool treasure, or it could be that you step into a zoo,

which is what they call rooms full of monsters, and maybe some treasures where basically you step in, you see everything. It's like that scene in Star Wars where Hans Solo goes chasing after the Stormtrooper down the Death Star hallway, and then there's like a whole room full of Stormtroopers, and they look at each other, and he's like, oh, crap. That's a zoo in Rogue, basically.

So every time you play, all of this is different. And because the game does have permanent death, that means if you die, the next time you descend into the dungeon, it's going to be a different layout. You're going to have to figure out the patterns and the, you know, figure out the IDs for the scrolls and basically all of this stuff all over from scratch. So it definitely builds replay value. Yeah. And so it's worth pointing out that it's not just the death I built replay value. When you're collecting these items in the dungeon, there are no shops. So everything you find in the dungeon is something you're finding there.

And if the game doesn't generate it, you just don't have a chance to get it ever. And the other real resource limitation in the original rogue is scrolls of identification, which is the item that you use to tell you what another item is. And, you know, of course, you don't know what that item is to begin with. Like, how do you know if it's a scroll of identify? Well, you have to use it. And that introduces a concept that is really important to rogue likes. called Use ID, which is

because these items are randomly generated, one way to find out what they are is to just use them and see what happens. And some games offer really interesting and subtle ways to test them that are not particularly dangerous. Nethack, because it has like a bazillion things you can do with every item, has a lot of these,

but games like Rogue, Morton, or Angband, where if you've got a potion, you're going to drink that potion, there's kind of only one way to use ID it, and sometimes it's really bad. Yeah, you definitely don't want to use ID a poison potion, but you don't know what it is until you use ID it. Right, and even in games where you can do things like throw items,

not all of them throwing a potion is going to apply that potion effect to a monster. NetHack does do that, but I distinctly remember Angband, and the last version I played of it, which was like 2.8 or something. something a very long time ago, throwing items just didn't apply any effects. It just did projectile damage. So it wasn't a useful way to identify items. It was just a useful way to get rid of them, which is actually also important. Inventory management in these games is critical as well because the amount of space you have is

limited. Yeah, it's the kind of game where if you have like two swords and you only need one, then the other sword becomes a good projectile, throw it at something and do some damage. Yeah, yeah, throw it at something, drop it somewhere, sell in other games, sell it, and yeah, inventory management is a really critical part of these games. So let's see. The other thing worth mentioning is describing what permadeath actually is. And it's just what it sounds like. When your character dies, that's it for that character.

That character is done. The game resets and you have to start all over again. You lose everything you're carrying. There's only persistence across game saves. Like if you decide, well, I need to go eat now or go live my life. You save the game. When you come back, it'll load that state. But the creators of Rogue realized pretty early on that people were save scumming.

So they, because, you know, they were working on a Unix system, they set it so that your save would self-delete as soon as you loaded the game. And, you know, because it wasn't a, like a personal computer. It was a dumb terminal. You couldn't, like, copied over and back it up someplace. So it created true perma death, and so there is this risk. Like everything you do, it could be your last move. So you really need to take the time to think through your inventory and your options and act accordingly. I was thinking that a lot of the restrictions in what you would call quote unquote dick moves in old game design are because there was really nothing better to do.

So you would go back to the game. But with this, you are at a terminal, right? And you need to either pay for time or your time is limited. So in this case, it just seems like, boy, you're mean. You're being too mean. Pretty much, yeah. So it's a very unforgiving kind of game, but there's so much complexity that arises from the interactions of systems and so much, you know, like genuine risk reward and unpredictability that emerges from the randomization, that it always makes it interesting to play in an interesting challenge. And I say unpredictability, but there is a high degree of predictability.

Like, it's systems-based. So you know what things are going to do as long as you know what you're doing things with, if that makes sense. Like once you understand the monsters, once you understand the items, you know how they're going to interact. But, you know, it's just there's the mystery of like what are these items that I'm collecting and what is in the next room that keeps things interesting. And then, of course, the high level of challenge. Would you say, like, in rogue likes, player knowledge is more valuable than character abilities or strength or anything like that? That's what I really associate with rogue likes and games with rogue elements in them. I think both are good.

Like, it's great to know the game, but you need the tools to deal with the game. But, yes, being armed with knowledge is an essential tool. And I also wanted to point out to the point where there are some games that even though they do have Permadeath, your knowledge of what enemies do including what damage dice they roll and what abilities they have actually persists from game to game so the game itself

compiles effectively a spoiler file for you about things as you encounter them more frequently interesting and I just checked iOS Rogue Touch is now available and playable I guess it has been for a few years now so that'll eventually not be playable just because of how the App Store works but it is

three bucks if you want to try it. I'm actually shocked that it's still there and still runs. Yeah, I looked out. There's lots of things with Rogue in the title that aren't Rogue, but this is just Rogue touch, the original Rogue with graphics and everything. If you're a fan of retronauts, be sure not to miss Zane's World on podcast one. World traveler, author, and alcohol aficionado, Zane Lambray, is well learned in the art of having a good time

as he reviews the best attractions and destinations on the globe and shares the crazy stories behind his travels. Check out Zane's World every Tuesday on podcast one or wherever you get your favorite podcast. I'm here to tell you how to hack McDonald's $1,2, $3 menu. All you got to do is order two sausage burritos, two McChicken, or two sausage McMuffin sandwiches. You'll get them both for just $3. You can even mix them up. There's even a way to hack, the hack. It's adding any size McAfee-Brewed coffee or soft drink for a buck.

Lots of people have tried this, and it totally works. McDonald's new choose-to-three for $3 on the $1-2-3 menu. It's no hack, just an awesome deal. Price and participation may vary. cannot be combined with combo meal, single item at regular price. All right. So now that we've talked about Rogue itself, we can delve into its successors, the Rogue likes, as it were. But first I want to go to the listener mail segment because we do have some listeners who wrote in, including John Harris, who I mentioned before, and he has a lot to say. Now, normally I tell people, please keep your listener mail submissions to 200 words or less. But in this case, I said, go for it. So actually first here's a letter in one of his post. I know. We're going to read them to you now.

So actually, first here's a letter for a post, a comment from... Oh, my God. Sorry. Eric Stefanski. I clicked to see more in one of his posts. I was not prepared for what would unfold. Yeah, well, I'll talk about that in a minute. I know.

So Eric Stefanski says, I'm pragmatic. I value things for what they once contributed separately from what I see in them now. I think that rogolikes have provided both an example of an early avenue to make games with tight resource constraints, as well as spawned a genre that, in my opinion, is an absolutely amazing basis for game dev. The way roguelike turns and tile-based worlds work make them feel less like a restriction and more like, this is how the world operates, and these are its building blocks, and I appreciate it tremendously.

As for my own enjoyment, some are nice, but I tend to prefer newer examples, all things told. I'm also one of those who appreciates minimalistic tile sets like cuds or CDDA's retro days a lot more than just ASCII or Unicode. My favorite parts of playing Rogue Likes is when emergent gameplay happens, events I couldn't have expected that make them non-routine and figuring out things as I go.

So that is one letter. Do you want to jump in and read something from John? Oh, boy. I don't know where to start. John Harris, by the way, wrote a column we mentioned earlier called AtPlay for Gamasutra. There were like 75 installments of it. Every week, he is probably the person who has written the most about roguelikes, at least for, you know, a mainstream accessible audience.

And he touched a lot on console RPGs or rogue likes, but also a lot on some of the originals. And he's written some meta articles about, you know, the genre itself and the rules and the concepts. So check out, yeah, if you don't pick up his book on Amazon, which you should, check out the Gamasutra columns because that actually may be the same material. But it's great reading, and for like the two years that he was running it, I would look forward to that every week to read. And it was a great lunchtime diversion. So most of these are about NetHack, and we have not talked about that yet, but I can just jump in with the beginning of this third comment because it does pick up from Rogue, if that's cool. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, it's okay to jump ahead to that hack with this.

I just don't have the context. But so John says, here's some more. One thing about Rogue is that it has above many of the big PC road lines. but more in common with action-oriented games like Spolunky and my current favorite of the shooter roguelike genre, Nuclear Throne, is that it's relatively short. The shorter, a punishingly difficult trial-by-fire dialogue kind of game is, generally the better.

Net hack addicts most players do... Net hack addicts most players due to its entertaining early dungeon, where death comes quick to inexperienced players and most of its awesome gimmicks are seen maybe one time in ten or less. Then they get better and reach the midgame, and then they find the bottom of the minds or even the beginning, beginning of the quest, and that's more awesome still. But beyond that point, there's dozens of hours

of game ahead of them, and every minute, longer, someone plays a game, the penalty in terms of state loss and time sunk grows. It sucks a lot less to lose a game after an hour than after five freaking days. NetHack seems to recognize this to an extent for once a player gets sufficiently kidded out, and if it's level

17 or so or greater, only stupid play is going to result in death. But coming back around, it's the interplay of dangers that's the best part of NetHack. He goes on to talk more about it, but I will agree with him in that in most rogue experiences I find that they err on the side of brevity these days

especially the modern reinterpretations of rogue likes through you know Spalunky. The most time you'll spend in Spalanky is maybe like 20 minutes. The same thing with Binding of Isaac. I think my longest binding of Isaac game might have been like almost half an hour and that's when I was being

very meticulous and going through every room. So yeah if you die and time is a much more valuable commodity these days with so many distractions I feel like they need to be less punishing, and I feel like that is what I like to find in Rogue likes, too. All right, from a guy named Ben. As long as they've been around, my favorite roguelike has always been the pretty

recent and still actively development, dungeon crawl stone soup. Since the mid-auts, I've been rolling character after character and never getting more than a fraction of the way through the game. With 15 total runes, the in-dungeon McGuffins, and only three required to beat the game, I've only ever seen one and then managed to tank my game anyway. I don't know how many other rogolikes go, but that seems like a good representation to me. Uh, from Jay Thompson, a bit longer. My first encounter with rogolikes actually came with 1993's dungeon hack, a rogue like spinoff of the classic I of the Beholder D&D games, which my family received along with a bunch of other

classic RPGs when we bought our first computer from a family friend. Well, this was obviously not a true classic PC rogue-like. It did get me into the idea of a procedurally generated dungeon crawler, and I would continue to slowly drabble with them as my kid brain continued to figure out what these dang RPGs actually were and how they functioned. Not too long after, my family went through a bit of a rough patch where there was a lot less money to spend on video games. I started to gravitate toward RPGs because I knew they would typically last me longer than other games. Replayability and cost became an additional factor I started considering and choosing games.

Though I started out scouring bargain bins at game stores for PCs and console RPGs, I soon discovered there was an entire library of freeware RPGs that fit the mold of everything I was looking for in a game. Sure, they didn't have the best graphics, often just being represented through Askey, but they made up for it with countless character options, endless replayability, those RPG mechanics I was quickly becoming obsessed with, and most importantly, they were free. While I dabbled with Takes on Rogue at first, it was NetHack that was the

first one I really picked up on. I admittedly chickened out on it by using an early graphical interface, but once I figured out the interface, the Asky graphics became easier to pick up. Once I discovered The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and became obsessed with Tolkien's Middle Earth, Engband and Tales of Middle Earth became immediate favorites. Tales of Middle Earth particularly seemed more expansive than anything I had played before, with the simple graphics allowing for a larger scope than you could easily get with the graphics of modern gaming in the way of things. Tales of Middle Earth became such a consistent part of my gaming life that Once it evolved into the commercial tales of Magell, Megeel, dropping the bases in Tolkien,

I not only happily paid money for the Steam version, but I started to gift it out to as many friends as possible so they could know the joy of leading a group of dwarfs to reclaim a lost mine from an army of orcs, all while dodging randomly falling rocks and roving bands of poisonous snakes. So there is another comment from John, but we'll skip that for now, and talk about NetHack, which is kind of, would you say it's the big one, Steve? Yes, NetHack is the one that most people have heard of or played, and it's the one that I personally like the least. Oh.

Because what I wanted out of playing roguelikes when I was a kid was, I wanted something that was kind of like a light diversion that had tactical elements that, you know, like I'd have to think about, but not really learn or know. know a lot about. Nethack is almost more like a job sometimes than a game. Yeah. It's what it seems like. It's incredibly clever and just full of systems and interactions, but it just seems so daunting. It is. And that was another thing about it is I'm playing these games when I'm like 14, 15, 16. And I start up NetHack and I'm like, oh, cool, I have a dog or whatever. And I go down a couple of floors in the

dungeon and I accidentally walk into my dog and then my dog gets mad at me and my dog kills me. And I'm like, no, this is terrible. I don't want to play this. Yeah, so NetHack debuted in 1987 as an evolution of 1982's Rogue clone Hack. And Hack was pretty much just straight rogue, but NetHack really expanded on it beyond much more than the base concept. And NetHack is actually still a living product. The most recent update was in 2016 and the dev team announced another revision of the game that's coming up. This was back in April of 2018, but there is another revision in the works. So the dev team, I think it's changed somewhat over the years and new people have come in and old people have dropped out, but they're still working at it and they're very

secretive. The thing about the dev team is that no one really gets any insights into what's coming in NetHack. So they keep changing. changing up rules and adding new things, and no one knows what they're going to be. But the mantra of this game is the dev team thinks of everything, because if you can think of a use case for the objects in the game, it's almost definitely possible to do that. And if it's not, mention it and they will add it to the future revision of the game. Yeah. And in fact, there's actually something that was added to the game for this exact reason,

which is people used to say that NetHack has everything in it but the kitchen sink. So they added kitchen sinks to the game. Thank God. It's possible to die because of the kitchen sink. Yes. There are lots of really bad things you can do with the kitchen sink. Well, yeah, the thing about the kitchen sink is that they took the term sink literally. So I think this might have been a John Harris column where I read this.

But if you have like the ability to fly or float and you pass over a square that the kitchen sink is on, you will sink. And you'll take a very small amount of fall damage. But if you have like one hit point and you take fall damage because of the kitchen sink, you will die. So it's possible to die because of the kitchen sink. Yeah. And actually it's, there's a popular way to ID items, use ID items in NetHack, which is, oh, I think I'm holding a ring of floating. I'm going to drop the ring into the sink and see if it goes away or not. Because if it's a ring of floating, it will float above the sink.

And then you know what it is. and then also you can drink from them you can use them to summon demons to have sex with them to increase your stats NetHack is a weird game Yeah there's a Again John Harris column

An app play column That gives a just An absolutely enchanting description Of what you can do in NetHack So I'm just going to read this verbatim For example The first time a player encounters a giant eel may end the game, because they can wrap themselves around him and drag him into the water,

killing him in two turns. Eels are an extremely dangerous opponent, but once the player knows about the danger, it turns out there's quite a lot he can do in this situation. He can just use a means of taking care of the eel from afar, since they can't leave the water, that's not too difficult. Or he might grease his armor, making it difficult for the eel to gain hold. Or he might wear an oil-skin cloak, which is similarly slippery. Or he might wear an amulant of magical breathing, making drowning impossible. Or he might polymorph into a monster that doesn't need to breathe. Or he might bridge the water with ice using a wand of cold, since eels are harmless out of the water. Or he might teleport the eel with a wand, hopefully onto dry land. Or he might

trap the eel in a small pool by pushing boulders into the spaces around him, creating land. Or if he's levitating, he can stop surprising the eel and making him lose his grip. Or he could just wear an amulet of life-saving. So because of the sheer amount of stuff in the game and the sheer complexity possible in NetHack, spoiler culture is like super deep and intricate in NetHack. And from what I understand, there is like a part of the community that is just like you should not spoil yourself. You should experience this game fresh. But Like you said earlier, Steve, it's pretty much impossible to make any real progress in this game without spoiling yourself because there are so many things that can happen, so many things to know about, things that you will encounter once in, you know, 50 plays. And if you don't know how to deal with that one super rare instance of something happening, then you'll die.

Or it can be even worse than that because, again, like a lot of these games, you have to use ID things because scrolls of identification are still very rare. And because NetHack has so many different things you can do with every item, there's like kind of a set series of things you need to learn to do with items in order to identify them. And one of the biggest ones is knowing the magic word of warding that you can inscribe in the dirt in front of you to see if monsters move away from it, whether it becomes permanently etched, whether it becomes written in flame or ice, whether the ground in front of you teleports away. Like, there are so many weird things that you kind of need to know how to do to even sort of make it to that midgame level, little alone past the midgame level. But John Harris is right, which is that once you reach a certain point in NetHack, you kind of know what's going to happen and it's just playing out the rest of the game to the very end. This could be a crackpot theory of mine, and I'm curious as to what Steve thinks of this, but we're talking about these games and a lot of it, a lot of my reaction is like, well, we're a big, babies now. We can't really play these games anymore. These aren't intended for a wide audience. But then we're talking about how reactive, something like NetHack is, and I can't help

but think of games like Minecraft, which are the biggest games ever. And the options aren't as limitless because it's a graphical-based interface, and it's not text at all. But I feel like it's the same air of mystery and the same reactive environment. And just like how deep it can go if you want to explore it. Like you can build like a working computer in Minecraft. People have done things like that. I feel like that is sort of the more, slightly more user-friendly version of an experience like this. Yeah, it kind of is. And we're going to talk about Door Fortress eventually, I think. And Door Fortress is obviously a huge influence on Minecraft, at least in some elements. And Minecraft does kind of have that mysterious thing about it when you

first played a few times. If you're not really familiar with it, which is, oh, I pick up these items and what do I do with them now? Oh, I combine them. Well, how do I combine them? What do I combine them into? Oh, I made this new thing. What does it actually do? And the interesting thing about Minecraft is that the items that you make and the things that they do and how they're assembled follow some kind of relatively logical sense that most people can kind of intuitively grasp, as opposed to understanding that kitchen sink operates as a pun where it is a literal sink that pulls things in. Yeah, it's trying to have a like a reliable rule set as opposed to like a clever

or arbitrary or sillier rule set. Yeah, and I think that might be the kind of thing that really turns me off about NetHack is that it tries to be too clever for its own good. Because you, and that's the thing why it's kind of hard to figure out what some of the rules are. I'm trying to remember what some of the other really weird like pun uses of items in the game more because I know that there are a bunch of them and they're just slipping off the top of my head.

Yeah, I mean, it does, it definitely does feature sort of a quippy writing style that kind of reminds me of infocom games where it's a little bit sarcastic, a little bit punish, and you have to really sort of think sideways to figure some things out. Yeah, there's a lot of old adventure game

logic in games like this. So the game is called NetHack because it's hack networked, right? And I'm thinking the only thing it really does networked. There's no multiplayer It's just that when you die, you leave a bones file on the network to basically, it's like a tombstone, basically, to say, this is where this guy by this name died, and here's how he died, and, you know, here's what level he was, and wow, isn't he stupid? So now we can talk about demon souls, right?

Is there more to it than that? There actually is more to it than that. Oh, you can fight ghosts that come back of players' graves and stuff. Now is the time to talk about Dark Souls. Yeah, that's true. Now is the time to dark about Dark Souls. The real Dark Souls begins now. So some other ideas that were introduced in NetHack that showed up in subsequent games.

We mentioned before Ascension, but basically the premise of NetHack, just like in Rogue, is to descend into the dungeon and acquire an amulet. And at that point, you become God, basically, or demigod, and you ascend, you become the winner. And you can't really do anything after ascending in this game, right? Yeah, once you ascend, it's kind of over. There are some very strange things that can happen to you on your way to ascending. Like if you attempt to ascend without having the ambulance, you kind of die. The last big challenge of the game that actually does kill some players, no matter how well prepared they are, is you have to go past the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

They're not really the last bosses of the game. but they're the last enemies. You don't have to kill them. You just have to get past them. Right, and they respond after they die, right? They do, yes. And so, like, the part of the game actually is learning, oh, well, so there are several stages to NetHack, and some of them are actually fixed content, like the Sokobon levels, which

show up in the middle of the game, which are kind of box puzzle levels based around pushing an arrangement of boulders to get from one end to the other. Sokobon. And so there's a limited set of levels, and one thing that players are kind of expected to know is, how do I get past every Sokobon level in the least number of turns? Oh, okay, well, I got past Sokobon, and now I'm going to go past a few more levels in the dungeon, and then I get to the castle. Well, how does the castle work?

The castle has the moat. It has the eels. You can pull down the drawbridge. When you go inside, there's, I believe, Medusa is the enemy that's always in the castle. Well, how do I defeat Medusa? Well, if I have a shield, if I have a mirror of some sort, then I hold up the mirror and I kill Medusa that way. Oh, well, I go then past the castle, I think, is where you actually pick up the amulet. You go back up through the dungeon to the first floor, and then it's called Ascension, because from the first floor, you ascend upward through the clouds.

I think it's like another 20 levels or something to go up through an ascension. I've certainly never made it that far in that hack, so I have absolutely no idea what the end game is like, aside from reading it. So, yeah, that's something worth mentioning is that the dungeon in this game is broken into strata, basically. There are different areas that they always show up at the same levels, right? Like the castle is always at the same level. And the amulet is in, originally it was called hell, but now it's called the Astral Plain, right? I think so, yeah. And you need to, you have to figure out the secret to staying alive there because otherwise, if you, like, step into hell without proper protection, you'll burn to a crisp and immediately die.

So that's kind of a like point of no return sort of thing. You know, if you want to advance, you have to know the secret. This game introduced the ability to use items. So a famous example is that if you kill a cockatrice, you can throw its corpse at an enemy to petrify the enemy. Although if you don't wear protective gloves, then picking up the cockatries corpse will instantly petrify you. So it's, you know, it's one of those like systemic things where you have to. To do things, you have to prepare yourself properly. And finally, this game, I think, introduced shops, which are...

Moria came first, I think, introduced shops. But this is the first one to introduce the shopkeeper as a character. Yeah, so you have just random rooms in the dungeon where you can pay gold for special treasures, or not special, but just like items that you would otherwise find randomly. And there's a shopkeeper that you have to pay. but you can try to steal you can try to kill the shopkeeper he's very powerful but it's possible to kill him so

you know it's one of those games where you can basically say once you figure out the secrets you can be like well I'm going to be a thief now but until then it's a bad idea so it's just another thing also I seem to remember if you assault or kill the cop the shopkeeper

there's a chance the Keystone cops come after you of course well there were bumblers so I'm sure they're not too dangerous right No, they're actually pretty dangerous from what I remember. Yeah. That's a reference for the 90-year-olds out there. All right, so anyway, I think that's probably enough about NetHack.

I don't know. Should we read that last comment by John, or is it too... I mean, it goes on. There was something about Medusa, I think. I would love to know what John had to say about this. All right, well, let's talk about. His problems on NetHack are essentially how I experienced the game. I did a Control F for Medusa so I can read about the Medusa element of this if you want me to.

Go for it. Okay. So John goes on to say, anyway, one of the last. less fun holdovers from those old days that made into hack and in a much less their abrupt version. Nethack was Medusa. You remember Medusa from the miss of Perseus or more likely from the movie Clash of the Titan? Sorry, it's Perseus. Well, Medusa is in multiple old rogue likes and two of them, in fact, her most modern appearance are hack and NetHack. In NetHack, there is a special level

devoted to her. The thing about Medusa, of course, is that your character sees her, they turned to stone. And then he has D-Y-W-Y-P-I-P-I. That's, do you want your possessions identified? A prompt signaling that you just got dead. And NetHack, Medusa is always pre-generated on her level. Your character enters a room filled with statues, hint, hint, of all kinds of different monsters. If you didn't already know that you were on the Medusa level, from the layout of the place, or if you hadn't already detected her magically or telepathically, that's your cue to put on a blindfold so you two don't get dead.

Although it's possible through digging through dungeon floors, falling through trap doors or level teleportation to end up beneath Medusa's level without encountering her, which makes for a rather rude surprise for a hero with coming back up through her level since she stands right by the stairs. The thing about older games, however, is they had the Medusa, but no Medusa level. She was just a regular dungeon occupant, found in some suitably deep level. If coming up through the stairs and getting surprised by Medusa seems unfair, imagine if she was just traipsing about.

The thing about Produce is she's not immune to her own gaze, so if you know she's lurking about, you can turn her into stone instantly, just by wearing a blindfold and carrying a polished silver shield. This leads me to a particular favorite fact about the game that with an additional wand of stone to flesh, you can make Medusa into your own personal experience point factory as she instantly restones herself after each step. This might seem a bit unbalanced, but there are only so many ones in the dungeon and only so many ways to recharge them. And by that point in the game, there's lots of other things you need more than experience points. Anyway, considering that Medusa's worth a little north of thousand to get from level 21 to 22, you need 10 million.

So Medusa is worth 1,000, and to get from level 21 and 22, you need 10 million. So, you know, why not cheat? That's my editorial, I think. All right. So there's a lot happening in that NetHack, and it's a, it's a bewildering game in a lot of ways. Very impressive, but yeah, I feel like I just, I will never play much of that game because I just, I don't have the time in my life. Yeah, it takes a lot of time. You really do, you know, NetHack culture is like, don't read the spoilers, but you kind of need to read the spoilers.

And as like a weird side note, I actually think, I can't remember whether it was in earlier issue of Nintendo Power about Legend of Zelda, which may actually have taken it from here. But the NetHack spoiler file might actually be the first instance of culture using the term spoiler to describe something that happens in a game or story that you don't want to know about going in. So I think that that's where it came from. So moving on from NetHack, we've spent a lot of time talking about it, so we kind of need to hurry through the rest of these games.

That's okay because I don't know that much about them. There's ancient domain of mystery created by a guy named Thomas Biskopf, and it's interesting because it's maybe the only game on here that's not open source and also not a direct derivative of rogue. Yeah, Adam is a weird game. And it's especially interesting around because I know a lot about it, even though I only played it a couple times. because in the mid-90s and late 90s, when Thomas was working on this game, he would post regular status updates to his website and also to some news groups and stuff.

And from the external point of occasionally picking up a new build and playing it, you always kind of wondered what exactly he was doing because it wasn't a particularly good game. It had a lot of interesting ideas that I think have persisted through. to more modern games. Like, Caves of Cud seems like it's really super inspired by Adam. But I know that his play was, excuse me?

But you like Caves of Cud, right? Caves of Cud is okay. I played it for the first time today, and I think it's a really interesting game. I don't know if it's good, but I think it's very interesting. Got it. But, yeah, his whole idea for this game was, oh, eventually I'm going to finish it. it'll reach 1.0, I'm going to open source it at that point, but it's also going to be a commercial product. Because his entire goal with this game was to try and sell it, which for a person making a

roguelike in the mid to late 90s is very ambitious and a little weird. So when I saw it on this list as like a game that was actually released, and I went to Wikipedia and I kind of browsed there to hear, learn more about it too. Like, I'm shocked that it reached 1.0 and actually came out, like, officially came out. What I do remember of it is that the way that character generation worked was you not only picked, like, your race in class, and, you know, you got your stats randomly rolled to you or you kind of did the attribute points in them. That's sort of how character generation works for most of these games. you were also randomly assigned mutations, which would give you advantages or disadvantages or special abilities. And it felt like it had more of a science fiction bent to it than a lot of these other games did,

which is something else that is really unusual for a roguelike. Interesting. It sounds like the mutation element almost sounds like something from Saga, which is an equally unfriendly style of game. So maybe there's something there. But, yeah, John Harris classifies it or characterizes it as the most RPG-like of rogue-likes. So I can definitely see where it would be an acquired taste. And if it's, you know, it was just one guy working on it, I feel like the games of this complexity need more eyeballs on it. So it's an interesting side note, I guess.

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting side note. And it's also kind of interesting because it was the first one of these that was really developed kind of in tandem with all. open internet culture as that was expanding. This isn't something that came out of the university student scene. This was something along with a lot of the Angband variants that started showing

up in the mid to late 90s because a bunch of weird people who didn't have Unix time share systems in the 80s were getting their hands on these games all of a sudden. And they were like, oh, I want to make one of these. This seems like it could be pretty easy. And then they find out how hard it is to make one of them.

All right. So next on the list is Moria and Engband and basically one derive from the other. Engband is the more advanced one. This is the one I'm probably most familiar with, not because I've played it,

but because I've seen it being played so much. Like about 10 years ago, I downloaded a screensaver that is basically a bot playing Engband. So whenever I was sitting at work working on stuff, I'd look up at my computer and there would be the computer

playing Engband. and trying to advance, you know, beyond level 10 of the dungeon. And it actually got pretty good. I don't think it ever beat the game. But I was kind of impressed by how effectively it played the game, certainly better than I could. But it sounds like this is when you have a lot of experience with yourself, right? Is that right, Steve?

Yeah, this is the one that I spent most of my time playing as a kid. So what is it you love about Engband so much? What I love about it is that the combat is really tactical. but it doesn't have, and it has a good variety of items and things you can do with them, but not to the sort of absurd degree that NetHack does.

Everything in Angband is very comprehensible and readable. If you pick up a wand, you're probably going to do one thing with that wand. You're going to point it at another thing. If you pick up a staff, you're going to do one thing with that staff. You're just going to use it, and it'll have whatever effect it has,

either on you or on the area around you. If you have a potion, You're going to drink it, or maybe you're going to throw it at an enemy. But if you throw it at an enemy, it's like any other thrown item. It just acts like a projectile. You don't use it to just identify things that way. And it also introduced a couple of things that I think are really kind of cool, which is the idea of unique monsters.

And unique monsters are named monsters that are often Lord of the Rings characters, that are what are called out of depth in this game, which means that, like, if I'm on level five of the dungeon, I expect to encounter things that are roughly about level five. They do damage comparable to mine. They don't have any crazy special abilities. Uniques have crazy special abilities. They have way more HP than you.

And one of the worst ones that you can get is in the very early dungeon is called Smeagle, who, of course, is the infamous little Hobbit guy who's wearing the ring of invisibility. So you can't see him. And all he does is move up behind you and steal your stuff. And it's the most awful

thing at that point in the game because money is extremely tight in the early dungeons and you really need it because you don't find food in the dungeon. You mostly get food when you travel back to town and buy it. So you could also spend a whole bunch of time hunting

around these enormous dungeons. It was a full nine-by-nine screen, and I think that each screen was in 80-by-80 character set. So these were very, very large dungeons for the time. And you're trying to hunt down this thing that would steal from you and then randomly teleport to whatever other location. And there are other monsters, some of which might be what we're called exploding monsters, which just means that it would breed. so like there would be a mass of worms in the middle of a room and okay yeah that's a pretty low level enemy I could just kind of stomp on it and it'll be done except for every turn it clones itself so you have to kill them very very fast or else the entire level gets filled up with that kind of stuff

but yeah I played a lot of this game and it's just it just appealed to me because it was a free game that had all of the tactical stuff that I wanted to get out of games like Dio which, first of all, I don't think a Mac version of Diablo came out for a bazillion years. It was really late, yeah. Yeah. And also I remember it not being particularly good. So, like, I would just play Angband instead. Yeah, so this seems like a huge game just reading about it, like all the different,

the different affinities and resistances you can get. The fact that it has just so many unique elements that you don't know if you're going to run into. Yeah, it seems very daunting, but maybe not as daunting as NetHack. Yeah, it's daunting because its complexity comes from interactions in the dungeon and enemy abilities. And the complexity doesn't come from player inputs, which is kind of the complexity of NetHack. Well, the complexity of player inputs and also the complexity of figuring out what are the developers thinking? Because, like, oh, I polish a shield to make a mirror for Medusa. okay sure like that makes sense if you think of it but think about the number of steps that go into thinking about how you would put together the chain of user inputs to make that actually happen in the game and it's kind of crazy but with angband it's like oh okay so i see this particular type of monster and it's this particular color of asky character so it probably has these abilities so i know it's going to do these things to me

okay, these are the items I have in my inventory. So the best strategy for me to take is to do X, Y, and Z. And that's kind of the way you play Ang Band. And sometimes what happens is, and where a lot of deaths come from, is it comes from you being careless, it feels like. It never really feels like it's the game's fault so much as I went down in the dungeon too fast. I advanced too far on that monster. oh, I didn't have the right kind of equipment with me for this level in the dungeon

or sometimes it's, oh no, I was a fool and I used ID to potion and it killed me. All right, so I think we've kind of been through the big direct rogue descendants. And what I find interesting is that the next game on this list that I've put together, we're going to have to kind of blast through this stuff now. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup seems specifically designed as a reaction to all the rogue likes. it seems like it was designed to be accessible and to like, from what I've read, it was like specifically designed so that anyone could play it. And it wouldn't take, you know, years of grueling, painstaking practice to master the game, learn its intricacies, but rather to be kind of accessible, playable, playable, in lots of different configurations of permutations.

Yeah. And this, Dungeon Crawlstone Soup is the one that I hear people pick up most frequently. It's playable online. NetHack is playable online as well. But DCSS is actually a really easy game to pick up. It's kind of easy to learn. It's very readable and comprehensible. And I think it strikes a good middle point between the full tactical combat of Angband and the creative uses of items that NetHack has.

Well, the interesting thing to me about dungeon crawl is that it places a heavy emphasis on religion. There are lots of gods in the game, and you choose to worship one, and the god you choose to worship shapes your gameplay style. So, like, if you, I think if you worship, you know, the, like the barbarian god, he demands you not use magic spells. You just use physical attacks. But in return, you get, like, better weapons and better strength. if you worship the mage goddess, she expects you to focus primarily on spells

but in return you'll get better wands, you'll get more spell books and things like that. So it has a big impact on the approach you play and so I think there's something like 186 different permutations of class, race, and religion in this game.

My God, that's crazy. I can't remember exactly how many, I might be making that number up but only like a handful have been finished in a proper competitive environment, but people have managed supposedly to complete the game in all the different playable configurations in some

form. So it's a viable game, however you choose to play it. Though, of course, I'm sure some combos are easier than others. Yeah, it's an interesting game. I never got into it because it kind of started becoming popular around the time that I was dropping out

of roguelikes because instead of spending my time playing them, I was spending my time in graduate school. But, like, from everyone that I've talked to who's gotten into these games in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, all of them pointed to Dungeon Crawl and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup as, like, the roguelike to go to. That was the one that got them started, and that was the one that got them hooked. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there's Dwar Fortress, and I'm not even going to talk about this game. I've read the boat murdered LP, and I still don't understand what the hell is going on. To say that... This game, like, it just, I look at it and I'm like, what's happening?

This game, so a dwarf fortress evangelist talked to me about this game about 10 years ago, and the conversation was so bad that I still remember it. I'm still haunted by it. So I'm going to tell all you dwarf fortress people, calm down a little bit. Don't get into the extended details and don't waste somebody's time for 45 minutes. 45 minutes? It is a long, one-sided conversation about your fortress. I couldn't get out of it.

I feel like this is the kind of game that appeals because, like, for the same reason as Eve Online, like, if you are there and invested in it, so many things can happen that are just so unpredictable and so amazing and, like, how is a video game doing this? But if you are not into it, who what, just shut up, okay? I don't care. Like, it's inscrutable. But, yeah, like, I'm being unfair to this game, I think, because it's, it's incredible, but it just does not make itself accessible at all. And it's, it's so, you know, just from what I understand of it, it's like, imagine Harvest Moon meets civilization and the Sims, and then it's all as just unflinchingly, brutally hard and complex as Netflix, and that NetHack Netflix. Yeah, Darth Furtress has always struck me as one of those games where it's more fun to hear someone's story about it than it is to actually play it. And thank God if people play it, because I love to hear their stories about what happened in their game.

Yeah, I mean, go to LPRCive.org and look up boat murdered his dwarf or their dwarf fortress, let's play, because it's a chronicle of an entire civilization that I, yeah, it's just amazing. But I don't know, could you describe this game a little bit? I'm not good at it. But you're like, you're guiding a civilization of dwarves, and you're not really like playing the game as a rogue-like, you know, bump and attack. It's more like you're guiding a civilization of dwarves who act independently. Yeah, it's a little more like a god game in a way. I would actually say that it feels like it has a little bit of populace in it because mostly from what I remember trying to play it, it feels mostly like, oh, I'm giving some. sort of general directives to my dwarves

and I'm kind of shaping the landscape around them a little bit but I mean, I'll be honest I tried to play this a few years ago and it was 100% not my speed Yeah, I totally forgive you for that It seems fascinating but it's for someone who is much younger

and has much more free time than me I think the people who figure out this game are recruited by the Illuminati or something they secretly run our society Probably And so finally, you've talked about Caves of Cud. So the last classical roguelike I want to talk about, the last PC roguelike, is the most recent one, and that's Doom R.L, which is now just DRL, because Xenimax sucks. But it's doom turned into a roguelike, which at first you think, well, that's stupid.

But then no, because a netflax, you're going into hell. What are you doing in Doom? You're going into hell. So I can see it. But it's basically taking the first-person shooter and turning it into the ASCII equivalent. It's a very fast-paced and, you know, as much as a turn-based game can be fast-paced,

focused very heavily on ranged attacks as opposed to melee, much more simplified in terms of object interactions, uses familiar things like caco demons or whatever they've changed their names to, now that it's no longer doom. But it's a fascinating idea. And to just kind of bring things full circle,

it officially has a graphical user interface that was designed by Derek Yoo, the creator of Spalunky. So that's great. Yeah. And I've played it. It's a really good game. And the sessions are incredibly short. The creator of it actually describes it as a coffee break game, which is kind of what

it's perfect for you can play it in like five to seven minute chunks and it's super entertaining it's really fun it's very well designed um and then kind of just briefly i think that it's worth mentioning it came out of the seven day roguelike challenge oh okay which uh it actually came out of so i think the creator created aliens r l for the seven day roguelic challenge and then expanded that into doom rl because it's frankly a slightly better theming and yeah Yeah, like the alien sandbox is pretty modest. There's not a lot you can do in alien. Well, aliens, plural.

So you were in semi, the procedurally generated space and there's a bunch of the critters coming after you and you shoot them. Got it. Okay, whatever. But Doom is more constrained spaces and I think that it just offers a faster pace of play that's more entertaining. Right. And, you know, the original Doom had some of that interactive complexity built into it where you could, you know, cause. you know, cause different enemy mobs to attack each other.

So it feels like that you can extrapolate that into roguelike style play pretty easily. Yeah. And it's, like I said, it's a lot of fun. It would either be Dumorell or Dungeon Crawlstone Soup that I'd say if people listening to this are interested in kind of getting started with roguelike history.

Like those are the two games I'd say are really good starting with. Or maybe like a sheer and the wanderer game if you can find one used somewhere. That's another episode to discuss. Yeah. But I will say the most recent Shear and the Wanderer for Vita is the one to get. For Vita, you say. For Vita, that still exists on the planet.

Not really. They haven't scoured it from the planet yet. I still have mine. They can't take it away from me. Damn it. Anyway, yeah. So I think that's as far as we're going to go with this. But this has been a pretty, I think, detailed and,

elaborate history of rogue likes without necessarily getting too deeply into the games themselves. But this is not a rogue like podcast. It is a history podcast. And that, by golly, I think we've done. Thank you to patron John Gibson for supporting retronauts on Patreon and for requesting this episode. I hope that it was to your satisfaction, John. If not, I apologize. No refunds. Yeah. This episode took a long time to put together. So fingers crossed that you were satisfied with the results, even if we were kind of approaching it mostly from outsider perspectives. But thank you, Steve Tramer, for being on this podcast to make it not just outside perspectives, but to give us the, what would you call it, the player perspective.

I was going to say someone who has cured his addiction, and I'm totally blanking on the term. that's a good way of funny. Although I would say that my addiction really hasn't been cured, it's just moved to the games that are descended from rogue lights. Ah, okay. Okay. The reformed, do a rogue like fan. Let me tell you about a game that came out a couple of weeks ago on this podcast, about games for 20 years ago. And that happens sometimes, too. It's good to talk about, you know, like the modern descendants of these games, too. Yeah. By the way, speaking of that game that came out two weeks ago, play dead cells. It's absolutely amazing. It is a really excellent distillation. of a lot of rogue-like philosophy into a sort of Metroidvania?

Sort of. Okay, well, everyone should check that out then. It's been more than two weeks by the time this podcast comes out, though. Bye, golly. Anyway, we are going to wrap it up here. So, Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself and where we can find you online if you want to be found online. Yeah, sure.

I think you guys can find me online. My name is Stephen Tramer. I have played and made video games and board games. and board games. Unfortunately, none of them are out and published yet. I do a little bit of writing on game, software, and philosophy, and history stuff. I'm getting that up and running at generic domain. So you can find me there.

Nice. I like it. Do you have, like, Twitter or anything? Oh, man, I've got Twitter, but Twitter is so bad. I don't know. It is. Yeah, okay. I love it.

Well, Twitter itself is evil I'm sure to do. That's true. All right, well, thank you for being on this podcast. As for myself, I am Jeremy Parrish, but you knew that already. You can find me on Twitter, yes, I use it as GameSpite, or at Retronauts.com.

And Retronauts itself, yes, it is supported through Patreon thanks to patrons like John Gibson, who support us and request episodes. You can go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts and support the show for $3 a month. you'll get early access one week ahead of the public release at a higher bit rate than

we can put online for the public release and without advertisements. So that seems like a great deal for $3. That's like 50 cents a podcast. That's great. That's just great business. You got to go. You got to go do it. And let's see.

Anything else? No, that's it. So, Bob, tell us about yourself. Sure. I'm Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter as Bob Servim. By the way, I say find me or fight me. Fight me and find me on Twitter as Bob.

serve on. By the way, I want to say, I'm sorry if I didn't have much to add. This is the end of a long recording day, and I'm sick. Jeremy and I have a rule that one of us has to be sick for every recording weekend. Yeah, it was nice for me to be able to take the weekend off. Jeremy was not the one who was sick this time. It was me. But I have to thank Jeremy for his great notes and Steve for his experiences. Because frankly, these games make me sweaty and anxious just to hear about them. So I was, I was, I'm glad I have this knowledge without having to like touch them in any way because I think I would just have a panic attack. I'm really looking forward to the follow-up episodes. I'd like to do a console roguelike's

episode and a Rogue Lights episode at some point. Those are much more my speed. Yeah, those are much more accessible and less panic-inducing. But I'm glad I learned about these. And by the way, I have other podcasts and fun things to listen to. If you go to my Patreon, I have a little Patreon with our friend Henry Gilbert. It is the Talking

Simpsons Patreon. We have two major podcasts there, Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. Talking Simpsons is a cryological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon is a similar podcast. We look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. And if you give to the Patreon at the $5 level, You get all kinds of bonus stuff, dozens and dozens of bonus podcasts, exclusive mini-series, interviews, season wrap-ups, community podcast.

So much is going on there at Talking Simpsons. And that's how I make most of my income. So check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons or just check out the podcast for free. They're both free on any podcast thing you use, Talking Simpsons, and What a Cartoon. Thank you very much. Retronaz also. How many episodes have you had about Fish Police? Oh, people say that.

We would not do that of our own volition, but if you give it a certain level, you can make us watch Fish Police, and we will make the most of it. What the hell is Fish Police? Everyone, I implore you. Please give Bob money, so he has to watch Fish Police. I agree. I need a reason to watch it. And Fish Police is a bad primetime animated series made after the Simpsons boom, but it's

also, but it's based on an alternative comic from the 80s that Sam Keith actually inked on from the Max. I learned that through our research on a past episode of what cartoon that Jeremy will be on. So yes, Jeremy is on our podcast as well. You just broke some tenses there, right? Yes. I don't know where you exist in time, but yes, check on my podcast, and please give to Retroads and What a Cartoon and Talking

Simpsons. It's a great big family. All right, and thanks for everyone for listening. Thanks again, John Gibson, and this is our point of perma death. Oh, would you like to identify your items? No, thanks. Life is full of those Ah, moments, like right up to our first stretch and y'all in the morning.

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In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of

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