Rogue / Nethack

Dying in a Dungeon

I was introduced to networked UNIX computers as a freshman in college. This was pre-WWW, with USEnet groups like rec.games.board as a source of information, but it opened up a new world of games for me. The computers were mostly used for email, reading news, and typing up programming assignments. But there were games to be found on the system.

After noticing what looked like an ASCII dungeon on a nearby screen, I eventually discovered Rogue or Nethack or some other variant¹. So I entered the dungeon and … got killed by the tiniest monster. I started again and got killed by … the next tiniest monster.

I learned to run away from monsters; at least until I’d healed from the prior one. But that took time, so I got hungry and starved to death. So next game I ate one of the corpses. got sick and died. I rarely made it down past the third or fourth level, and there were supposedly fifty or more.

And they didn’t even have color. Image from Wikipedia

A few decades later, I downloaded Nethack for my PC, and after dozens of deaths and reading the FAQ I could sometimes make it down ten or twenty. Once I think I made it to thirty.

There’s always a new way to die. Each new ascii letter meant a new monster to deal with. And there are dozens of scrolls and spells and potions and rings and things. Worse yet, each game randomized the descriptions each time. If PRATYAVAYAH was a spell of identification in the prior game, you couldn’t go blithely reading the first PRATYAVAYAH scroll in the next … because it might destroy your armor. Last game’s amulet that stopped hunger might be this games …. cursed amulet of strangulation.

Game after game of acquiring tricks to figure out how to safely test equipment, not starve to death, not die from monsters. Trick after trick. “Rogue-like” games are ridiculously hard, and even when you know all the tricks there are “auto-deaths” — situations where you can die in a single instant, no matter how many hit points you have, and if you die you start from scratch with the only benefit being that you’ve learned another way to die. And there’s no save points, no recovery.²

Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy’s³ Rogue (and it’s descendants) spawned an entire genre of massively complex games. Is it a new moon (in the real world)? That effects it. Some creatures can kill you if you see them, so figure out how to (temporarily) blind your self. When you hallucinate the letters and text go wrong in weird ways. Some potions work differently if confused. One mantra I heard was “The dev eam thinks of everything.” And for all that, when I downloaded Nethack it could still fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk. Unless you add a graphical interface, it’s still probably smaller than this web page. The space isn’t for graphics and sound. It’s for game.

A brutal, brutal game.

I eventually tired of Nethack. I get the appeal of complex games where one mistake — or even just bad luck — can spell death⁴. But partially Nethack — once you get mediocre at it — becomes a grind of dozens of levels and not taking risks, just slowly building up advantages. I’m told that several off-shoot games handle the pacing better, but at that point I was done.

But “Rogue” has made a big resurgence with games like Slay the Spire or Hades: not as hard as the original, and now with fancy graphics and sounds, but still a procedurally generated map and “start from scratch” each game. Technically these games are “roguelites” because you can unlock new things with each failure, and some may not have permadeaths⁵. But these games co-exist with their spiritual ancestors. That old laptop that was bricked and wiped clean may not be good for much, but it can run Nethack.

And for that reason, I think that Rogue and/or Nethack should be in the 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century. I’m still not sure which, or both (or perhaps even some other ancestor).

Let the debate rage in the comments.

1. I don’t remember exactly.

2. You can save the game and restart it later, but the game deletes the save file on restart. In theory you could copy it and — if you day — restore it. This is called “Save scumming.”

3. Information gathered from the Ars Technica history of rogue-like games.

4. Looking at you, Magic Realm.

5. Both games mentioned also cleverly handle the issue of “why do I — the player — keep my knowledge between games?” In Slay the Spire you are being reincarnated and in Hades you are trying to escape Hell and each ‘death’ merely sends you back to the start.