the roguelike archive
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ASCII illustration
Twenty-six games, a few crooked family trees, and more than forty years spent deciding whether to open a door.
This is an encyclopedia of traditional roguelikes: games where movement, exploration and combat proceed through considered actions in a dangerous, partly generated world. It follows their history through individual games, the people who made them, and the ways their rules changed.
The terminal is one of this history’s homes. So are handhelds and tile displays. The entries stay with traditional play, including the relevant modes of games that offer several ways to play.
Find a way in
- Timeline: follow the releases and turning points
- Before Rogue: the earlier dungeon experiments
- Family trees: code ancestry and design influence
- Reading the dungeon: symbols, terms and decisions
- The people around it: Usenet, forks, servers and short projects
- Screens and credits: two real captures, with provenance
- Sources and scope: how the dates and relationships were chosen
Games, A to Z
- Ancient Domains of Mystery: The wilderness between the dungeons
- Angband: An expedition measured in depth and preparation
- Brogue: Light, water and a dangerous little alphabet
- Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: The expedition becomes a life among the wreckage
- Caves of Qud: Ruins with a history that changes between lives
- Cogmind: Everything you are carrying is also part of you
- DRL: A shotgun still takes a turn
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: Making the difficult decision easier to see
- Golden Krone Hotel: A window can be a weapon
- Hack: A dungeon passed from one programmer to another
- HyperRogue: The shortest way home may stop making sense
- Infra Arcana: The descent is an investigation with a cost
- IVAN: The body is part of the inventory
- Jupiter Hell: Modern machinery, one decision at a time
- Larn: A short journey, with someone waiting at home
- Linley’s Dungeon Crawl: The other great dungeon family
- Moria and Umoria: A town above the long descent
- NetHack: A dungeon dense with consequences
- Omega: There is a world beyond the stairwell
- POWDER: A dungeon small enough to carry
- Rogue: The dungeon that would not stay learned
- Shiren the Wanderer: A straw hat on an uncertain road
- Sil: A song in the halls of Angband
- Tales of Maj’Eyal and the ToME family: A long family history, followed by a new beginning
- Torneko’s Great Adventure: The shopkeeper goes below
- UnReal World: The next winter is a sufficient enemy
The opening ASCII drawings are illustrations. They are not game captures or exact maps. Real screenshots are labelled with their recorded edition and date.