Sources and scope
This is a selected encyclopedia of traditional roguelikes, researched in September 2026. It is organised for reading and comparison. It is not a list of every game that has ever used the label.
Dates
Entries distinguish prototypes, public releases, forks and later 1.0 milestones. Moria’s 1981 BASIC experiment and its 1983 Pascal version are both recorded. Angband’s 1990 Warwick version is a development milestone, not a claim that every later port appeared that year. Maj’Eyal’s 2012 release is not the beginning of the earlier ToME family.
The timeline links back to the entries for the evidence behind each date.
Evidence
The strongest sources here are creator recollections, contemporary release records, project manuals and maintained source repositories. A recollection is still a recollection. Where the surviving dates are awkward, the text keeps the distinction rather than pretending to know an exact birthday.
Community encyclopedias and bibliographic records supply a few secondary checks, particularly for early releases and names. Their links are labelled as such on the relevant pages. Mechanical comparisons and descriptions of a game’s place in the history are editorial readings of the cited material.
Main shelves
- Wichman on Rogue
- Brouwer’s original Hack archive
- Koeneke and the Moria history
- Angband’s version history
- NetHack’s guidebook and credits
- UnReal World’s development record
- ADOM’s development history
- The Dawn of Stone Soup
- Casalini on the Maj’Eyal rewrite
- Jeff Lait’s POWDER log
- Sil’s preserved releases
- Qud’s generated histories, by its designers
Every game entry includes its own sources. The two reproduced screenshots have a separate credit and licence page.