An Ode to the Brilliance of Roguelikes
How these early ASCII role-playing games sparked my love of minimalist design.
I t starts with an @ symbol, photons throbbing in the blackness of a cathode-ray tube. This is you, weary adventurer: a rogue.
Around you, a matrix of decimals, bordered by other mathematical symbols. The vertical bars (|) and minus signs (-) are walls, the plus symbols (+) doors. These symbols describe a room, the first you’ll find in your perilous quest through the Dungeons of Doom to find the Amulet of Yendor. As you climb down staircases (%) to ever deeper levels, mystical weapons [)], powerful spells (?), and magic potions (!) enable flight, invisibility, and other powers. You encounter frightful monsters, and when you do, this bestiary of capital letters — from Aquator to Zombie — causes sweat to drip down your nonbinary brow. Why? Because in this ASCII fantasy realm, death is permanent. Game over.
The first time I played Rogue, I was only five years old. It was 1984. My mother was a systems engineer for the telephone company, a job that granted her a sizable perk: a home computer terminal. This pre-internet workstation was nothing more than a keyboard, a modem, and a CRT monitor. A thin client, it had no smarts of its own, but it could dial into AT&T’s powerful computers and consequently control the Boston area’s telephone systems.
It bears repeating: My mother would sit me down and let me play unattended on a device that could — had I but known the command — shut down dial-tone across the Eastern seaboard. It was the telephonic equivalent of handing a kid the nuclear football. But I, a kindergartner, had no eyes for phreaking: I was there for the games.
There was Zork, a famous text adventure beyond my reading level, and Go Fish, which I dismissed as a game for babies. But the second I loaded Rogue for the first time, I embarked on a torrid affair not just with games of its type — called roguelikes — but with typography, symbology, and fonts. These games, more than anything else, made me realize the incredible power of type and the value of minimalist graphic design.
First unleashed on the network of the University of California–Santa Cruz, in 1980, Rogue wasn’t throwback; it was cutting-edge. The game, designed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, was created as an attempt to simulate the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons on the school’s network-connected terminals. These terminals had such slow modems that when a player loaded a file, text was essentially typed out in real time, line by line. Hence, why early computer games like Zork are essentially graphic-less text adventures.
But Toy and Wichman hit on something revolutionary. Using ASCII characters as tiles, they programmed Rogue to generate entire dungeons out of glyphs, and only redraw the parts of the screen that changed every turn. Not only was it impressive for the time, but this solution allowed Rogue’s gameplay to be incredibly rich. Instead of having to create art for every object, then worry about a computer’s ability to render it, the programmers just had to assign it a symbol from the keyboard.
The Doom of its day, Rogue inspired an entire genre of games. Modern roguelikes tend to follow Rogue’s lead in a number of ways.
First, they’re procedurally generated. That is, no two gaming sessions are alike. Every time you boot up, levels can have different layouts, potions can do different things. Additionally, they have “permadeath,” so they’re brutally hard: When your character dies, you have to start over, with no reloading. The games are also turn-based like chess, as opposed to real-time like soccer, which makes for highly tactical gameplay. Every move counts.
Finally, roguelikes tend to be built atop text-based skeletons, using universal ASCII symbols like @, &, and * to imply whole fantasy worlds. Modern roguelikes might have options to use more traditional graphics, but these are usually just pixel art tiles rendered over a letter, number, or symbol: a picture of a door, for example, pasted over a (+). The DNA of these games, though, is ASCII: a collection of 128 printable characters that every computer has been able to render since 1960.
This relatively simple character set is why, to new players, booting up your first roguelike can almost seem like your computer crashed and barfed up the alphabet soup stored in RAM onto the screen. To the seasoned player, however, this screenful of abstract ASCII characters has almost code-like information density, defining an entire world of architecture, mysticism, and zoology. It’s also about iconography and the Uncanny Valley. Almost every video game, from Pac-Man to Halo, relies on iconography to immerse a player in a world. In Super Mario Bros., the titular Mario isn’t really a plumber but an animated icon — known in gaming as a sprite — comprised of 192 pixels. Modern games might replace these 8-bit sprites with 3-D models constructed from polygons, but even these are merely more advanced icons — symbols of what is meant to be real: a Goomba, a spaceship, a floating yellow head gobbling ghosts.
If the Uncanny Valley has proved anything, though, it’s that the closer to life computer graphics become, the more our brains find their realism wanting. It’s easier to suspend disbelief for the symbolic (Pac-Man, Mario) than for the skeuomorphic (the latest cutting-edge PlayStation VR game). In the former, our minds fill in the details; in the latter, our brains — unoccupied with the task of imagination — have nothing to do but fixate on the subtle ways in which pseudo-realism falls short of the authentic.
These phenomena further feed the mystique and power of roguelikes. A roguelike room is as mechanically abstract as a typewritten sentence. It’s made of a series of glyphs that would be meaningless in any other context, but that when linked together in a certain way onscreen, conjure remarkably concrete images in our minds. A (k) moving toward an (@) across a field of (.)s becomes a slavering kobold, drooling ichor and scraping its claws across the dungeon floor as it advances, red eyes gleaming. A green (l) standing in the middle of an octagon of yellow (*)’s becomes a leprechaun dancing atop its pot of gold. A blue (]) becomes an enchanted claymore, ethereally glowing, worshipped as a totem by a horde of (g) goblins, dancing in the dark.
These graphics, such as they are, are all the more vivid and personal for being imagined, not seen. “[Players] would invent meaning,” Rogue’s co-creator, Michael Toy, remembered in Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games. “They would place themselves in this situation and their creativity would express itself. They made the world more interesting and beautiful.”
The symbolic depth of ASCII places roguelikes among the most extraordinary deep-game genres around.
Take Rogue’s spiritual sequel, Nethack, in which a player can root around in sink drains to find magic rings, petrify enemies by wielding the corpse of a cockatrice (careful to wear gloves, so as to avoid also turning to stone), or get electrocuted for praying to your god too frivolously (unless you’re wearing rubber boots, in which case, you’re fine).
Or try Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which uses ASCII graphics to simulate a zombie apocalypse every bit as potent as the one in The Walking Dead, from drivable cars to wandering tribes of deadly survivors. Or, if you’re really feeling reckless, load up Dwarf Fortress, the most notorious roguelike, which asks you to manage an entire subterranean society of dwarves. Every playthrough generates an entire planet to play through — not just its geography but its history, from the canyons carved by its rivers over millennia to the entire history of the planet’s legends and gods… and they change every time.
These infinitely replayable games didn’t cost millions of dollars to make: most of them were made for nothing as labors of love. Nor do they have big dev teams. It took 1,000 people to make Grand Theft Auto V, one of the best-selling games of all time, which takes place in a fictionalized 3-D recreation of California. Comparatively, just two dudes created Dwarf Fortress, which is at least as intricate and simulates far more. And you don’t need cutting-edge computers to play them — Nethack will run on practically every computer from 1987 on. The simple graphics of roguelikes allow solo virtuosos to design symbolically rich, ever-evolving worlds as cheaply as putting down prose on a page. Roguelikes are what Tolkien, Hemingway, or Joyce would be writing if their native language were code, not English.
Every design lover knows Dieter Rams’s famous aphorism: “As little design as possible.” Roguelikes are gaming’s incarnation of that philosophy. Take a look at a screenshot from modern roguelike — Brogue, for starters, or Caves of Qud — and tell me that ASCII can’t be every bit as colorful, beautiful, and evocative as the latest Nintendo creation.
Lovers of roguelikes would blanche at the notion that their beloved genre of games were “minimalist” and, of course, from a gameplay perspective, they’re not. But design-lovers know that minimalism is not an insult. The minimalism of Swiss style and Dieter Rams does not refer to a shallow pool glittering with surface reflections, but an ocean, beautiful in its stillness, but with fathomless depths to explore. Such is the roguelike. At their best, these games incarnate some of design’s most hallowed truths: that typography has power, that systems are more important than surface appearance, and that less can be more. Even if you don’t usually play video games, roguelikes are worth loading up if you subscribe to these truths; and if there’s a young gamer in your life, playing a roguelike might just begin their design journey. I know it did for me.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
