History of the Adventure Genre, part 2

Feature

The second part of our history of the Adventure Genre.

November 13th, 2007 by Marko Susimets�

An Old-timer takes a look into the past

Rogues, Hacks and NetHacks
In today's game market, it is hard to find a game that actually offers more than fancy graphics and sounds. When a gamer goes and complains about the situation, there's normally at least one old beard around who'll say that everything was better in the old days.

But was it really so? In the previous article we took a look at old text adventures and found that they may have had a lot of content, but lacked the graphics that many modern gamers take for granted. However, in the current article, we take a look at another variety of old games, which were inspired by text adventures, but introduced "graphics" and more re-playability value through random game maps. A couple of the names of these games were already mentioned in the previous article: Rogue and Nethack. Both text adventures and roguelike games had their golden age in the 1980s, before the introduction of polished graphics and sound effects.

So how do we play these roguelike games?
Unlike text adventures, roguelike games present the game world as letters and symbols, with the dungeon walls often represented either by #'s or horizontal and vertical bars. Dungeon floors would be marked with period symbols and the hero was most often represented by the at sign (@). Monsters and NPCs would then be various letters, capitalization marking the bigger creatures etc. The hero (@) would move around in the dungeons with simple keyboard commands, such as the cursor keys for different directions, w to wield a weapon and e to eat some food. Later versions of the game replaced these basic symbols with decent graphics, but the gameplay remained the same.

The goal of the games is usually pretty similar, despite the title. In Rogue, the player has entered a dungeon and cannot escape it until (s)he has retrieved an amulet known as the Amulet of Yendor. Although the dungeons were different in every game, the amulet could always be found on the lowest level, behind the nastiest monsters and trickiest puzzles. Along the way, the hero would learn new spells and gather better and more powerful items. In Hack, which may be more recognizable titles but were based on Rogue, the game was expanded to include character classes, pets and shops, as well as new monsters, items and spells. With Nethack, even more additions were made, including the addition of worship and gods.

Especially the pets were an innovative idea and could have many uses in the game. The player can tame additional pets along the way through simple bribery (food) to devious magic, but at the beginning the pet is usually a simple kitten or a dog. The pets can be trained into shoplifters and they can assist in combat and even detect cursed items (some of which cannot easily be abandoned once taken along).

The development of rogue-like games
Roguelike games were first developed in 1980, with the release of Rogue (surprise!). As with the text adventures discussed in the previous installment in this series, Rogue was developed in a time when computer graphics still did not exist. In fact, Rogue stemmed from a project at U.C. Berkeley that allowed, for the first time, programs to do "cursor addressing", which meant that programs could put a character on a specific location on the computer screen. This allowed for a crude form of "graphics" for games. Three students from Santa Cruz set about to use this new software routine to create games and eventually came up with Rogue. When one of the students moved to U.C. Berkeley, he hooked up with the student who had created the "cursor addressing" routines and they set up the game on the university Unix, which eventually allowed the game to be spread all over the world.

Later on, the creators of the game ported the game to PC and Mac and started selling it. When the marketing became too burdensome, they contacted an established game company, Epyx, who took over the marketing and packaging of the game. This allowed for the game to be ported to other platforms, most notably Amigas and Ataris. Rogue never became a commercial success for its creators, but it is probably one of the best known games in gaming history.

Alongside with Rogue, there came out several other similar games, such as Hack (1985) and NetHack (1987). NetHack is not an online game, but got its name from the fact that it was developed by a team of people who mostly interacted over the Internet. NetHack is also one of the roguelike games that is still actively developed.

Roguelike games never actually died out and they are still widely played today, but mainly by the older generation of players. To attract new players, several variants include more interesting graphics, most notably Vulture's Eye, which uses a bird's eye view and might even attract some demanding modern RPG players.
Where can I find these games?

As was said above, Rogue, Hack and NetHack never actually died out and they continue to be developed even today. NetHack is probably the most interesting variant of these games, since it includes so many options and extras, including character classes and the chance to have a pet. The official homepage of NetHack can be found here and a long list of variants of this game are provided by Erebus. Vulture's Eye uses the NetHack engine and can be found at Darkart's. Anyone playing the game will also appreciate the detailed beginner's guide.

For those who want to read more about the history of Rogue, the originator of this genre, will be interested in an article written by one of the original developers himself. And D. Russell offers an interesting variant of this game at his site.