Origin
See also: Chronology of roguelike video gamesThe roguelike genre takes its name from Rogue, a role-playing video game based on the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games, including concepts such as stats and experience points.
Some features of Rogue existed in earlier games, notably: Adventure (1975), Dungeon (1975), DND/Telengard (1976), Beneath Apple Manor (1978), and several written for the PLATO system, such as the multi-user games dnd (1975) and Moria (1975). DND, dnd, Beneath Apple Manor, and Moria all used limited graphics. Moria offered a primitive first-person, three-dimensional view, while DND and dnd presented a top-down map view similar to Rogue. Dungeon had not only a top-down map view, but line of sight code and a textual display, and Beneath Apple Manor had the former two features as well.
In Rogue, Moria, and Beneath Apple Manor, the dungeon is randomly regenerated when the player begins, creating a new challenge each time.
These games present a plain view. Traditionally, an "@" sign represents the player character. Letters of the alphabet represent other characters (usually opposing monsters). Some versions of Rogue only made use of capital letters, but present-day roguelikes vary capitalization to supply additional visual cues. A dog, for example, may be represented by the letter "d", and a dragon by a "D". Coloration may signal further distinction between creatures. For example, a Red Dragon might be represented by a red "D" and a Blue Dragon by a blue "D", each of differing abilities significant to player strategy. Additional dungeon features are represented by other ASCII (or ANSI) symbols. A traditional sampling follows.
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Graphical adaptations are available for most early roguelikes, and it is not uncommon for new development projects to adopt a graphical user interface.
Players issue game commands with at most a few keystrokes, rather than with sentences interpreted by a parser or by means of a pointing device such as a mouse. For example, in NetHack one would press "r" to read a scroll, "d" to drop an item, and "q" to quaff (drink) a potion.
Read more about this topic: Roguelike
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