Dungeon H@cks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games
by David L. Craddock
First posted February 2019
I still love seeing, hearing, or reading about other people’s “emergent narratives” around proc gen games—as, apparently do thousands of other people! Twitch, Critical Role, LP archives, youtube longplays, games club podcasts and tiktok stitching all allow for communal storytelling, and all revel in the digital space Rogue pioneered decades ago. Is every strength in the digital narrative space derived from Rogue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, the @ being your little avatar is so pleasing to me, aesthetically.
Apex Legends released recently to roaring acclaim; a behemoth on twitch, the hype got me to try it—I even scraped together a win—but I quickly gave up and went back to watching professionals play. It is the difference between me running some laps in the park against seeing Allyson Felix compete in the Olympics: sure, we’re both running, but only one of us elevates it to an artform.
Watching others play creates a micronarrative, a communal experience like hearing about a Nethack ascension run, reading the touchstone Dwarf Fortress boatmurdered saga, or losing an afternoon deep in the intrigue of EVE Online:
Although it’s not important to the game, some of the most fun you can have with roguelikes actually doesn’t involve playing them, but involves going into the Usenet groups and reading players’ stories about their games.
...One player started playing a character whose ambition in life was to be a dragon. She found the ring of polymorph and an amulet of polymorph control. She slips on the ring, drinks the potion of polymorph, specifies “black dragon,” then slips on the amulet. Dragons have lots of disadvantages, but she went on to win the game anyway.
Dungeon H@cks is the definitive text on early roguelikes—a genre that hasn’t been generified like “xerox” to “copy”, “DOOM-clone” to “first-person shooter” [FPS], “Kleenex” to “tissue.” [note from the future: velcro made a song about “hook & loop” that went mid viral on tiktok] So the foundation—Rogue—is still in the name. But no one is preserving the link.
No one except the author, who tracked down the creators of a handful of foundational games for an entire genre, interviewed them and spun the history into a cohesive narrative. That’s amazing. Don’t you wish someone had done that for, say, the creator of the umbrella? Not just the “when” and “where” but the “why” and “how.” That’s what you get here: “For Rogueto achieve Toy’s dream of an infinitely replayable game, every element had to be procedurally generated.” The dude that created Rogue wanted to play his own game and be surprised, and lo, procedurally generated dungeon crawls were born. That’s friggin’ nuts.
Even the format of Dungeon H@cks hews closely to the open-source ethos that drove many of the early roguelikes:
"I never would have written [Moria] if I hadn't run into Colossal Cave Adventure and Rogue, and those were free. What I did is I ended up releasing the source code to anyone who wanted to run the game, but also so people could learn the same things I had learned—about data structures, about how to write code efficiently. That was kind of my gift to the education world, I guess."
A number of interviews the author personally conducted are accessible in the back of the book. Having the interviews at the end is nice in theory, but structurally puzzling. As I read through them, I kept flipping back to reference the chapters and noticed that direct quotes were inserted; you’ll read the same words more than once if you read the whole book (my first excerpt is from an interview with John Harris, and it appears twice in Dungeon H@cks). I like seeing the sources fleshed out, so the small complaint of reading the same sentence twice barely registers on the cosmic scale of things that could have gone wrong with what seems to be a self-published (self-funded?) endeavor. Amazing.
If you’ve never heard of the Amulet of Yendor, I don’t know how or why you would search this out. But if you have even the smallest amount of interest in video game history—of uncovering the roots of the procedurally generated loot tables that underpin the gaming world’s new hotness—then Dungeon H@cks is required reading. Because while Apex Legends is about forty years too new to be in the book—a team-based battle royale where you drop into a Hunger Games-inspired arena where you must find gear, fight the 19 other squads, and survive to win—it wouldn’t be anywhere without Rogue.