This super ugly video game came out over 40 years ago and without it, games like Hades 2 probably would never have existed (2024)

Game News This Super Ugly Video Game Came Out Over 40 Years Ago, and Without It, Games Like Hades 2 Would Probably Never Happen

Published on 02/06/2024 at 09:45

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Do you know where rogue-lites come from? Well: here's the answer… On the occasion of the release (and unanimous success) of Hades 2, let us introduce you to Rogue, founder of the genre.

To prepare for the arrival of Hades 2 (which is currently a hit in early access on Steam, with 94% positive reviews from nearly 37,000 evaluations), I relaunched Hades first of the name… And what a game! The rogue-lite from Supergiant Games has clearly not stolen its GOTY 2020 title from JV, and it's always a pleasure to try to escape the Underworld in the shoes of Zagreus. But, browsing these randomly arranged rooms made me ask myself a question. Where does this type of game where almost everything is procedural come from and how did developers come to create such an experience?

Hello 80s

To understand it, welcome to the beginning of the 80's. At the time, Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy, two UC Santa Cruz students, were having fun creating text adventure games in their school's lab. Their primary inspiration: the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons as well as Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first titles of the genre. The principle is simple… The computer displays a story (here, it is about caves and trolls) and the player must – regularly – write using the keyboard the action he wishes to carry out. 40 years ago, we weren't doing any better when it came to role-playing “video games”. “The first time I played a title like that, it was like the universe had changed,” Michael Toy confessed in a 2016 interview. “All of a sudden, the stories start talking to you and you can really be inside”.

As explained above, Glenn and Michael were such fans that they began developing their own text adventure games. But the two friends face the facts: as authors, they know every trick and enigma in advance. “So how do we get the computer to create puzzles itself?”remembers Glenn Wichman, in 2022. Easier said than done.

(Dungeons & Dragons and Colossal Cave Adventure)

Draw with text

Because of course, in 1980, there was no ChatGPT: it was impossible to automatically generate a coherent text adventure with which the player could interact! Glenn and Michael will therefore opt for a little adventure game, but another “hitch” arises, how to create such an experience on an ADM-3A terminal connected to a PDP 11/70 computer (basically, a microwave which can only display text)? In a stroke of luck, thanks to “BSD Unix”, an operating software common to California universities at the time, the Santa Cruz colleagues got their hands on Ken Arnold's “Curses”, installed 1h30 away, in Berkeley . “With this, we could draw on the screen using computer characters”notes Glenn Wichman… Enough to create “graphics”, however basic they may be.

Thanks to the small software of Ken Arnold (who will later be credited as co-creator of Rogue, the game in question here), Glenn and Michael imagine a dungeon on nine floors where hides, on the last level, the 'Amulet of Yendor. A place where stone slabs are represented by dots and doors by the “plus” symbol, and where the arrangement of the rooms changes completely between two parts, in accordance with the vision of the colleagues. A small tour de force achieved thanks to a procedural generation deemed poor by Michael Toy. “At the time, I knew nothing about computer engineering,” he admits with a smile on his lips, again from the 2016 interview. “Rogue’s procedural generation is a tic-tac-toe grid with a piece random in each box”.

(Glenn Wichman, Michael Toy and Ken Arnold, the creators of Rogue, at the Roguelike Celebration 2016)

The team will even push its desire to make each game unique with permadeath. With each failure, all progress is definitively lost, no item is kept from one run to the next! A mechanic that, according to the creators, makes Rogue more “immersive and fun”, forcing players to deal with the items/situation of the moment, without the possibility of loading a more advantageous save. Subsequently, permadeath will become one of the major markers of “rogue-like”, that is to say games which are inspired by Michael's baby, Glenn, Ken. But let's not move too quickly.

(With permadeath) we were trying to make the game more immersive and make things matter, but without making it more painful. It was intended to make things more fun: “this thing (a picked up object for example, editor's note) counts, so I'll think about it” (…) On the other hand, if I can save then drink the potion and – oh , it's bad – so I refill and don't drink the potion – Michael Toy, co-creator of Rogue (via Game Developer)

The greatness of small beginnings

Coming back to Rogue, the randomly arranged rooms are certainly rudimentary, but they work. In its 80's version, the title places you in control of a courageous adventurer symbolized by an at sign. Here, each screen represents a floor and each “box”, a room. The goal ? Explore all the rooms until you find a portal to the lower floor, but also collect resources (gold coins, scrolls) and face monsters, represented by the letters of the alphabet. Like Dungeons & Dragons: Rogue also relies on a system of experience and turn-based combat… There are even secret passages and documents to decipher in order to know their effect.

(Rogue, 1980)

“We never thought of game design as a discipline in its own right, everything was mixed with programming,” notes Glenn Wichman – again in 2022. “We weren't programmers, developers, engineers, we just wanted to play stuff”. However, Rogue will cause a sensation and, after a few improvements, will spread everywhere, first within the universities of California then in the rest of the world (thanks to “Arpanet”, ancestor of the Internet, in 1984). This is the starting point of the first rogue-likes, these dungeon crawlers where death is, again, permanent! Years later, games would take these randomly generated levels and add real-time action, platforming, and storytelling. Some will even make failure less punishing, with the possibility of improving your character over time and gradually making the impossible possible. These are “rogue-lite”, the genre to which Hades belongs.

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