BBC - h2g2 - Roguelike games

Quoting from the roguelike FAQ, "It all began with a simple game called "Rogue", which was very simplistic, and used an ASCII display, allowing the character to control an adventurer. The popularity of this game spawned a long list of variants, and whole new games using a similar idea. These in turn spawned variants and new games, and there are now many of these games in existance."

Some of the things that makes a roguelike special is:

1. ASCII letters representing the player, dungeon and monsters.
2. Randomly generated dungeons.
3. Top-down view.
4. Turn-based.
5. Tons of (varied) monsters, items, spells.
6. Lots of stats.
7. Final death. When you die, you can't load a previously saved game.
8. Being extremely difficult to finish, may take months or years of playing if you don't cheat.
9. Being free. Not only that, most of them are open-source, meaning you can modify them all you want. (If you have the right tools that is)

Some people may turn down roguelike games because of their "lousy graphics" but this doesn't make any more sense than not reading books because they don't have any special visual effects. Indeed, playing a roguelike is much like reading a book in that you visualize the situation in your head.

Roguelike past

First there was Rogue, the predecessor to Moria, Hack and Omega. Moria evolved into Angband, and Hack into Nethack. ADOM and Linley's Dungeon Crawl was inspired by Nethack and Angband spawned a horde of variants.
The Balrog page has a near complete geneaology and chronology of roguelike games.

Go to roguelike news for all things roguelike... news, links, developement articles and FAQs. If you get interested in actually making a roguelike of your own, you could check out the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.developement.
(Can I do something about the referenced links?)