User:Burzmali/History of Roguelikes

Pre-history and Inception
The roguelike genre has its roots in the text adventure games of the 1970s, and the pen and paper role-playing game Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. The initial development of the roguelike family of computer games was made possible by Ken Arnold, who designed a library of C functions called curses that allowed cursor addressing, the placing of characters at specific places on a screen. The concept for the genre's namesake was developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, and was implemented by Michael Toy and Ken Arnold. Rogue was first released to a wide audience when it was included in the BSD UNIX distribution 4.2 in 1980.

Early Roguelikes
As it was released the BSD license, the source code for Rogue was made freely available for download. As it spread through college campuses, other programmers began to develop and release new games based on the Rogue source code. In 1983, The Dungeons of Moria, was developed and released by Robert Alan Koeneke.  Similiarly, in 1985, a team lead by Jay Fenlason developed Hack (improved and renamed NetHack in 1987).

Roguelike expansion
In the late 80s and through the 90s, the number of Roguelikes grew rapidly. Many were variants of earlier games, most notably the Hacklikes based on NetHack and Bands based on Angband (itself a variant of Moria). In addition, other variants appeared including Ragnarok (a Viking themed variant), Alphaman (a science fiction themed variant) and ADOM.

Modern Roguelikes
Many of roguelike games continue to be supported and regularly updated, often implementing non-ASCII interfaces to appeal to younger gamers. Other development groups have created roguelikes with 3D interfaces and made version for PDAs.

Seven Day Challenge
The first such challenge was started on March 5, 2005 with 15 participants, of which 10 succeeded. It was an immediate success with games like DiabloRL by Kornel Kisielewicz and You Only Live Once by Jeff Lait being praised for innovative use of the roguelike medium, as well as the first releases of games like CastlevaniaRL which continued evolving after the challenge.

The second challenge started on February 25, 2006. It featured 20 participants, of which 12 succeeded. One of the highlights was Letter Hunt by Jeff Lait, which featured an innovative concept that combined roguelike with a Scrabble-like word game.

The third challenge was off the schedule, and was called the Orange October Minigun 7DRL. It began on October 15, 2006 and ended on October 22, 2006 with 7 out of 12 participants succeeding. Notable entries include Ali Baba's Cave - The Roguelike by Frederic Back, Berserk! by Kornel Kisielewicz, and MetroidRL by Santiago Zapata.

The Seven-Day Roguelike challenge held between March 10 and March 18, 2007 had 22 challengers, representing several different countries including Russia, Poland, Finland, Germany, Britain, Australia, Colombia, and the United States. Nine of the participants successfully completed the challenge. This challenge was followed up a week later with a 7DRL playing challenge, where roguelike developers played and reviewed the games created for the challenge.