My Journey With Roguelikes
I was working a summer internship at a mosquito control company many years ago with two other people. We traveled a lot to different areas which gave us a decent amount of downtime where we could do what we pleased. Being dudes, we played a lot of videogames.
One guy had his own shard on Ultima Online where we all made characters and farted around. This was fun, killing monsters and navigating the weird economy of UO that had built up years after most of the player base had moved on. But occasionally I would see the other guy playing a game on his laptop with tons of windows open and weird tiny little tiled graphics. I asked him what the heck that was and he told me it was ToME, short for Tales of Middle Earth. It was a free game, so I installed it and gave it a whirl.
The game I played was ToME 2.3.4, the final release of that version before the developer went on to make an aborted attempt at ToME 3, then moving on to the much more successful Tales of Maj’Eyal. Which is a great roguelike in its own right, but before I tell you that story, I need to tell you this story.
Rogue was released for Unix microcomputer systems in 1980. It was a text-based game that centered around going through a dungeon, battling monsters and acquiring items. It was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and other computer games of the time. One of the selling points was that every time a new game was started the dungeon would be different and that once a player character died, it was permanent and irreversible.
Eventually, the source code for Rogue was released so people could add or change the behavior of the game. This led to variants like the still popular today NetHack which eventually gave birth to variants like SLASH'EM (Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic). All of these games had a similar design ethos, a single character traversing a huge, randomly generated dungeon to accomplish a difficult goal with only one chance to succeed.
Angband was another one of those variants. Since the antecedents were heavily influenced by Tolkien, as was much of early nerd culture, it's only natural that a game would fully embrace that heritage. Angband is named for the huge dungeon of Morgoth and many of its items and enemies carry on that theming.
Angband, like it's predecessor, also ended up open source which allowed for even more variants. Zangband (short for Zelazny Angband) incorporated elements from Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber novels. Cthangband used monsters from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. ToME went all in with a fully explorable Middle Earth.
I was hooked on ToME for a good long while. The early game was fairly easy to get through and there were a few ways to bypass it entirely, although not without risk. After quite some time playing, I managed to push through to the end game and actually win with a Dark Elf Mindcrafter (#515 on the Angband ladder!).
I eventually got fired from the internship after bringing in a router so all us interns could get on the Internet at the same time. At the start they told us there would be a possibility of getting hired full time afterwards, but I checked years later and they were still offering that same internship position so I think they were full of shit.