Computerized Dungeons and Randomly Generated Worlds: From Rogue to Minecraft [Scanning Our Past]

Replayability is a major factor in the long-term enjoyment of a video game. Many games can be engrossing on the first playthrough, but those with fixed solutions and singular paths through multiple levels of skill can quickly lose their appeal after the first win. One approach to replayability is randomly generated content, which ensures a different playthrough each time. While numerous role-playing games simulate dice rolls, procedural generation in games used predefined seed values in combination with pseudorandom number generators to create entire levels and item sets.
Rogue
is one of the earliest examples of games to focus core gameplay elements around randomly generated levels and items, and its popularity within the UNIX community led to a group of dedicated fans making their own improvements on the game and sharing their modifications online. These derivatives of
Rogue
, known as “roguelikes,” have more than a 30-year history of development, and many are still maintained to this day.