Kernigh plays several roguelike games, put spends most time in NetHack and its variants. Kernigh is playing these games:
But which computer games are roguelike? The roguelike genre consists of those games inspired by the original Rogue.
Rogue is "A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems.... Nethack, Omega, Larn, Angband, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games (all known as ‘roguelikes’) all took off from the inspiration provided by rogue(6); the popular Windows game Diablo, though graphics-intensive, has very similar play logic." – rogue, Jargon File 4.4.7
Within wiki, RogueBasin's definition contains the most discussion about which games are roguelike. It cites "ASCII display of a tiled world", "random world generation", "little plot", "turn-based gameplay and dungeon hack". However, many roguelike games do not have all of those traits.
RogueBasin also does not emphasise what some persons consider to be crucial to the roguelike genre: unidentified items. Milen of Everything2.com describes this feature as crucial to any roguelike game:
"An "identification" item system. I would say this is the primary mark of a Roguelike game. Roguelikes tend to have a huge variety of magic items, but at the start of a game the player does not know what they are. Unknown items of the same type are all marked with a common description, such as "orange potion." Once an item type is conclusively discovered, all the items of that type are automatically marked with the new title. The usual methods of discovery are trial and error, which is fraught with peril and doesn't always work, and reading a scroll of Identify, which is infallible but in limited supply, and are themselves a random, unidentified item type at the start of the game. In my opinion, it is the absence of this feature that prevents the Diablo series from being considered true Roguelike games." – roguelike (thing)@Everything2.com
John Harris of GameSetWatch likewise emphasises item identification:
"Instead of random dungeons, the defining feature of the roguelikes is likely that the items generated during the game are also randomly selected, and their appearance is scrambled each game. That is to say, when you find an unknown potion lying on the floor of the dungeon, you don’t know at first what it will do when you drink it. One game it might heal you, the next it may rob your character of sight making you easy prey for wandering monsters." – @ Play: An Introduction To Some Rogue-s
A previous version of this page claimed that earliest roguelikes did not scramble the appearances between games. Even Hack 1.0 contains code in hack.o_init.c to shuffle the descrioptions of some items. Users who consult the source code will not be able to identify any item. In games like Hack, NetHack and ADOM, the random scrambling of appearances between games keeps the gameplay interesting. In ToME, even the artifacts can be random!
A complete discussion of roguelike games, though, ought to mention the DND/Telengard-like games. These games predate Rogue and they use fixed (not random) dungeons and items, so they are not roguelikes. What makes these games interesting to play is that the screen only shows a 3x3 region of tiles. The hero does not memorise the other parts of the map as would happen in Rogue. Because DND draws the map on the screen (in contrast to "interactive fiction") and allows the hero to wield weapons, armor, and even the ring of regeneration, some claim that DND inspired Rogue.
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