The roguelike genre of video games takes its name from Rogue, a text-based dungeon crawl game made by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman in 1980 that boomed in popularity on college campuses soon after its release. Rogue was by no means the first of its kind; plenty of Dungeons & Dragons aficionados had attempted to replicate the experience of the pencil-and-paper role-playing game on the computer, with varying degrees of success. The difference between Rogue and the games that preceded it was that, while the latter contained unvarying, pre-programmed levels and puzzles whose novelty quickly faded after multiple playthroughs, Rogue could build its own dungeons using random generation, giving the player a original experience with each new game. The other important design decision Toy and Wichman made was to make death permanent; when your character died, the game was over, and if you wanted to keep playing you had to start over from the beginning in a new dungeon, with a new character. This feature, which became known as “permadeath,” was complemented by the game’s random generation, which insured against repetition even as the player was made to restart the game again and again. Moreover, because the player only had one chance to win each time, the stakes would naturally get higher as his or her character ventured deeper into the dungeon, making the game more exciting as it went on.
The problem with Rogue is that it was obtuse. The graphics were crude text renderings, in which your character was represented by an “at” symbol (@) and monsters corresponded to various letters of the alphabet (for instance, a “j” might represent a jackal, while an uppercase “A” might be a giant ant). Worse, Rogue’s successors added dozens of keyboard commands, all with different, specific uses; in the most popular derivative of Rogue, Nethack, there were keys to put on armor, keys to take it off, a key to dip things, a key to rub things, separate keys for eating and drinking and so on. Because the people who made roguelikes were the same people who played them obsessively and were accustomed to their idiosyncrasies, there was never an impetus to make the genre more accessible, and for a long time roguelikes remained an insular oddity among games.
Recently, however, a number of games have reclaimed the fundamental tenets of Rogue’s design –– permadeath and random generation –– while eschewing the form’s outdated trappings. Foremost among these is The Binding of Issac, a game by Edmund McMillen about a child whose mother hears the voice of God commanding her to sacrifice her son, Issac, as a test of loyalty. Obliging her deity, she grabs a butcher knife and bursts into Issac’s room, who, terrified, escapes down a trapdoor into the basement. What follows is a bizarre synthesis of Biblical allusion, scatological humor, body horror and childhood anxieties as Issac descends deeper and deeper into the bowels of his home, careening around flies, spiders and flesh-less abominations in his quest to escape his mother. The gameplay borrows Zelda’s formula of using keys, bombs and special items to progress through the levels, and the combat is modeled off of Smash T.V.’s independent control of moving and shooting (or in this case, crying; the weaponless Issac fends off enemies with a barrage of tears). The sheer depth of the game is incredible; I’ve logged over 120 hours and still have yet to see everything it has to offer. For anyone looking to revitalize their faith in video games’ ability to evoke a seemingly endless world of possibility, you could do worse –– much worse –– than The Binding of Issac.
