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A review by dozens
Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games by David L. Craddock
3.0
There's a special place in my heart for the roguelike. This was a fun little genealogy of some of the genre's forerunners.
It strikes me how closely related developing the early games was to developing for the hardware, and to the limitations of the hardware. We don't really have that constraint any more, and I definitely get how it can be a real thing of beauty to be as perfectly expressive as you want to be within a clearly defined set of constraints. It's the whole point of haiku, and other rigid poetic constructs.
I think that if I were to start writing such a game myself today, I'd start on a fantasy console like the TIC-80 in order to feel some of those same limitations.
It strikes me how closely related developing the early games was to developing for the hardware, and to the limitations of the hardware. We don't really have that constraint any more, and I definitely get how it can be a real thing of beauty to be as perfectly expressive as you want to be within a clearly defined set of constraints. It's the whole point of haiku, and other rigid poetic constructs.
I think that if I were to start writing such a game myself today, I'd start on a fantasy console like the TIC-80 in order to feel some of those same limitations.