Published 2026-09-06
The word points at one program written in 1980 and a nine-point definition written by developers in 2008. Here is what survives of it in 2026, and how my own game scores against all nine.
"Roguelike" is one of the very few genre names that points at a single file. Not a mood, not a decade, not a marketing bracket: a program written in the autumn of 1980 by two roommates in Santa Cruz. Everything the word has meant since is an argument about how far you can walk from that program and still borrow its name.
Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, students at UC Santa Cruz, wanted a dungeon that would not be the same twice, so they generated the levels instead of drawing them. It was rendered in text characters, which was not a style decision, it was the only display there was. When development moved to Berkeley that winter, Ken Arnold, author of the curses library the game leaned on to address the terminal, joined and helped optimise it. Rogue later shipped inside 4.2BSD, which is how it reached every university machine that mattered.
Three things came out of that program and never left: the level is generated, the death is permanent, the run is the unit of play.
By 2008 the word had drifted, so the people who made those games tried to pin it down. At the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin they produced the Berlin Interpretation: nine high-value factors, a handful of low-value ones, and deliberately no pass mark. The nine:
The low-value half is more revealing: an ASCII display, a dungeon setting, a single controlled character, monsters bound by your rules, tactical challenge, open numbers. The most quoted definition of the genre refuses to make its own look a requirement.
It is a good description and a bad boundary, and it was built that way: there is no pass mark. Run the modern shelf through it and the result is absurd. The Binding of Isaac (2011) is real time and not grid based. FTL (2012) is not hack and slash. Slay the Spire (2019) has no movement at all. Balatro (2024) has no monsters. Every one belongs on any honest list of the genre's best work, and every one fails several of the nine.
So read it as a description of a living tradition, not the definition of a category. That tradition is specific and still going: NetHack, Angband, Caves of Qud, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Shattered Pixel Dungeon on a phone.
Three things survive contact with the shelf.
That is the definition every store tag and every player is working from. "Roguelite" names the sub-argument: it keeps those three and adds progression that outlives death.
REELS is a roguelite, and worth scoring against all nine rather than claiming the older word.
It passes on random generation, permadeath and resource management. The pit, the machine and the charm pool come from a seed. The death is total: no lives, no continues, no rewind. The resource is the toll, due every sixty seconds by default and paid in the souls you reap, and the thirty health points handed back between tolls are the whole survival budget.
It fails on turn based and grid based, and not narrowly. The reels drop on their own clock, between 1.9 and 3.9 seconds depending on which of the seven machines you took down, never faster than 1.4 seconds whatever you stack on it, while you steer a thumbstick around a pit. It fails on non-modal too: the toll draft is its own screen. Complexity it probably passes, on 61 charms that rewrite the rules of the spin instead of raising numbers, and five toll pacts. Exploration it half passes, on seven zones and doors that announce their price, but nothing you identify by drinking it.
The factor that decides the label is the one Berlin never listed, because in 1980 it did not exist: what carries over. Adventure mode has a workshop, where tokens earned at the payout buy permanent bonuses. That is meta-progression, and that is a roguelite. The daily challenge and the campaign run what the code calls a bare machine, no workshop bonuses at all, because a shared seed you can buy your way through is not a shared seed. So one game is a roguelite in one mode and much closer to Rogue in the other two.
Those separate Balatro from NetHack better than the label does. Lists built on them: iOS roguelikes with no ads and no in-app currency, games like Brotato, games like Hades.
REELS is out on iOS: free trial with your progress kept, then a single purchase unlocks everything permanently. App Store