A roguelike is a superficially two-dimensional dungeon crawling computer game, usually with simple text or ASCII \"graphics\" and many with \"tiles\" which replace the rather limited character set with a wider array.

The genre is named after Rogue, although some features of Rogue existed in earlier games, notably: Adventure (1975), Dungeon (1975 for PDP-10 mainframes), and several games written for the PLATO system on CDC computers such as dnd (1975, ) and 0moria (late 1970s). Both dnd and 0moria used limited graphics and were multi-user. 0moria used a primitive a first-person shooter 3-D view, while dnd used a top-down map view similar to Rogue. Unlike Rogue and 0moria, most earlier games had pre-scripted scenarios that were largely the same each time they were played and which players could grow tired of, with only some random variations. In Rogue and 0moria the dungeon is randomly regenerated each time the player begins the game, creating a new challenge each time and remaining fresh for the player.

Becoming widely available with the Berkeley Software Distribution version of Unix, Rogue became the most popular dungeon crawl game yet created.

Typical gameplay

These games present an absolutely overhead view the components of which were originally characters on a teletype. Traditionally, the hero is represented by an \"@\" sign, which can be seen as a head and shoulders view from above. Other characters (usually enemy monsters) are represented by letters of the alphabet. Rogue itself only made use of capital letters, but modern roguelikes utilize different capitalization of letters to represent different monsters. A dog, for example, may be represented by the letter \"d\", and a dragon by a \"D\". Also, to further distinguish various creatures, a modern roguelike game will display different colored letters. For example, a Red Dragon might be represented by a red \"D\", whereas a Blue Dragon might be represented by a blue \"D\", each with their own abilities and required strategy by the player. Further dungeon features are represented by other ASCII (or ANSI) graphics. A traditional sampling is below.

Though many Rogue \"purists\" scoff at the idea, it is becoming increasingly popular to make use of graphics in roguelikes. Numerous graphical versions are available for most of the traditional games; and it is very common for the newer roguelike projects in development to use graphics, sometimes even sound.