Dungeons and Desktops: 10 Roguelikes Kept Alive by the Community

The roguelike lineage that began with Rogue and continued through Hack and NetHack was a genre grown by networks and community from its earliest days. The piece pairs this with an experiment turning a GitHub repository into a dungeon, noting that the genre survives longer through players and contributors than through developers.

10 open-source roguelikes each evolved in the hands of their communities in different ways.

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead started as a fork and grew into an endlessly layered simulation spanning survival, crafting, vehicles, and mutations.
• NetHack is a classic born from network collaboration, and even at 5.0.0 it still adds bizarre rules like camera-induced blindness.
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup restarted as a 2006 fork and went on to embrace public servers and a ghost-spectating culture.
• Angband, after being relicensed in 2009, gave rise to branched development split into stable and experimental versions on GitHub, along with countless variants.
• Brogue Community Edition is a case where the community continued development and new releases even after the original ended.
• Pixel Dungeon went open source in 2014, and even after being declared "complete" in 2015, it spawned dozens of forks.
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon started as a balance mod and grew into something on the scale of an independent game through years of updates.
• DRL started as Doom, the Roguelike and, even after being renamed, retains the feel of a '90s FPS.
• KeeperRL combines dungeon building with defense, offering both a paid version purchasable via charity donation and a free ASCII build.
• HyperRogue creates an exploration where the space itself feels alien, built on non-Euclidean geometry.

Finally, the 7DRL challenge and Roguelike Celebration continue to provide venues for rapid experimentation and open discussion, with forking and open development keeping the roguelike genre alive to this day.