Going Rogue (Digital Antiquarian) [LWN.net]

After an initial foray into the ways that open-source software has failed to live up to its early hype, this Digital Antiquarian article covers the history of rogue-like games in great detail.

This brings us back around to a statement I made at the outset: that roguelikes are the exception that proves the rule of open-source game development — and just possibly of open-source software development in general. The cast of thousands who contribute to them do so in order to make exactly the games that they want to play, which in the abstract is the best of all possible reasons to make a game. The experience they end up with is, unsurprisingly, much like high-wire programming at its most advanced, presenting players with an immense, multi-faceted system to be explored and mastered.

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