Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney.

Tonight, for a very special episode of 3M.A, we welcome Darren Gray, game designer, and the host of Roguelike Radio.

Darren, welcome to the show.

Hello, thank you for having me.

And we also welcome back, our friend, co-president of Red Hook, Tyler Sigman, a designer on Darkest Dungeon.

Hello, hello.

So if Darren's presence hasn't already given the game away, today we're going to be

talking about rogue likes and their seemingly ever-expanding influence on gaming and strategy

gaming.

We're also going to talk about YAA genre whose conventions and aesthetics are often self-consciously

archaic, has survived, thrived, and seemingly colonized huge swats of more mainstream

gaming.

Darren, I wanted to start us out by risking detouring us into a debate about definitions.

We don't talk too much about roguelikes on this show. I'm certainly not the most familiar person with the genre. Our resident expert is our producer, Michael Hermes, who is frantically trying to fix some audio issues so we can join us later in the show. We can't guarantee that. So you're just going to have to, you're going to have to clue me in. You're going to have to hold my hand and speak to me as if to a small child to explain what we're talking about when we talk about rogue likes.

And why the hell is the genre named after one game?

Well, I'm not sure why the term has stuck around so much.

You might remember we used to call FPS's Doom Clones.

That name didn't really stick, whereas Rogue likes, as a term, has stuck, after the game Rogue in 19, which was released in 1983, which wasn't actually the first Rogue.

Neathample Manor was released a year before, but that's just a historical footnote now.

So Rogue likes began, I suppose, after Rogue itself,

because the Rogue itself wasn't called a Rogue like when it was released.

I'm not sure it really had a name.

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