Beginning of the Adventure

When I meet someone for the first time and the topic
turns to Spelunky, I describe it as “a platform game, like
Super Mario Bros.,” because whether or not you play
video games, you’ve heard of Mario. Mario was the
face of the art form during the 1980s and 1990s, when
platformers dominated the gaming landscape. Unlike
movie genres, which are distinguished by similarities in
the themes or narratives, video game genres are gener-
ally defined by how the games are played. Platformers,
for example, are defined by jumping onto platforms and
over obstacles, just as shooters are defined by shooting
things and puzzle games are defined by solving puzzles.
Playing Spelunky for the first time, you’ll notice sim-
ilarities to other platformers: You run, you jump, you
hit enemies. The game starts you off in an abandoned
mine, armed with a whip that you can use to dispatch
snakes, spiders, bats, and the occasional caveman, as
well as ropes and bombs to help you reach otherwise
unavailable areas. Since it’s your first time playing, you’ll
probably die quickly. Maybe you didn’t know that the
stone block would let loose an arrow when you stepped
in front of it, or maybe you misjudged a long jump,
sending you into a pit of sharp spikes. Or maybe you
lingered too long in the level and a creepy ghost floated
onscreen and vaporized you. Or one of your bombs blew

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up in your face. Oh, well! In Spelunky you only have one
life, so if you run out of hearts you’ll be returned to the
lobby room.
It’s when you start up your second game that you’ll
notice Spelunky is different from Mario. In Super Mario
Bros., you’ll always start a new game by taking that
familiar stroll to the right, where you’ll pass by the same
four question blocks, the same goomba, and the same
short pipe. The levels are unchanging. Each time you
play Spelunky, however, you’ll get a completely different
set of sixteen levels. In one run, you may encounter
a large pit filled with snakes in the third level, and in
the next run you may encounter a sacrificial altar and
a bomb shop instead. Occasionally, levels will be dark,
forcing you to maneuver carefully by the dim light of
flares and glowing scarabs. While each element of the
game behaves the same (a snake, for example, will always
move back and forth in the same pattern, and an arrow
will always do the same amount of damage), the way
those elements are arranged is randomly generated at
run-time. This randomization is what makes Spelunky
stand out among platformers, and it’s why my full
summary of the game is that it’s “a platform game, like
Super Mario Bros., but with randomly-generated levels.”
Sometimes I’ll describe Spelunky as a platformer that’s
inspired by “roguelikes,” although roguelikes are much
less well-known. The genre takes its name from a top-
down, turn-based fantasy game called Rogue, which was
created in 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman.

s pelun ky
Whereas playing a Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog
game in their heyday was a lesson in designing elegant
levels and silky-smooth controls, roguelikes have prided
themselves on their randomly-generated dungeons and
mechanical complexity. The original Rogue used the
ASCII character set for graphics (where an “@” might
represent the player and a “g” could be a goblin) and
this tradition was carried by roguelikes far into modern
times, keeping it a niche genre. Even the popularity
of Blizzard’s Diablo series, which was influenced by
roguelikes, didn’t do much to raise their profile, since
the influence was not widely known. When I started
working on Spelunky, roguelikes were only just starting
to break into the mainstream consciousness.
It probably doesn’t help that what a roguelike is
has always been up for debate. At the 2008 Roguelike
Developers Conference, a group of roguelike develop-
ers attempted to clarify the definition of the genre by
creating a list of high and low value factors called the
“Berlin Interpretation.” The Berlin Interpretation’s high
value factors define a roguelike as a turn-based, grid-
based, dungeon crawl that features randomized levels
and permanent death. The less important low value
factors include ASCII graphics, one player character as
opposed to a party system, and monsters that share rules
and behaviors with players.
When I was working on Spelunky, I focused on just
three attributes of roguelikes that to me held the essence
of the genre:

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 1. Randomized level generation.
2. Permanent death (also known as “permadeath”),
whereby the player has one life and cannot reload
their game to take back mistakes.
3. A ruleset for physical interactions that is shared
by the player, non-player characters (NPCs), and
items.

The third attribute is my version of “monsters share

rules and behaviors with players” and it extends not
only to monsters but to items as well. In many games,
monsters and items are coded separately and handled
separately. You might be able to pick up an item and
kick a monster, but you couldn’t kick an item and pick
up a monster. In a roguelike, you should be able to pick
up and kick items and monsters, with results that are
based on consistent rules. This suggests that the player,
the monsters, and the items are treated more like vari-
ations on a single type of object than three completely
different objects.
Over the years, attempts have been made to add
audio and attractive graphics to roguelikes, and to
improve their intimidating user interfaces. For exam-
ple, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is a Japanese
roguelike for the Super Famicom and Nintendo DS
that makes traditional roguelike game mechanics more
accessible with animated sprites and simplified controls.
The latest versions of the canon roguelikes (ADOM,
Angband, Crawl, and NetHack) now support tile

s pelun ky
graphics and mouse control as well. But it was a 2006
roguelike/simulation hybrid called Dwarf Fortress that
brought the genre into the light, and it did so not by
being more accessible, but by being even more complex.
Imagine a game that simulates a fantasy world many
times larger than the most advanced big budget video
game, but rendered completely in characters you’d find
in a word processor.
Dwarf Fortress has two modes: “Adventurer Mode,”
in which you control a single hero, and “Fortress
Mode,” which tasks you with keeping a community
of dwarves alive in a mountain home of your design.
This home is just a small part of a world that is pro-
cedurally-generated with remarkable detail going back
hundreds of years, to the point where you can trace a
minor character’s lineage back many generations. I read
about one world where the history logs revealed that
a particular NPC’s part-goblin blood was the result of
one of his ancestors being kidnapped by goblins during
a raid. And one of the cool things about the game is
that both Adventurer Mode and Fortress Mode can be
played in the same world, so a player could build a for-
tress in Fortress Mode and then visit that same fortress
as an adventurer later (or the ruins of that same fortress,
once things inevitably go awry).
Dwarf Fortress made for interesting news because the
sheer complexity of what the simulation could carry out
seemed nearly matched by its inaccessibility. The game,
which is still in constant development, has an air of