The Roguelike Rule of Thumb

Slightly less obtusely, it usually was a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler with potions and scrolls and varied weapons to use against varied mobs. When you died, you were dead. Your character began each time with no knowledge and had to learn what a "cloudy red potion" happens to be this time around by drinking it or using an identify scroll.

that was the literal point of my blog post. (I am the OA)

back in the 70s/80s there was Rogue. and then there were a dozen or so follow-on games all clearly like Rogue

we then, at that time, called them Rogue-likes. made sense! we all knew exactly what we were talking about then. nothing has changed with either the word "Rogue" or the word "like" since.

To spell it out more concretely... Here is the game Rogue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)

is some game like that? yes/no. tho I gave 6 distinct exemplar cases of the shades of gray nuances involved, from black to white, using oranges as an example.

oh and "the Berlin thing" is irrelevant, it has no more Authority than any rando hipster on the street spouting off a quote from cult propaganda. Rogue and like each have concrete meaningsz unchanged.

To be more clear, for the kids: both permadeath and procgen are game design features independent from Rogue-likes. Permadeath was common in standup arcade games and in home video game cartridge games of all genres, for a decade plus -- platforms where you could NOT save and restore. I also played plenty of procgen games that had nothing to do with dungeons or Terminals or ASCII.