It’s tough replaying games. Once you know what to do and where to go, that “first-time magic” dulls with each play. This is the appeal of procedural content: it allows us to be consistently surprised by the game. A procedural game that’s only an hour long can be replayed hundreds of times without boring the player.
Well geeze, it sounds like procedural content is the wave of the future! Yeah, well it’s about damn time. The history of procedural content goes back much further than “a few years ago.” In 1983, a curious little adventure game spread through college campuses like a wildfire. It wasn’t like other games and was played hundreds of times by hundreds of people. Finishing this game didn’t mean you had mastered it.
Rogue changed everything.
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