ASCII in Video Games
Text-Mode Graphics from Rogue to Dwarf Fortress
Before pixel art, there was character art. Early game developers used ASCII characters as graphics because their hardware had no framebuffer, only a text terminal. The @ symbol became the player. The # symbol became a wall. Periods marked empty floor. From this constraint came Rogue in 1980, then thousands of roguelikes, MUDs, and text adventures that defined genres still thriving today.
1. Why Text Was the First Game Graphics
Computers in the 1970s could display text but not arbitrary pixel graphics. The DEC VT100 terminal (1978) showed 80 columns by 24 rows of characters with no bitmap capability. Game developers who wanted interactive visuals had one option: use the 95 printable ASCII characters as tiles.
This forced a specific design vocabulary. The @ symbol (64) represented the player because it vaguely resembles a person. The # (35) represented walls because it looks solid. Letters represented monsters: D for dragon, k for kobold, capital letters for tougher variants. Periods, colons, and other punctuation filled in items, terrain, and effects.
2. The Games That Defined the Genre
Rogue (1980)
Rogue generated a new dungeon layout every playthrough using procedural generation. Death was permanent (no save-reload). The entire game displayed on a text terminal using ASCII characters: rooms were rectangles of dots bordered by dashes and pipes, corridors were # symbols, and treasure was marked with * and $.
Rogue popularized two mechanics that still define modern games: procedural generation (used by Minecraft, No Man's Sky, Hades) and permadeath (used by Spelunky, FTL, Slay the Spire). The genre it spawned, "roguelike," is named directly after it.
NetHack (1987)
NetHack expanded Rogue's formula with hundreds of items, monsters, and interactions. You could polymorph into a dragon, eat a floating eye's corpse to gain telepathy, or dip a longsword into a fountain and potentially get Excalibur. Every object was still an ASCII character, but the depth of interaction rivaled graphical RPGs of the era.
Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) and Zork (1977)
These were pure text games with no character graphics at all. Players typed commands ("go north," "take lamp," "kill troll with sword") and the game responded with text descriptions. They proved that compelling game worlds could exist entirely in prose, influencing everything from point-and-click adventures to modern narrative games.
MUD1 (1978)
The first Multi-User Dungeon ran on a PDP-10 at Essex University. Multiple players explored the same text world simultaneously over a network connection. MUD1 was the direct ancestor of MMORPGs like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft.
3. The ASCII Character as Game Tile
Using characters as tiles imposed interesting constraints. With only 95 printable characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 33 symbols), developers had a limited palette. Some games extended this by using the CP437 character set (the IBM PC's default encoding), which added 128 more characters including box-drawing characters, block elements, and accented letters.
Color added another dimension. The VT100 and ANSI terminals supported 8 foreground colors and 8 background colors. A red D was a different monster than a green D. Games like NetHack and Angband used color coding extensively to convey information density that would otherwise require graphical sprites.
4. Modern Games Using ASCII
Dwarf Fortress (2006-present)
The most complex simulation game ever made ships with ASCII graphics by default. It simulates entire civilizations, geologies, weather systems, and individual dwarf personalities using nothing but colored ASCII characters. The ASCII interface is not a limitation here - it is a deliberate design choice that lets the simulation run at full complexity without a graphics bottleneck.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
An open-source survival roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world. Uses ASCII for terrain, items, vehicles, and creatures. The ASCII rendering keeps the game moddable and accessible on low-end hardware while supporting a game world of enormous scope.
Caves of Qud
A science-fantasy roguelike that blends ASCII tiles with modern mechanics like mutations, faction reputation, and procedural history generation. It demonstrates that ASCII aesthetics can coexist with contemporary game design.
5. ASCII Art in Game Culture
Beyond gameplay, ASCII art became part of gaming culture. BBS (Bulletin Board System) users in the 1980s and 1990s created elaborate ASCII and ANSI art for login screens, file descriptions, and group logos. The demoscene community pushed CP437 character art to photorealistic levels.
You can explore this tradition in our ASCII art gallery, try creating your own game-style characters with the ASCII art generator, or convert game screenshots into character art using the image to ASCII converter. The emoticons collection includes text faces commonly used in gaming chat.
6. Why ASCII Games Still Matter
Three reasons. First, procedural generation. ASCII games pioneered the algorithms that generate unique content each playthrough - algorithms now used by games with billion-dollar budgets. Second, accessibility. ASCII games run on anything with a terminal, from a Raspberry Pi to a mainframe SSH session. Third, design clarity. When your entire visual language is 95 characters, every design decision is forced to be intentional.
The roguelike genre that ASCII spawned is now one of the most active in indie gaming. Steam lists thousands of roguelike and roguelite titles. Many use pixel art or full 3D graphics, but the design DNA traces back to an @ symbol navigating a grid of # walls on a VT100 terminal. For more on how ASCII encoding underpins these systems, explore the full ASCII table and character set reference.