"Only the nerdiest of the nerds would tolerate that stuff": Mewgenics dev says before Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, roguelikes were the reserve of hardcore fans

Mewgenics might have surpassed Hades 2 as the most-played roguelike on Steam, but co-creator Edmund McMillen says that the entire genre used to be the reserve of "the nerdiest of nerds" before he helped contribute to its modern popularity.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, McMillen, who created The Binding of Isaac back in 2011, says that the developer of another iconic roguelike helped put him onto the genre: "I'm pretty sure Derek [Yu], before he made Spelunky [...], was writing a lot about traditional roguelikes." McMillen says he was "somewhat familiar" with a handful of text-based or ASCII-art roguelikes, but it was Yu's recommendation of 1997's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup that really made him fall in love with the genre.

"I really loved it, I really loved the genre," he says, while also admitting that "the barrier of entry for those types of games is that people didn't play them because they were so abstract, and some of them didn't have any visuals at all, and only the nerdiest of nerds would entertain that stuff."

Spelunky, he says, was the game that allowed the roguelike to break free of its 'nerdy' reputation - Yu took the format of Stone Soup and matched it with the platformer stylings of games like Spelunker and Mario, "and it worked so well. To me, it felt like this was the new arcade game, the new Pac-Man, the new Donkey Kong. Suddenly, scores matter again. Lives mattered again. Everything mattered. And it was so cool that you could have an endlessly replayable game like that that felt so dynamic and neat."

After Yu proved the idea could work, McMillen says he "knew right away that this was just the beginning," and thought that "everybody in the world was just going to go and grab onto another genre and do it." For McMillen's part, he took the Zelda-esque dungeon crawler and "jumped in with Isaac." As that quickly became a major indie hit in the early 2010s, combined with Spelunky's console release, he says "that established the action roguelike genre."

McMillen's development partner on Mewgenics, Tyler Glaiel, admitted that the genre had "exploded over the last 10-15 years," to the point that the roguelike is barely even a genre at all anymore. "It doesn't feel like a genre to me, it feels like a structure - it's not that rigid a thing. Genres aren't really that rigid anymore, but it does feel like you can put any genre you want on top of the roguelike structure, and have something interesting. They just don't get boring."

Mewgenics could earn McMillen a second entry on our list of the best roguelikes.