Holograms flicker as the ground shakes with the roar of the crowd surrounding the field. The crack of bats, the whir of wheels, the cries of sentient beings pushing beyond their limits, every sound signalling a moment that might go down in history. You don’t know the rules and even losing seems fun, so there’s nothing else for it… it’s time to wave your foam finger and let the games begin!

The time has finally come and we are thrilled to announce our full lineup for Roguelike Celebration 2026, taking place October 17th and 18th (which is somehow just over two weeks away!)

📅 The full schedule is here but to pick a few highlights:

• Brian Bucklew and Corey Frang sharing the in-progress text templating framework that has been taking on the huge task of localizing the complex runtime-generated grammatical structures of Caves of Qud.

• Dan Stormont and Michael Howk presenting a 45 minute special feature on how the source code of Jay Fenlason’s Hack was recovered and what it took to make a game written for the PDP-11 playable on modern hardware.

• Andrew Plotkin (Spider and Web, Hadean Lands) exploring the commonalities of mazes across many genres to answer the question: what is it about mazes that leaves you feeling lost?

• Matt Carney (NORCO, Perfect Tides: Station to Station) diving into Terry Riley’s In C, a minimalist procedural musical composition, as a way to consider how procedurally generated games can utilize a strong sense of possibility (or ‘key’) to make fantastic shapes of their own.

🎟 Buy a ticket now - while they are pay-what-you-can, please consider kicking what you can our way as this goes towards captioning, honoraria for speakers, recording equipment, and artist commissions. We appreciate your support!

🎨 We also have our shirt for this year! Finally the timing is right that you can get decked out in this year’s Roguelike Celebration shirt in time for the conference. Thank you to our incredible artist Ragonia, you can find those designs available on a variety of nouns via our merch shop here! (As well as browsing all the designs from previous years, as attendees requested after last year’s big anniversary celebration.)

🎮 Finally, you can also get an early peek at our Steam Sale! We’ve curated a great list of traditional roguelikes, deckbuilders, games by past and present speakers, and weird stuff that simply delights us. Discounts will start during the event itself but if you want to find some new gems for your wishlist now, take a look!

See you at the conference!