The Importance of Balance in Rogue

A lot of the ways in which Rogue is really nicely balanced are fortuitous more than designed. I don't remember setting out to build a game that was almost impossible to beat. There were certainly were cases where we said okay, you know with this latest version, nobody's ever getting past level 15. Or, you know, everybody is always getting immediately killed by dragons so we need to take their stats down a little bit. But again it wasn't sort of as I recall it with an idea in mind of,You know, this is the difficulty level that we're going for aside from, you know,. that impossible was not what we wanted.