PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATION is a hot topic in game development. But it is not new. Its use goes back to the 8-bit era of the 1980s. Both Elite [82] and Exile [181] generated a sizable portion of their content (in the first case a whole galaxy of stars, in the second an underground cave system). Both games were the same each time you played, but the game content was far too big to fit in the 32kB of RAM available. They used procedural generation as a form of compression. Elite in particular proved highly influential, directly leading to games such as Spore [137], Elite: Dangerous [118] and No Man’s Sky [119].
In the early 1980s, Rogue [139] was first released as freeware for mainframe machines. It featured a procedurally ...
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