NetHack

About NetHack

NetHack (1987) is the open-source roguelike built over the internet by the DevTeam from the earlier Hack, a dungeon of permadeath, unidentified potions and absurd item interactions that is still being developed.

NetHack in Depth

Players pick a race, role, sex and alignment, from traditional knights, wizards and priests to archaeologists, tourists and cavemen, and descend through the Mazes of Menace, about fifty levels mostly generated when first entered and then kept for the rest of the game. The goal is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the bottom and offer it to the character's god, which grants immortality, "ascension". Along the way come sub-quests, including one for the character's role, the Wizard of Yendor, who keeps returning to harass the player, and finally the Riders, Death, Famine and Pestilence. A source-code comment says the player is the fourth horseman, War. Most characters start with a pet kitten or little dog; knights get a pony.

As in Rogue, items are unidentified: a potion may be only "pink", every scroll of one kind shares a nonsense label, and the descriptions are reshuffled each game. Items can be blessed, uncursed or cursed, and curses can twist effects, so a cursed potion of gain level lifts the player through the ceiling to the level above. Death is permanent, but the game sometimes saves the level where a character died as a "bones file" that another player may later stumble into. Experienced players add voluntary "conducts", such as playing vegetarian or killing nothing.

Making NetHack

Hack was created by Jay Fenlason, Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jonathan Payne at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School after they played Rogue at Berkeley. Fenlason gave the code to a USENIX conference, it spread on Usenet, and many forks followed. Mike Stephenson took over as maintainer and, with philosophy professor Izchak Miller and Janet Walz, started a new fork as the DevTeam, expanding the bestiary and items and drawing on sources beyond high fantasy. They released NetHack on 28 July 1987 and kept the main source restricted to a few members so that their release would remain the legitimate one, while Stephenson's 1989 NetHack General Public License allowed anyone to port or fork it.

Version 3.0 arrived in July 1989, and the team became known for its secrecy between releases. After 3.4.3 in December 2003 there was no major update until 3.6.0 in December 2015. Players gather on servers such as nethack.alt.org and in annual tournaments, and it has influenced games including ADOM, Spelunky, Diablo and Mystery Dungeon. Time included it in its 2012 list of the 100 greatest video games, and it was part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Never Alone" exhibition.