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Celebrating Over 15 Years Of NetHack

Posted by simoniker on from the hack-me-baby-one-more-time dept.

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Each week, GameSpy inducts classic games into its Hall Of Fame 'either because of their brilliant gameplay (which makes them playable to this day), or because they innovated in such a way to reshape gaming as we know it,' and a noted inductee is none other than the classic dungeon crawl NetHack. GameSpy's article looks back on the history of NetHack, tracing its origins from Rogue all the way up to the present day, including humorous 'Tales of NetHack Addiction' along the way." Update: 01/06 04:04 GMT by S : Though listed as a 'Recent Highlight' on GameSpy's main page, this article, whilst worthwhile, is an old one.

25 comments

  1. Nice choice. by ivern76 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nethack...such good memories. I play ADOM now (www.adom.de), another roguelike game...better storyline, and awesome gameplay.

    1. Re:Nice choice. by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ADOM is great. Was hugely addicted to Nethack, but these days if I want Nethack, I play "Slashem", which is Nethack with a ton of stuff added. Adom really rules though. Great fun.

      With all these articles, I'm thinking Gamespy bought Slashdot...

    2. Re:Nice choice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ADOM... pffftthh. Try ToME!

    3. Re:Nice choice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Nethack...such good memories. I play ADOM now (www.adom.de), another roguelike game...better storyline, and awesome gameplay.

      And proprietary, and not runnable on windows. I mean, it's a freakin curses-based game, and he won't let anyone actually port it. It's only going to remain a good game as long as Biskup feels like supporting it.

      He has delusions of commercializing it. Sorry Tom, you're no BioWare.

    4. Re:Nice choice. by MilenCent · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, I find that while Nethack's reputation is of a brutal, ultra-tough player-killer, once you know enough about the game you can win much more often, and indeed there are players in the yearly month-long Nethack contest that won more than half of their games (including one player who did so, and ascended every class, who was himself mentioned on Slashdot).

      However ADOM, while a very good game, strikes me as a pale imitator of Nethack. I think it's a more interesting game than Angband (whose appeal eludes me, being almost entirely about combat), but when I played it extensively I noticed a number of things that I disagreed with, gameplay-wise. Most notably, items generation frequencies are modified depending on the player class, there doesn't seem to be Nethack's rich web of item interrelations (a major part of the game), and a lot of stuff seems put in "just because." And most of ADOM's injokes aren't as funny, though I wouldn't be biased against it because of that. And every time I read in the newsgroup of the vaunted "become a chaos god" ending I get the impression that the game is unfocused. There are certainly many great things about ADOM however, don't get me wrong, and while I say it "imitates" Nethack it does it honestly, trying to come up with its own way of doing things in many places, and in that respect the game has many cool ideas.

      Slash'em is the current "alternative" gameplay fork of Nethack (possible because, unlike ADOM, it's open source), taking up the mantle from Slash, Nethack--, Nethack+ and the almost-forgotten Nethack-TNG. It hasn't be updated in a while, however. There are other, smaller patches (the Lethe patch is generally recommended by me), but Slash'em includes so many extra things that it's almost ludicrous. The Slash'em philosophy is to add things first and make them fit later, while the Dev Team's thinks long and hard, in some ways *too* long and hard, about what to add. However, the cream-of-the-crop features of the gameplay variants often find their way into vanilla Nethack, which is where the current weapon skill system (Nethack+), some monsters and, I think, the untying of player role and race (Slash'em) came from.

      Does it sound weird that the Dev Team thinks hard about what to add to Nethack? Isn't this the legendary game that, when the developers were informed that it contained everything but the kitchen sink, put them in the game? The fact is that the Dev Team *doesn't* just put things in the game willy-nilly, despite the reputation. Otherwise we wouldn't have long-standing gameplay variants in which there are lightsabers, bullwhips that inflict extra damage against undead and a doppelganger character race. Our Nethack community has played lots of all three games, and some of the older variants as well, but we always come back to vanilla.

  2. Old News by Dark_Nova · · Score: 5, Informative

    This article is over three years old. It was published in June 2000.

    As much as I like Nethack, this isn't exactly a new story.

    1. Re:Old News by Decaffeinated+Jedi · · Score: 4, Informative

      As the guy who submitted the story in the first place, I'll take the blame here. Gamespy is currently running a link to the NetHack story on their front page under the "Recent Highlights" category, and I didn't look into its background quite as thoroughly as I should have. I guess Gamespy is just recycling content onto its front page. Oops!

      --
      DecafJedi
      my weblog: apropos of something
  3. Recent inductee? by steve.m · · Score: 1, Redundant

    According to the Hall of fame link (see near the bottom), NetHack was inducted in June 2000.

    So this isn't exactly recent news...

    1. Re:Recent inductee? by simoniker · · Score: 1

      I also checked the front page and saw it listed in the 'Recent Highlights'. Oh well :/

  4. We all remember our first time... by dreamquick · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...playing nethack!

    Mine was on an old berkley system that was being used for testing, and being the naive young pup that I was I thought they wouldn't have anything amusing on there (apart from the MOTD with offensive items enabled).

    How wrong I was... many a lunchhour was lost due to nethack and those damned grues!

    1. Re:We all remember our first time... by mseeger · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Hi,

      We all remember our first time...

      Of course i do. If there would have been no nethack on our brand new SparcStation 1, i could have finished my diploma thesis months earlier. Unluckily they refused to include "and retrieved the amulett of yendor" in my academic credentials. In 1991 the amulett was much easier (gameplay) to retrieve. On the other side we had no root access to the system and if you died, the game was really over. Nowadays everyone plays it on his PC and can make backups. Tempora mutantor....

      Regards, Martin

    2. Re:We all remember our first time... by Repton · · Score: 1

      I do, actually ...

      I first played it as a door game on a dialup BBS.

      I recall one of my early games, on about dungeon level 4, I was walking around when suddenly about a dozen hezrou trooped into the room and made mincemeat of me.

      (I didn't even know what a hezrou was at that stage ...)

      As soon as I was back in the BBS, the sysop broke in to chat and ask me where all those demons came from :-)

      (I guess, in hindsight, it was a bones level..)

      --
      Repton.
      They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
  5. You are looking at a dark webpage... by weeboo0104 · · Score: 5, Funny

    it was most likely slashdotted by a grue.

    --
    It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
    1. Re:You are looking at a dark webpage... by JDWTopGuy · · Score: 1

      The grue has been killed by a kitten. It should have turned the light on.

      --
      Ron Paul 2012
    2. Re:You are looking at a dark webpage... by dasunt · · Score: 1

      Nah, its more like this:

      The grue lost its pet through a trap door on dlvl 2.

      Quickly decending to find it, the grue finally spotted the kitten after many battles on dlvl 7.

      After killing the mumak that was between it and the kitten, the grue only had a few hps left. But it was finally reunited with the kitten.

      The kitten, having gone feral, attacked and killed the grue.

      (Except that grues aren't in vanilla nethack)

  6. I got a special vid card for it by endx7 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone knows you gotta have expensive video card for your games, which is why I got the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC. You know, the one specially designed to render games like nethack. It works great!!

  7. Just Remember... by Quarters · · Score: 4, Funny

    You only like NetHack for the music.

    1. Re:Just Remember... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You hear a divine music...
      It sounds like: GAFFE.

  8. Download my bones file by Trikenstein · · Score: 1
    here

    Look for BarG-B

  9. What a coincidence... by linuxn · · Score: 1

    Just installed Nethack on a brand new ipaq 2210 :) It ROX.

  10. What? by odorf · · Score: 1

    How can you people give up nethack? Who cares about graphics! I personaly like the old grahpics, and in all those new games I bet you cant eat your pony's corpse after it had been killed by water mokasins and get deathly ill! None of those new games will ever replace nethack

  11. Damn good game. by irokitt · · Score: 1

    Unlike som of you guys, I was born to late to enjoy Nethack in it's early glory. But in my mind there is no alternative to an RPG as intensely rich and detailed as Netahack and it's cousins that I've played, Slash'em and Angband/Mangband. It's curious, since in every other respect I'm a rabid FPS guy. But the game is intriguing at first, and then absolutely addicting. I haven't gotten the Amulet yet-come very, very close though. Until I do, Nethack stays on my desktop in a hallowed position.

    --
    If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.