Celebrating Over 15 Years Of NetHack

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.

Comments

Nice choice.

[ivern76]

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

Re:Nice choice.

[MilenCent]

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.

Old News

[Dark_Nova]

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.

Re:Old News

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

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!