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.

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.

[Goldberg's Pants]

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...

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 e

Old News

[Dark_Nova]

This article [gamespy.com] 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 [gamespy.com] 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!

Recent inductee?

[steve.m]

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

So this isn't exactly recent news...

Re:Recent inductee?

[simoniker]

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

We all remember our first time...

[dreamquick]

...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!

Re:We all remember our first time...

[mseeger]

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 mutanto

Re:We all remember our first time...

[Repton]

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..)

You are looking at a dark webpage...

[weeboo0104]

it was most likely slashdotted by a grue.

Re:You are looking at a dark webpage...

[JDWTopGuy]

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

Re:You are looking at a dark webpage...

[dasunt]

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)

I got a special vid card for it

[endx7]

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

Just Remember...

[Quarters]

You only like NetHack for the music.

Download my bones file

[Trikenstein]

here [nethack.de]

Look for BarG-B

What a coincidence...

[linuxn]

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

What?

[odorf]

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

Damn good game.

[irokitt]

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.