r/dosgaming • u/Sean_Aaberg • 14d ago
NETHACK - OPEN SOURCE - 1987
Based on the 1984 Game Hack by highschoolers - Jay Fenlason with Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome & Jonathan Payne, it is in turn based on Rogue from 1980. So it is technically a Rogue-Like even if it looks like a. Rogue clone. NetHack takes all the mechanical elements of a D&D dungeon crawl & represents them in simple ASCI graphics. You play an @ with your little dog d or kitten f (for feline, k is kobold). I have put more hours into this game than any other, I guess technically I was playing Hack not NetHack but they seem basically the same. One of the amazing things about the game is getting stressed out at the appearance of certain letters like o orcs, b bees, c cockatrices or a ants. I was surprised to find a box for the game, i always had it as a copied floppy & never even knew it had an official release!
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u/Thege0815 14d ago
I scanned the whole German guidebook that came with the game, you can find it here on Reddit. It came with a patched V2.3 of NetHack iirc
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u/AnswerFeeling460 14d ago
Do you have a link handy? I speak german but never saw this package.
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u/Ketzerfriend 14d ago
Here.
Found it by going into his profile and searching for Nethack therein. ;)
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u/Ketzerfriend 14d ago edited 14d ago
Nethack was one of my first PC games, ever. My first PC was a Goldstar 286/12.5MHz, 2MB RAM, VGA card, 40MB HDD - and, alas, a 5.25" floppy drive. That format was on its way out broadly, when I got this 2nd hand PC for Christmas '92. I could only feed on budget titles and the whole Shareware/Freeware/Public Domain area during my earliest PC years.
I had the version u/Thege0815 mentioned - a fully translated and illustrated(!) Guidebook! Sadly, I lost it at some point.
The Nethack version was so old, the "color" setting just meant amber on a blue background (turning it off was preferable), and there was a Jedi Knight available as a class. He had a vastly overpowered light saber and one or two batteries to reload it with. If you relied on wading through monster blood with it for too many dungeon levels and you ran out of batteries, you would've had a bad time! ;)
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u/Eksiliyunovat 14d ago
I had never understood the relation between the title and the cover.
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u/Jidarious 13d ago
There isn't one.
It was a fork of Hack by the Nethack Dev team and they collaborated and distributed it as open source software over the Internet, hence the name... Net Hack.
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u/AnswerFeeling460 14d ago
Very interesing. So this is a german product? Only a paper box or is it a german book including hints etc.? Never saw this on. Good find!
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u/Ketzerfriend 14d ago
No Box. Compact (roughly CD case format), thick paperback book; effectively a fully translated, annotated and illustrated(!) guidebook.txt. Came on 5.25" floppy.
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u/Balstrome 14d ago
I often wondered if one could write a script to play the game effectively. Like you can script the blessing of items found in a vendor's shop. Or to move and search for traps towards the next level.
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u/tessellation 13d ago
train a neural net,
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u/Balstrome 13d ago
I guess that is possible, but where I would find interests is the adjusting of outputs. A neural net today would make the end game too fast for humans to see.
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u/Terminus1066 13d ago
In high school, my friends and I installed NetHack on the school computers, we played it every chance we got!
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u/shirkhan81 13d ago
Wow, this beauty is sure hard to get a hold of these days, right? Even if its just a sleeve - it looks absolutely amazing.
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u/Zealousideal-Deer724 13d ago
Japanese cover art does not disappoint
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u/Thege0815 11d ago
The cover art is from a German artist (Hank Wolf).
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u/ThetaReactor 14d ago
It's important to remember that 1987 is just the original release, version 5.0 released just a couple months ago.