NetHack

NetHack is a single-player, open-source roguelike? video game in which the player descends through a randomly generated dungeon, fighting monsters and gathering treasure in a quest to recover the Amulet of Yendor from its lowest floor.¹¹⁴ First released in 1987, it is a descendant of the 1980 game Rogue and its offshoot Hack?, and has been maintained for decades by an anonymous collective of contributors known as the DevTeam.⁵⁴ The game is drawn almost entirely in ASCII? text: the dungeon is a configuration of brackets, asterisks, and periods, monsters are represented by letters — “O” for orcs, “D” for dragons — and the player’s avatar is a cheerfully blinking “@” sign.⁸

The name refers not to any networked play — NetHack is strictly single-player — but to the way the developers, many of whom have never met in person, organize the work by passing code fixes and additions back and forth.¹⁵ That collaborative, distributed model gave the game its name when the earlier Hack? was renamed in acknowledgment of contributions exchanged over Usenet.⁴ The game is free software, released under the NetHack General Public License, though it is not in the public domain.¹⁵¹¹

Gameplay

The player chooses one of several predefined character classes — among them the Archeologist, Barbarian, Caveman, Healer, Knight, Priest, Monk, Ranger, Rogue, Samurai, Tourist, Valkyrie, and Wizard — and descends the staircases of the dungeon, the Mazes of Menace, to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor for a patron god.¹² Death is permanent, in keeping with the roguelike tradition it inherited from Rogue.⁵ The game is celebrated for the density of its object, monster, and world interactions, in which nearly every item, tool, weapon, and creature carries a wealth of attributes that combine into situations no player could fully anticipate.⁸

The best-known illustration of this depth is the cockatrice, a creature whose touch turns a hero to stone; a player who kills one and picks up its corpse while wearing gloves can wield the body as a flail that petrifies monsters on contact — a maneuver Usenet players dubbed “wielding the rubber chicken”.⁸ A player who acquires a wand of polymorph and a ring of polymorph control can transform into a cockatrice and even lay its eggs, which serve as grenades of instant paralysis.⁸ Such emergent possibilities, and the way the game seemed to anticipate the player’s schemes, led DevTeam member Jean-Christophe Collet to describe being enthralled by “the sheer complexity of the situations you could get into, and the way that there was no ‘right way’ to get out of them”.⁸

The critic John Harris used NetHack repeatedly as the exemplar in his analysis of eight roguelike design principles, alongside Rogue, Angband?, ADOM, and Dungeon Crawl.⁷ He cited its delayed-stoning mechanic, which gives a poisoned player a few turns to cure the condition rather than dying instantly, as a model of the “no beheading rule,” and pointed to items such as the Amulet of Strangulation and the Wand of Death as instances of instant-death hazards balanced by lore and the possibility of divine intervention through prayer.⁷ The game’s design deliberately makes it hard to know when it is safe to test unidentified items, a tension Harris identified as central to well-made roguelikes.⁷

Lineage and influences

NetHack sits well down a chain of dungeon-crawling games that began with Rogue, developed in 1980 at U.C. Santa Cruz by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold for Unix systems.⁵¹ Rogue was itself an attempt to randomize the maze layout and monster and item placements of Colossal Cave Adventure, combined with elements drawn from the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and the 1970s mainframe game Star Trek.¹ NetHack descends from Rogue by way of Hack?, a 1982 offshoot; it took the exploration of Rogue and made it far richer, adding an encyclopedia of objects, a larger vocabulary, pop-culture references, and a puzzler’s attitude, turning the game into a metagame in which crafty players matched wits with nearly omniscient developers.⁵ Its Dungeons & Dragons roots are pronounced, drawing on the crunchy, old-school style that predominated in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁹

The game’s influence on later titles is broad and has been described as impossible to overstate for subsequent roguelikes and other genres.²⁰ Blizzard’s designers acknowledged their debt to NetHack and other roguelikes in creating the Diablo? series, which one observer described as “basically Nethack, writ large with 3D animation and stereo sound”.⁸⁵ NetHack stands alongside Angband? — a 100-level dungeon based on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien — ADOM, and Dungeon Crawl as one of the major roguelikes whose design conventions define the genre.⁷⁵

Development and reception

In 1988, Izchak Miller, a University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor, helped organize the game’s chief contributors into the DevTeam, an affiliation intended to oversee its continued evolution.⁴ The player’s Guidebook was written by Eric S. Raymond?, the open-source advocate known for the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” and its appendices detail the game’s history and its roster of well over a hundred contributors.⁴ Development proceeded in long, unscheduled bursts — the DevTeam declining to announce schedules so as never to miss deadlines — and version 3.3.0 arrived in December 1999 after more than three years of silence, an event announced quietly on Slashdot just before the new year.¹⁵⁸

NetHack has been repeatedly cited as one of the finest games ever made despite — or because of — its lack of graphics.⁴ Salon called it “the best game ever” in January 2000, arguing that with an all-text interface “the preferred graphics card is your mind’s eye,” which allows a player to feel genuine terror at the approach of a letter “C” hopping across the screen.⁴ It appeared in Time’s All-TIME 100 Video Games list and in IGN’s roundup of “Fifteen Really, Really, Really Hard Games”.¹³ The game runs on essentially any computer with a C compiler and has been ported to systems including Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, VMS, and Amiga.¹¹³

Many committed players connect to public servers rather than running the game locally; the best-known is nethack.alt.org, known as NAO, which keeps statistics, records games, connects to an IRC channel bot that announces deaths, and lets players inherit the “bones” files of others who died before them.¹⁰ The game sustains an active community, including the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack and the #nethack IRC channel, where a bot named Rodney reports wins and deaths.¹⁰⁸ An unofficial reference site, NetHackWiki, was founded on October 11, 2005, and by mid-2026 hosted more than 5,600 articles of spoilers and strategy.¹²¹¹

The current version, NetHack 5.0.0, was released by the DevTeam on May 2, 2026, as a renaming of the long-running development version 3.7.0; it made the source code compliant with the C99 standard, enabled cross-compiling between platforms, and replaced the game’s older yacc-and-lex build utilities with Lua-based alternatives loaded during play, with over 3,100 fixes and changes.²¹² Saved games and bones files from earlier versions are not compatible with it.² The game’s official source is maintained in a public Git repository, which as of July 2026 held over 19,000 commits.¹⁴