Nethack, or "F*** You Too, RNG!"

What is Nethack? I know this is the question crossing the minds of many, right now, especially amongst the younger people here. Well, Nethack is the type of computer game known as an ASCII. It's known that way for one simple reason. It has no graphics. It uses the ASCII character set to represent objects in a randomly generated dungeon, where you batter your way through hordes of evil stuff that mostly wants you dead in an effort to recover the mighty Amulet of Yendor.

Now for those of you who started panicking at the words "no graphics", don't worry, since it's original design back in the stone ages when people played it on ASCII terminals, Nethack has received an update, including a graphics tileset, and many spinoff games, some including graphics. Mind you, the system requirements for even the graphical version of vanilla Nethack run somewhere between "wristwatch" and "calculator" by today's tech. More literally, I'm fairly certain there's full ports available for cell phones, and if there aren't, it's due to nobody porting it, rather than lack of power.

The system is loosely based off of second edition D&D, for my fellow fossils old enough to understand what that means. Don't worry though, the game calculates THAC0 for you. If you're a baby and don't understand what that means, don't worry about it, the game handles all the confusing stuff for you. Basic reading skills and a good memory are all this game requires out of you. (Oh, and patience.)

I've played it off and on for about 15-16 years, although much more during the younger portion of that time frame, and I've never beaten it. And the great thing is, that's not even that abnormal. If you don't come into the game reading tons of spoilers right off the bat, odds are good you're going to die horribly on the first floor of the dungeon a couple thousand times. (Most people will anyway.)

The whole game is turn based, and mostly involves running your little "@" that represents you around trying desperately to collect enough =, ", !, /, ?, [, (, and ) symbols to survive the next 30 seconds. If you're curious, those all represent some of the various types of magical items, armor, weapons, and other miscellaneous equipment in the Mazes of Menace. (But not all of it.)

If you're now considering playing Nethack, instead of questioning my sanity like you should be, you should know the two main rules of Nethack. First, the RNG is out to get you. As in you personally. And secondly, the least dangerous monster within 5 dungeon levels of you will always get the killing blow on you, to ensure your embarrassment.

I'm not going to try to type up a comprehensive guide, or even a vague one, because a vague guide would take most people at least an hour to read straight through, and a comprehensive one would make War and Peace look like Archie comics. (There I go showing my age again... remember when they published good stuff?)

There's some cool stuff available these days that wasn't around when I was a kid, dying to newts every third step, and restarting the dungeon every ten minutes. (Oh yeah, you die, you start over, welcome to real gaming, kids.) For one, there's Nethack Wiki. Man, this resource is awesome. Trying to parse enough plain text to make a web page load slow (god, those old computers...) could be frustrating at the least, making trial and error very inviting.

There's also NAO, a public server that lets people compare scores, watch games in progress, and has an IRC channel to chat in and get tips from. This is particularly cool because of Nethack's "Bones" feature. The game will occasionally store the level someone died on in a local file, and then randomly throw it at someone else, ghost, inventory, and whatever nasty killed the other player. With a bunch of people all playing across the server, you get more bones files, and more random ones, which is awesome, since you don't have 15 or 20 people all using the same machines anymore.

Recently, you have begun to find yourself unfulfilled and distant in your daily occupation. Strange dreams of prospecting, stealing, crusading, and combat have haunted you in your sleep for many months, but you aren't sure of the reason. You wonder whether you have in fact been having those dreams all your life, and somehow managed to forget about them until now. Some nights you awaken suddenly and cry out, terrified at the vivid recollection of the strange and powerful creatures that seem to be lurking behind every corner of the dungeon in your dream. Could these details haunting your dreams be real? As each night passes, you feel the desire to enter the mysterious caverns near the ruins grow stronger. Each morning, however, you quickly put the idea out of your head as you recall the tales of those who entered the caverns before you and did not return. Eventually you can resist the yearning to seek out the fantastic place in your dreams no longer. After all, when other adventurers came back this way after spending time in the caverns, they usually seemed better off than when they passed through the first time. And who was to say that all of those who did not return had not just kept going?

Asking around, you hear about a bauble, called the Amulet of Yendor by some, which, if you can find it, will bring you great wealth. One legend you were told even mentioned that the one who finds the amulet will be granted immortality by the gods. The amulet is rumored to be somewhere beyond the Valley of Gehennom, deep within the Mazes of Menace. Upon hearing the legends, you immediately realize that there is some profound and undiscovered reason that you are to descend into the caverns and seek out that amulet of which they spoke. Even if the rumors of the amulet's powers are untrue, you decide that you should at least be able to sell the tales of your adventures to the local minstrels for a tidy sum, especially if you encounter any of the terrifying and magical creatures of your dreams along the way. You spend one last night fortifying yourself at the local inn, becoming more and more depressed as you watch the odds of your success being posted on the inn's walls getting lower and lower.

In the morning you awake, collect your belongings, and set off for the dungeon. After several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the entrance to the Mazes of Menace. It is late at night, so you make camp at the entrance and spend the night sleeping under the open skies. In the morning, you gather your gear, eat what may be your last meal outside, and enter the dungeon...

This is the intro text you'll read maybe twice, ever, and then skip past every other time you start the game. (Several million, most likely.) Long story short, your objective is to battle your way down through the dungeon, into the depths of Gehennom, collect several potent magical artifacts, perform a magical invocation to break into the sanctuary of a vengeful deity's high priest, steal another magical artifact, and run like a scared rabbit back out of the dungeon, through the elemental planes, and up to the Astral plane, in an effort to sacrifice the Amulet and become a demi-god.

And yes, that's really the short version. The game is difficult, with significant depth and random elements to keep people coming back, even though the game is older than the majority of TL's users, even a lot of the people who've been here since the early BW days. (Yeah, how do YOU like being the young punks?) Given that the download itself is pretty tiny, you should definitely try it out.

PuTTY, a telnet/SSH client for Windows, lets you connect to the server at NAO.

NAO, a public Nethack server if you want to play with other people's bones, and compete on scores instead of just being on your machine.

Nethack Wiki, containing all the spoilers and information you need to beat it in under a decade.

Nethack official site, kinda says it all.

Roguelike Games group (RGRN) on Google groups.