Put NetHack on my community app and this 38-year-old game keeps outsmarting me

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Summary

A developer adds NetHack to their community app and discovers the 38-year-old roguelike's surprising depth, including multiplayer via bones files and countless obscure interactions.

<p>I added NetHack to my community app a while back, unmodified upstream binary running on a shared box. I thought I was adding "an old roguelike". I was not prepared. :D</p> <p>It shipped multiplayer in the 80s and nobody calls it that. Bones files. Someone dies on lvl 12, their ghost and their cursed loot get written to disk, and another player on the same machine walks into that grave later. People are haunting each other with zero configuration.</p> <p>"The DevTeam thinks of everything" is not a meme. Every "surely this won't work" works. Every "surely the game doesn't track that" is tracked. You can wield a cockatrice corpse as a weapon (wear gloves). You can scare monsters by writing Elbereth in the dust. You can dip, rub, sit on, and kick basically anything, and the game has an opinion about all of it. I keep watching people find interactions I didn't know existed, in a game running unmodified on my box.</p> <p>And it's still alive. First released in 1987, still maintained by the DevTeam today, and it hangs in MoMA's collection as one of the culturally significant video games. A museum piece that still gets patches. Meanwhile it runs on a potato over a text terminal.</p> <p>Love it :D</p>
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Cached at: 07/07/26, 02:17 PM

# Put NetHack on my community app and this 38-year-old game keeps outsmarting me Source: [https://lobste.rs/s/xiamhy/put_nethack_on_my_community_app_this_38](https://lobste.rs/s/xiamhy/put_nethack_on_my_community_app_this_38) I added NetHack to my community app a while back, unmodified upstream binary running on a shared box\. I thought I was adding "an old roguelike"\. I was not prepared\. :D It shipped multiplayer in the 80s and nobody calls it that\. Bones files\. Someone dies on lvl 12, their ghost and their cursed loot get written to disk, and another player on the same machine walks into that grave later\. People are haunting each other with zero configuration\. "The DevTeam thinks of everything" is not a meme\. Every "surely this won't work" works\. Every "surely the game doesn't track that" is tracked\. You can wield a cockatrice corpse as a weapon \(wear gloves\)\. You can scare monsters by writing Elbereth in the dust\. You can dip, rub, sit on, and kick basically anything, and the game has an opinion about all of it\. I keep watching people find interactions I didn't know existed, in a game running unmodified on my box\. And it's still alive\. First released in 1987, still maintained by the DevTeam today, and it hangs in MoMA's collection as one of the culturally significant video games\. A museum piece that still gets patches\. Meanwhile it runs on a potato over a text terminal\. Love it :D

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