As roguelikes go, NetHack is a museum piece. I don’t say that because it’s old—though it is extremely old, originally released as it was in the same year that Lethal Weapon hit theaters—but because it is literally in the Museum of Modern Art alongside SimCity 2000 and Portal. It’s a massively influential and historic game, and as of yesterday, it’s new all over again.
That’s thanks to a 5.0.0 release because, yes, the game is still in active development after nearly 40 years. It’s an open-source project with the source code maintained by a pantheon of coders and community members called the DevTeam. The game itself is an immediate descendant of Rogue, the original ASCII-based dungeon crawler that we now use as shorthand when describing games like Balatro, Hades, and countless others.
You can check out the 5.0.0 release blog post for a brief intro, which notes that “a list of over 3100 fixes and changes” awaits players who dive into the new version. Old saves and “bones files” (dungeon floors that save when you die so you can load them into another game) won’t work, so it’s a great time to start fresh alongside everybody else. The main menu page of the NetHack website includes a download link to Windows, DOS, and Amiga versions.
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If you want to read the changelog, which the release blog notes may contain spoilers, you can do so on the NetHack GitHub page. Like other games with detailed systems and procedural generation, the notes are a bunch of delightful nonsense: “pets avoid eating shapeshifter corpses unless starving or nearly feral,” one line reads. “Demon lords hate Demonbane,” reads another.
It may be a bit intimidating to charge face-first into a legendarily intricate game with ASCII graphics from the ’80s, though, so I recommend checking out PC Gamer’s let’s play series, NetHack from aaaa to Zruty. In it, senior editor Wes Fenlon and NetHack guru Jeremy Nissen dig into why the game is so celebrated and how you might approach playing it yourself. The series just turned a decade old, but that’s only around a quarter of NetHack’s lifespan, so I’m sure it holds up fine.
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