We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.

We dusted off the image editor and made the first new page header in years! It’s about time too, for it’s time to shorten our list of pages before they threaten to overwhelm our nonexistent offices.

1. Seminal official D&D blobber Eye of The Beholder got a C64 port three years ago. That’s how long this link’s been laying at the bottom of our barrel. Here’s a demonstration video. (37 minutes) If you play it on a C128 in C128 mode, it uses the 80-column screen to display a map! Something to try out in VICE.

2. Also from around that time LowSpecGamer did a video exploring the origins of the ARM processor. (18 minutes) It was created by people new to processor construction for British Acorn microcomputers, and from there expanded and grew until now it’s the most popular processor style in the whole world, backing both Apple and Android devices, by a long shot. It’s beginning to make inroads into desktop use even; I’m currently writing this on an ARM-powered Raspberry Pi 500+.

3. onaretrotip shows off cancelled arcade games in two videos, Part 1 (18 minutes) and Part 2 (32 minutes).

4. I’ve been having a distracting amount of fun on a kind of public Unix/Linux machine called a tilde lately. I plan on writing a lot more on my experiences, but in the meantime you can find out what they’re about, including finding one to sign up for yourself, at tildeverse.org.

5. It’s been hanging out among my tabs for a few days, a memory of days when I referred to it frequently, Ali Harlow’s Nethack spoiler site. Not that the Nethack Wiki isn’t great, but the Wiki-style organization of information is not always the perfect mechanism for information delivery, and the decline of this style of fansite has weighed down on my soul, a whole species of site preyed upon by Fandom and its horde of highly SEO’d corporate wikis. Here’s some more surviving Nethack info sites, though you should note much of the information is a little outdated: the venerable Steelypips, Stan’s Nethack site, some miscellaneous related files most from 1997, and a few more files scattered about this directory at www.chiark.greenend.org.uk: an identification spoiler and item sheet, a musing about Nethack bots, a brief discussion about combat, a discussion comparing Dungeon Crawl with Nethack, and this cake:

6. A late-breaking development, the 25-year-old forums of classic gaming site Digital Press have been destroyed, apparently due to miscommunication between owners, in order to save a little bit of cash every month. As Time Extension reports, this is a gigantic blow to the retro gaming community, there was a huge amount of information that was contained there, and the Wayback Machine’s preservation of these forums is scattershot.

7. To throw in another last-second inclusion, Nintendo’s “My Nintendo” store is changing its name to just the “Nintendo Store.” This is their web shop, not their console-based digital game sales service called eShop, although you can buy downloadable games from the site too. I’d link to the announcement, but they stupidly only made it via Twitter. Get with the times, Nintendo!

rodneylives

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

So yesterday the Devteam (it is always the Devteam) released version 5.0 of legendary and venerable rogueike compuer game NetHack. It is 39 years old.

Nethack (I am more used to writing it without the capital H) is a venerable roguelike computer game, and by some measures the greatest roguelike of them all. Long before Caves of Qud or Dwarf Fortress it was, and still is, a game of surprising depth, and for many years no other games were anything close to it. Even today, few games do.

The history of the game is recounted on the excellent Nethack Wiki. It got its start as a remake of Jay Fenalson’s Hack (1981), itself a recreation of Rogue (1980), and which was remade by Andries Brouwer (1984). The first version of Nethack, sometimes stylized ad”NetHack” was 1.3d, posted to Usenet by DevTeam leader Mike Stephenson in June 1987.

Nethack 3.0 (July 1989) saw major changes to the gameplay. Nethack 3.1 (January 1993) greatly changed the dungeon, and in large part all following versions are modifications and elaborations upon it. In the time since sometimes there have been great pauses in its history. Nethack 3.2 arrived April 1996; Nethack 3.3 in 1999; Nethack 3.4 in 2002; Nethack 3.5 in 2002; Nethack 3.6 in December 2015; and now, Nethack 5.0 on May 2, 2026.

Here is a list of major changes, though it contains significant spoilers, and a note tells us that this is a renamed changelist from 3.7. With 3.4 the Devteam switched to a Linux-style numbering system: even minor numbers (like 3.6 and 5.0) are releases for wide play, and odd minor numbers (like 3.5 and 3.7) are development versions mostly intended for work and bug testing. Even so, as with all major versions of Nethack, bugs almost certainly exist in this version. Nethack jumped past version 4.0 probably because a notable fork called itself Nethack 4.

Three major architectural changes made in this version: the code now supports C99, bringing its source to the cusp of the 21 century. Much better support for cross-compiling exists now, building it on a system it’s not intended to run on. And the old yacc/lex special level construction system has been replaced with Lua. This make Lua a build requirement.

So, how do you play it?

For three systems binaries are provided: Windows, MS-DOS and Amiga. Yes, Nethack still supports MS-DOS, and yes, it still supports classic Amiga: it explicitly supports AmigaDOS 3.0, meaning it can still run on 68000 machines. While Atari ST support isn’t explicitly claimed, plenty of references to it are left in the code. (Does Lua exist for ST?)

That these are the only systems they provide binaries for shouldn’t be seen as an indication that these are the “most important” platforms for Nethack, it’s more that, since it’s entirely open source, building it yourself is entirely possible, and more expected than with most software. Nethack can be built for Linux, Windows 8-11, AmigaDOS, MacOS (I’m not sure if this includes classic Mac too but it might), Windows CE (wow), OS/2 (additional wow), BeOS, VMS and multiple Unixes.

Linux poses a special challenge for releasing binaries since there are so many distributions, so until 5.0 becomes the main Nethack in their repositories you’ll probably have to built it yourself. I have done this on two systems and can vouch that it’s doable, make sure to read the directions carefully though. After reading the README in the top level of the gzip tarball, the file you want to follow is in sys/unix/NewInstall.unx, which will tell you the manner in which to invoke sys/unix/hints/linux.500, and then ultimately, again from the top level of the source, make fetch-lua, make all, then make install. I ended up with a directory in my home called nh/install/games/, which contains a script that starts the system-installed nethack. Note that nethack supports multiple play styles: ordinary tty, curses, Windows UI, X11, Qt, Gnome and more, and configuring any of those besides the standard game will mean you’ll have to find an option to enable in include/config.h.

Another option is to play through public Nethack servers. The most popular of these are probably alt.org and Hardfought. alt.org doesn’t seem to make 5.0 itself available yet, and I’ve been able to get through to Hardfought today via ssh (possibly due to a misconfiguration on my end). If you can set them up for play then not only do you not have to build or install the game yourself, but you can even play with public bones, the remnants of other players’ games, adding an additional layer of high-stakes randomness to the dungeon.

For New Players

I wish I could point you to my old @Play column on learning Nethack, but its home blog GameSetWatch has been gone from the living internet for four or five years now. My book Exploring Roguelike Games from CRC Press has it, but it’s quite expensive unfortunately. It’s still buried somewhere in the Internet Archive. I must hunt it down some day.

If you haven’t played Nethack before you are in for a bit of a learning curve. Nethack 5.0 now has an optional tutorial in the early phases of the game that might help you. You can always press ? during the game to find its help system. If your keyboard has a numpad you’ll really want to enable it, or else you’ll have to learn vi keys, hjkl, for movement, as well as yubn for diagonals. This will also push several important commands into the “extended” input system, where you either hold Alt (aka Meta) and press a letter, of if you don’t even have that, you press “octothorpe” (#) and then type a command name. This is especially annoying for the #kick (Alt-K) and #loot (Alt-L I think) commands, needed for opening locked doors and chests, and getting items out of chests. You can set options during the game with #option (Alt-O), or in .nethackrc, defaults.nh, or NetHack.cnf, depending on your platform.

I can’t impress enough how much fun Nethack still is, even after all this time. There is a ton to learn before you can play well (read the wiki if you don’t mind spoilers), but it’s mostly entertaining knowledge. What other computer game freely quotes from sources ranging from Edmund Spenser to Terry Pratchett? It plays much faster than roguelikes of more recent vintage. Every level is only one screen in size, characters advance through the early levels rapidly, and its monsters and item systems are still top class. It’s true that I do miss the days when they’d introduce huge new features (3.0 and 3.1 each made it into almost an entirely new game), but there’s still a lot of things to discover. Gehennom, the deeper areas of the dungeon, has been changed greatly, and I look forward to reaching those hellish climes once again.

Happy hacking!

rodneylives

He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.

I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)

I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.

50 ways to leave your game
============================
by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).

There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed.
Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots
of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are
mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I
did):

a blast of acid
a blast of disintegration
a blast of fire
a blast of frost
a blast of lightning
a blast of missiles
a blast of poison gas
a blast of sleep gas
a bolt of cold
a bolt of fire
a bolt of lightning
a burst of flame
a carnivorous bag
a closing drawbridge
a cockatrice corpse
a collapsing drawbridge
a cone of cold
a contact-poisoned spellbook
a contaminated potion
a cursed throne
a death ray
a falling drawbridge
a falling object
a falling rock
a finger of death
a fireball
a genocide spell
a land mine
a magic missile
a magical explosion
a mildly contaminated potion
a potion of holy water
a potion of unholy water
a psychic blast
a residual undead turning effect
a scroll of fire
a scroll of genocide
a sleep ray
a system shock
a thrown potion
a touch of death
a tower of flame
a wand
acid
an alchemic blast
an electric chair
an electric shock
an exploding chest
an exploding crystal ball
an exploding drawbridge
an exploding item being destroyed
an exploding ring
an exploding rune
an exploding wand
an explosion
an iron ball collision
an object thrown at you
an unrefrigerated sip of juice
an unsuccessful polymorph
brainlessnes
bumping into a boulder
bumping into a door
colliding with the ceiling
contaminated water
drowning
eating a cadaver
eating a cockatrice corpse
eating a cockatrice egg
eating a poisonous corpse
eating a poisonous weapon
eating a rotten lump of royal jelly
eating an acidic corpse
eating the Medusa’s corpse
eating too rich a meal
exhaustion
falling downstairs
jumping out of a bear trap
kicking a ladder
kicking a rock
kicking a sink
kicking a throne
kicking a wall
kicking an altar
kicking something weird
kicking the drawbridge
kicking the stairs
leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
looking at the Medusa
molten lava
overexertion
sipping boiling water
sitting in lava
sitting on an iron spike
strangulation
swallowing a cockatrice whole
the wrath of
touching a cockatrice corpse
trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves

Other ways to die:

caught himself in his own tower of flame
committed suicide
crunched in the head by an iron ball
dragged downstairs by an iron ball
fell from a drawbridge
fell into a chasm
fell into a pit
fell into a pit of iron spikes
fell onto a sink
killed himself with his pick-axe
quit while already on Charon’s boat
shot himself with a death ray
squished under a boulder
starvation
teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death
unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence
using a magical horn on himself
went to heaven prematurely
zapped himself with a spell
zapped himself with a wand

That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.

rodneylives

Here are all his Nethack 3.1 posts to date:

Game 504: Nethack [3.1 series] (1993) – Beginning adventures

Nethack [3.1]: Blessed and Cursed – Discovering exercise, death by battery drain

Nethack [3.1]: Rust and Ruin – Beginning of very good game

Nethack [3.1]: Quest for Glory – Middle dungeon levels, Rogue level, Quest branch

Nethack [3.1]: Wish List – Exploring the lower regions of the main dungeon

Nethack [3.1]: Beyond This Place Of Wrath And Tears: from the Castle to Fort Ludios to entering Gehennom to killing Baalzebub

Nethack [3.1]: Nothing Lasts Forever – from killing the Wizard for the first time to getting the Amulet up to escaping the main dungeon for the Elemental Planes

rodneylives

The replacement for the old dev/null tournament, the November Nethack Tournament is on! Get yer armor and weapons, read your spellbooks and start testing those items! Maybe you’ll find a Wand of Wishing on the first floor? Probably not, but there’s all kinds of crazy D&D-ish adventures to be had this month, so get ‘hacking!

The November Nethack Tournament (tnnt.org)

rodneylives

Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.

There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.

Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with sparkle emojis around the things that personally enthuse me. Just because!

Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:

SATURDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in the First Decade of Text Games

10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, Abstract Space Exploration in The Banished Vault

10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in Geological Finitudes

10:45 AM/1:45 PM: Ludipe, Exploring Pacifist Roguelikes

11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: Love Island as a Roguelike

11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, Provenance, and You

Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: Rule and System Generation for Roguelikes

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The Data Science of Roguelikes

2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of Hand-Crafted Sudoku

3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: Making a Tiny Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the Blaseball Name Generator

4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for Music Generation

5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why Dynamic Content Selection Is Hard

SUNDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, Generating Riddles for a Generated World

10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of NetHack

10:30 AM/1:30 PM: Leigh Alexander, McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV

1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating Fan Reinterpretation Through Caves of Qud’s Modular Data Files

1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with Roguelike Music

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the Games That Are Played There

2 PM/5 PM: Jeff Olson, Alphaman: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the DOS Days When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code

3 PM/6 PM: Dustin Freeman, Live Action Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Jonathan Lessard, A Simulation with a View

3:45 PM/6:45 PM: Tom Francis, Generating Boring Levels for Fresh Experiences in Heat Signature

4 PM/7 PM: Patrick Kemp, Design Tooling at Spry Fox

5 PM/8 PM: Stav Hinenzon, A Messy Approach to Dynamic Narrative in Sunshine Shuffle

5:15 PM/8:15 PM: Josh Galecki, Procedurally Generating Puzzles

5:30 PM/8:30 PM: Jasper Cole, Backpack Hero – Player Upgrades and Progression

6 PM/9 PM: Brianna McHorse & Chris Foster, Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the Chaos In

rodneylives

Nethack uses the system time-of-day clock to affect the game in modest ways. It figures out the phase of the moon, and if it’s a full moon the player’s “base luck,” the number at which it starts and tends to trend towards, is +1. Luck affects the game in many minor ways, most notably affecting the to-hit chances of striking monsters. Full moons also affect werecreatures and the chances to tame dogs, but those effects are highly situational.

Playing on a new moon has one effect, but it’s a big one. If you’re fighting a cockatrice and you hear its hissing, and are not carrying a lizard corpse, then you always begin turning to stone, instead of there only being a one-in-ten chance. This is what is called a “delayed instadeath”: you don’t die immediately, but if you don’t take immediate action it’ll happen in the next few turns. That’s the next few turns from the game’s perspective: various events may conspire to prevent you from getting that action at all. (The Nethack Wiki’s page on petrification is instructive.)

If you do get the turn, one of the things you can do is eat a lizard corpse, or that of another acidic monster. (Eating dead monsters raw is something you just end up doing often in Nethack.) If those aren’t at hand, what usually works is prayer, provided that you haven’t prayed too recently, your patron god is not angry with you and you’re not in Gehennom. Ordinarily, if you haven’t been playing badly, your god isn’t mad at you. If you’re in Gehennom you’re in the late game anyway, and probably have had ample opportunity to obtain one of the several ways of halting impending calcification.

Prayer is nearly a universal panacea, if it’s available. But there is one other thing that can block prayer: if your luck is negative. Even if it’s by just one point, prayer will never work.

That’s where the only other date effect in Nethack comes into play: on Friday the 13th, your luck defaults to -1, the opposite of the full moon effect. So, unless you’ve increased your luck by one of a number of means, prayer will never work on Friday the 13th. And today is both a new moon night and Friday the 13th. Other uses for prayer won’t work either: if you’re weak from hunger? Too bad. Low on hit points? Sorry. Punished with a ball and chain? Not going to work. Wearing cursed levitation boots? LOL.

Days that both have a new moon and are a Friday the 13th are rare. The last one was in July of 2018, before that November of 2015, and the one before that was in 1999. So, um, if you’ve been thinking about trying out this weird old roguelike game you’ve heard about, you might want to wait a bit. Until tomorrow, anyway.

rodneylives

It’s a silly NetHack-themed game about exploring a dungeon, presented through a bunch of characters sitting around passing a blunt between them. It’s not really that hard, but there is a bit of strategy to it.

You and your pet sit around a campfire with other characters from that dungeon level and talk about things. Your character and your pet can say things like, they want to be less or more aggressive on the next level, or they want to invoke Elbereth, or they want to use an item; other characters may say things like telling you where fewer or more fights will be, or where treasure is. Or they may have nothing of importance to say.

Every time a character says something, they must pass the blunt, which when it’s depleted signals it’s time to go to the next level. (C’mon, you know all the characters in this dungeon have to be potheads.) All of the fighting and stuff happens in simulation between conversations. Your character or their pet may be wounded (observe their hit points when their conversation turn comes up), or even die at this phase. It’s possible for your pet to die but your character go on to win. It’s also possible for your character die and your pet go on to win the game, which is not something that can occur in NetHack.

It’s a very simple game, and as stated, not really that difficult. But it’s fun, and might give a chuckle to NetHack fanatics. It’s free and completely playable in browser!

Blunt Quaternion (itch.io, $0)

rodneylives

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

K. Holt at Engadget says Valve has doubled production of Steam Decks, meaning those on the waiting list will have less waiting to do.

At VentureBeat’s subsite GamesBeat, Dean Takahashi sadly reports that Bernie Stolar, former President at Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75. Alana Hauges of NintendoLife notes that his early career was in co-op, before joining Atari and working on their Lynx portable system. Later at Sony, Stolar helped shepherd the Playstation and franchises such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, before leaving to help Sega launch the Dreamcast.

After going free-to-play, the player base of popular battle royale hit Fall Guys‘ has ballooned to 20 million! But Eric Van Allen at Destructoid tells us that there is some tension among long-time players over changes to its currency model. At GameRant, Rory Young has more, including an observation made by one of the players: under the new system, a player who loses five matches in the first round ends up making more than a player who wins a match after five rounds!

Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun tells tales of the 2018 indie game Space Bob vs The Replicons (Steam), described as like a 2D No Man’s Sky, but didn’t do well on its initial release. Its creator had a heart attack a week after it hit Steam, then left the games industry. But he’s back, and has announced a big update. Its developer is Intravenous Software, and they’re on Twitter!

Sharang Biswas at Eurogamer posts an essay for Pride month about fanfiction and mods made by the gay community. (Note: slightly NSFW image)

Jeremy Winslow at Kotaku tells us that Blizzard has announced that, when Overwatch 2 releases, it will replace the original game, making it unavailable to play! Progress will carry over, but 6V6 matches will be sunset in favor of the new version’s 5V5 teams.

Finally, we have received word that venerable roguelike NetHack has been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its Never Alone exhibit! We’ve seen it mentioned on PC Gamer, Reddit, and Slashdot — remember them? DevTeam member Jean-Christophe Collet muses on the distinction on LinkedIn.

rodneylives

April 15th through the 17th, a group of 24 streamers will be playing classic roguelike NetHack for 48 straight hours on Twitch! Their site is at nethackathon.org, and they’re on Twitter. Last year’s marathon can be found archived on YouTube.

They did a similar stream last year in the month of September, but this year they’ve moved it to April in order to space themselves better around the two major NetHack tournaments in June and November.

What is that? You don’t know anything about NetHack? Oh boy, I get to explain it again-it’s a venerable roguelike game that’s been in existence for 34 years! The first version of NetHack is older than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It began during the presidency of Ronald Reagan! While there have been lulls in its development, and at least one major member of its dev team, Izchak Miller, passed away years ago, it’s still going, and it’s still being worked on. It’s notable for its high difficulty, the large amount of information a player must assimilate to be successful, and for its high degree of fairness (although sometimes it doesn’t seem fair)

NetHack comes across as like a solo adventure in an old school first-edition AD&D megadungeon. It’s full of monsters with weird properties, you have to figure out what your items do, and every game is randomly generated.

rodneylives