Hack can be considered as an improved version of the original Rogue game. Hack additions include:
Different character types start with different kind of equipment and abilities e.g. a tourist has no special abilities, but he starts with lots of money and an expensive camera, which can be used to blind monsters. A knight starts with a better armor and weapon than most characters and with an ability to turn undead.
Hack is full of many interesting/funny things: e.g. using a wand of polymorping the player character can polymorph himself/herself or some of his/her item into another being/thing. Keystone Kops are hunting player characters which rob stores. They attack the player character by throwing cream pies at him/her, and regenerate when they are killed. The cream pies can blind the character and the cream pies can be used for food.
Food is actually one of the main problems of the game. The player character must continually eat food, or he/she will eventually begin to faint and starve to death. When killed, creatures will leave behind corpses and many of them are edible. Eating some of them might even grant the player with intrinsic abilities (e.g. floating eye have the intrinsic ability of telepathy).
The original Hack was written by Jay Fenlason with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome, and Jon Payne. Andries Brouwer did a major re-write, transforming Hack into a different game, and published (at least) three versions (1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.0.3) for UNIX machines to the Usenet. Don G. Kneller ported Hack 1.0.3 to MSDOS, producing PC Hack 1.01e and 1.03g, and went on to produce at least four more versions (3.0, 3.2, 3.51, and 3.6). R. Black ported PC Hack 3.51 to the Atari ST, producing ST Hack 1.03.
Mike Stephenson merged these various Hack versions together, incorporating many of the added features, and produced NetHack version 1.4. Despite the name, NetHack is a single-player game like Hack. The "Net" prefix (in the name of the game) refers to its development by a team of programmers in the Internet community. NetHack is a greatly improved version of Hack.
Further Nethack versions have been produced by a large number of people (too many to mention by name in here). They are often called the NetHack Development Team (normally referred to as the Dev Team). The Dev Team is a slightly mysterious in its actions. They will never give any indication on about the new features or release date of the next NetHack version. New releases of Nethack were not released between December 1996 and December 1999 and the development speed of NetHack has been much slower than Zangband. Nethack has spawned many variants. Information, binaries and source code for these can be found using the links listed below.
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