September 14, 2000: That’s the day Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, the second-worst iteration of Windows in its long history. It also marked the final release of MS-DOS, which for so many years had undergirded its operating systems. In 2006—two decades ago—Microsoft ceased long-term support for Windows 98 and Me, meaning that MS-DOS’s life was truly over.
Two days ago the latest update for NetHack dropped, and you bet your ass it still supports MS-DOS, just like it did when it first released in 1987.
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Perhaps even more absurd is that the NetHack development team still maintains an official binary for the Amiga—you know, the personal computer line that went extinct in 1994.
NetHack 3D is by far the nicest modern interface I’ve seen for the game—nice enough to tempt me away from playing in a terminal connected to nethack.alt.org. NetHack 3D adapts the game’s incredibly complex controls into some quite intuitive context menus, with mouse support on PC and touch support on mobile. You can switch to ASCII mode if you want, but the default way to play is with a 2D tileset, and there are several options sourced from the NetHack community. I can’t say I’m crazy about NetHack 3D’s AI-generated logo, but at least the rest of the graphics are player-made tilesets.
NetHack 3D’s layered-on-top configuration options and polished UI don’t prevent you from typing in any of NetHack’s more obscure interactions manually, just like you always could, but it simplifies all the basics. There’s even a novel first-person mode, which is not going to be the ideal way to play in a game as deadly as NetHack, but still—it’s surreal seeing it from a literal new perspective, 39 years into its life.
I’m not kidding when I call this the best roguelike ever made, either—well, perhaps Caves of Qud has supplanted it, but no other game really comes close to expanding on the original Rogue with so many interlocking interactions and systems that there’s even a kitchen sink reference. Without NetHack, there probably never would’ve been a Dwarf Fortress. There’s a reason the game’s in the damn MOMA.
If you’ve never played NetHack, this is now by far the easiest way to ease into it. The tilesets are nice, but don’t be scared to try the ASCII mode. Give it enough time to learn the symbols used for most monsters and items, and it’ll start to feel like you can see the Matrix.
