NetHack is a very important PC game, so important that I believe without it we wouldn’t have gotten Roguelikes as we know them now. There’s a ton of reasons why people should know more about the history behind this game, not only because it gave an entire genre tons of unexpected complexity, but because without it many games wouldn’t exist. After all, as long as you don’t care about graphics, games from the older days have demonstrated to be way more complex beasts than what we have now. I would argue mechanically, we have never really left the 90s behind, which was a true game changer for the video game industry.
NetHack got bigger
And it also brought a ton of fixes with it, NetHack updates are very special because they take between 3 to 5 years to release, if they even come out that is. We have to keep in mind it has been in development since 1987, and as time passed the community behind the game has been growing slowly but surely. There’s many things to talk about, how complex the game is, how challenging it is, but one thing is for certain, without NetHack, or even Rogue, we wouldn’t have what we have today.
I’m a firm believer that people should go back in time to explore what games had to offer, because many often underestimate how these games worked in the first place. They would be very wrong to think that games got very advanced today besides graphics, because when you analyze things there’s really nothing truly new in the gaming space or something that hasn’t been done before. Some people only come for the graphics that breed of consumer keeps existing for some reason despite no big changes occurred lately. However, the true gamer will know how to appreciate the depth of NetHack.
