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 c...
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