Hack - The Amulet of Yendor
The direct ancestor of Nethack. The first roguelike I ever played back in the day...
Originally written by Jay Fenlason with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jon Payne. Personally, I played the PC port of the game (for MS-DOS), ported by Don G. Kneller.
Looking back at Hack, the most recent versions of Nethack look pretty mind-boggling. Hack is so much simpler. Some things, for example:
- There are much less character classes - and, of course, no character races.
- Still true to Rogue roots, there's only one monster per character. (Well, at least Hack uses both uppercase and lowercase letters...)
- No color. (PC port did, however, have Huge Luxuries like something that's called "IBMgraphics" in modern-day Nethack. =)
- No gods.
- Yes dogs. In fact, that's the only choice for a pet.
- No dungeon branches.
- The Hell was nothing like the modern Gehennom. (Never seen it in either game, but I heard they praise Izchak for his infernal infernalizations in "recent" Nethack versions.)
- Yes, since there was no gods, that meant Rodney was taking care of the Amulet of Yendor.
But aside of these things, Hack was very advanced compared to Rogue; it had many features that were pretty innovative at the time and that are still present in Nethack (that has, of course, taken all this to a whole new level).
I did succeed in compiling Hack 1.0.3 in Linux once, but that didn't work too well - but, the point was made: apparently the program still works after all these years...