Hack
| Hack | |
|---|---|
| Major Roguelike | |
| Developer | Jay Fenlason,
Kenny Woodland, |
| Theme | Fantasy |
| Influences | Rogue |
| Released | 1984 Jan 17 |
| Updated | 1985 Jul 23 (1.0.3) |
| Licensing | three-clause BSD |
| P. Language | C |
| Platforms | BSD, DOS |
| Interface | ASCII, CP437 |
| Game Length | |
| Official site of Hack | |
Hack, released seven times between 1984 and 1985, was one of the earliest clones of Rogue, after Moria. Its descendant, NetHack, which is still in development, spawned a subgenre of roguelike games known as hacklikes.
Description
Hack was an improved version of Rogue and introduced several new features, such as a computer pet dog following the character, several new classes, shops...
Food management was vital in Hack, for the character could easily starve to death if not properly fed.
Versions and platforms
Hack was written by Jay Fenlason from scratch between 1982 and 1984 for Unix systems. Versions 1.0 to 1.0.3, the ones first published to Usenet, were re-written by Andries Brouwer. Several versions were developed for DOS and the Atari ST. Current BSD OS projects, such as NetBSD, are maintaining Hack for modern BSD systems.
Legacy
In 1987, Mike Stephenson merged several Hack versions together and published NetHack, which is still supported today. NetHack in turn influenced games such as ADOM or Crawl.
Hack is the prototype of hacklike games, a subgenre of games sharing several primary characteristics. (They are usually opposed to bandlike games, games which follow Angband's gameplay.)
See also
Variants
Related topics
External links
- Hack (Unix video game) on Wikipedia
- Hack 1.0.3 on NetHackWiki
- Hack and Nethack