Today is a bad day to play NetHack. Real-world time, date and moon phase has some influence on that game, for Friday 13 this means that
your baseline luck is decreased by one. Note that prayers will be rejected while you have negative luck, so until you manage to redress this, dangerous situations will be that much more dangerous.
You could change the computer date of course, but wouldn’t that be cheating?
Hat tip: USA Erklärt.
A couple of days ago I uploaded Castle of the Winds, which in a way renewed my interest in roguelike games and led to all that discussion about hack121 and so on. Here are some additional tidbits for this game.
First, you’ll often read that Castle of the Winds was originally released in 1989. That’s complete nonsense. There are two releses, 1.0 from 1992 and 1.1 from 1993. That’s all. 1989 was the year Rick Saada started working on it, and he reflected that in the copyright notice (1989–92). That’s not an uncommon thing to do. Castle of the Winds was quite certainly a Windows 3.0 game from the beginning. Windows 3.0 was released in May 1990, but the SDKs tend to be available several months earlier, especially to Microsoft employees.
A question that is less easy to answer is whether it is correct to see Castle of the Winds as a roguelike game. Rick Saada never used that term, in the help file he refers to his game as a “graphical adventure game, loosely based on fantasy role playing games, and drawing much inspiration from Norse mythology.” Some dungeons may be random (this is usually seen as a main criterion), the first one definitely isn’t. The game also puts a stronger emphasis on story than roguelike games usually do, which due to their randomness take more of a sandbox approach.
However you want to answer this question, Castle of the Winds is definitely a remarkable game. With 13500 registrations, it may have been the greatest shareware success on 16-bit Windows. It still has its fans and fan sites, and Rick Saada still gets mail about it. It was one of the first RPGs for Windows, it remained one of few, and better than most. While back than it was often said that there were so few arcade games for Windows, this was never really true. The type of game that was really rare on Windows was exactly this kind, RPGs and adventures, games that demand a sort of commitment from the player and offer a sort of immersion (the big exception here, as in so many aspects, is Balance of Power). They got more numerous as SVGA cards with Windows drivers became more widespread, but Castle of the Winds remains one of the few 16 color games with these qualities.
So I’ve uploaded this mysterious game now to Download Central. You can download it, and look at some screenshots.
This game is really very mysterious. It has no title screen, no copyright notice, no release year, no name of the author hidden somewhere in the code. You can get the message Hack version 1.21 (Slak was here!)
by pressing STRG+V at any time in the game. That is all. The only documentation is a file named moves.txt which gives only the barest gameplay information and surprises a bit with incorrect English (weild, veiw, hungary) not mirrored by the in-game messages. Maybe it was written by someone else. The files in the archive all have the time stamp 2000-04-26. Alone the fact that the time stamps are exactly identical is an indicator that they have no relevance for the creation date of the game.
Hack 1.21 has a few interesting gameplay details. Right at the start it puts the player in a shop with a random sum of gold. A light source is absolutely necessary, or the character will be blind in the dark caverns. There is no pet, though this was a feature at least since Andries Brouwer’s Hack 1.0. It also seems to be a lot tougher than Don Kneller’s PC Hack, the probability that you’ll die a few seconds into the game is high. It is interesting that it shares this feature with Mike J. Teixeira’s MAG, which according to the author was based on Jay Fenlason’s Hack. This is just a guess, but maybe Andries Brouwer toned down the difficulty a bit.
Another feature it shares with MAG is the use of color. Don Kneller’s PC Hack used the extended IBM character set pretty much the same way, but refrained from the use of color (at least in the default setting, I never really explored the options). And that’s really all I can say about it. If you want to know more, check out the already quoted NetHackWiki entry on Jay Fenlason’s Hack, it has detailed comparisons between hack121, Hack 1.0 and PDP-11 Hack.
Okay, so maybe I should work on my reading skills. Somehow this sentence in Don Kneller’s Hack docs escaped my notice:
PC HACK is the MSDOS version of UNIX HACK which was originally written by several people at the Stichting Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam.
A few more questions were answered, and details added, by the NetHackWiki entry on Jay Fenlason’s Hack. 1982 was the year he started working on it, not the year of release. The Hack timeline looks about like this:
As for Hack121, it remains mysterious. It is the only Hack version that starts in a shop where the player can buy equipment. It does not have pets, something that was present at least since Andries Brouwer’s Hack 1.0 (nobody really knows what was in Jay Fenlason’s Hack). It is thus a somewhat independent project. Unless its creator steps out into the light at some point, we’ll probably never know who made it, where, and when.
Hack is somewhat the missing link between Rogue and NetHack, and it has always got less attention than these two. It seems that its history is a lot more complicated than I thought.
The first Hack was written by Jay Fenlason in 1982, with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jon Payne. It was a clone of Rogue, but with a lot more monsters, and distributed under the BSD license. It seems that this was only ever a Unix program, and that it has been lost.
In 1984, Andries Brouwer posted a Hack 1.0 to net.sources. He developed it up to 1.03, it was distributed under a copyright notice of the Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam.
In 1985, Michiel Huisjes posted a Hack for PDP-11 to net.sources in five messages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Apparently this version first introduced pets, in the form of a little dog.
Then there is a sourceless anonymous PC executable known as Hack121, since it is found in an archive with the name hack121.zip. It starts out in a shop where the player can buy equipment, uses the extended IBM character set and colors.
What I don’t know is how and if all these versions relate to Don Kneller’s Hack, which dates back to 1985 and which I had always assumed to be the basis for NetHack. In the doc to his Hack 1.0.3, no other Hack is mentioned, only Rogue.
As a final note, the origin of the name Hack
seems unclear too. I had always understood it to be derived from the fact that Rogue had been hacked. But it may also be derived from a lesser known usage of hack at MIT (New Hacker’s Dictionary):
To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and (since this is usually performed at educational institutions) the Campus Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to playing adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Zork.
Note: Shortly after posting this, I noted a few inaccuracies. They are corrected in the next entry.
