I’ve been going deep on NetHack lately and I keep getting humbled. I thought it was just “an old roguelike.” I was not prepared. :D It shipped multiplayer in the 80s and nobody calls it that. Bones files. Someone dies on dlvl 12, their ghost and their cursed loot get saved to disk, and later a different player walks into that grave and fights what killed them. People are haunting each other and it just happens. A quiet multiplayer feature, sitting there since before I was born. “The DevTeam thinks of everything” is not a meme. Every “surely this won’t work” works. Every “surely the game doesn’t track that” is tracked. You can wield a cockatrice corpse as a weapon (wear gloves). You can scare monsters by writing Elbereth in the dust. You can dip, rub, sit on, pray to, and kick basically anything, and the game has an opinion about all of it. I keep finding interactions I had no idea existed. And the engineering under it holds up. It’s still C, still curses talking to your terminal through terminfo, still buildable from a tarball on a modern machine with basically the same steps as decades ago. The reason every weird interaction works is that it’s not special-cased spaghetti, it’s a remarkably coherent object/monster/effect model that new content slots into cleanly. That’s why the game can “think of everything”: the everything is systemic, not a pile of if statements. Reading the source is its own kind of fun, it’s dense but shockingly legible for something this old. And it’s still alive. First released in 1987, still maintained by the DevTeam, and it’s in MoMA’s collection as a culturally significant piece of software. A museum piece that still ships patches. Meanwhile it runs happily on a potato over a plain text terminal. 38 years old and it’s one of the most alive pieces of software I’ve ever touched. I feel like I’ve seen 2% of this game.And I love it :D