May 12, 2026: Welcome, NetHack 5.0.0!

If you're of a certain age (or mindset) where high-tech computer graphics meant color ASCII characters, you've probably heard of NetHack, one of the defining roguelike video games of the roguelike genre. If you want a deep dive into its 39-year history, the Wikipedia entry does a thorough job.

This venerable text-based game has just had version 5.0.0 released. (This is a bit confusing because the previous released version was 3.6.7 in 2023 . . . they're skipping version 4 quite possibly because the name NetHack 4 is being used by a coded fork of 3.4.3.) More info can be found on the Set Side B blog.

So how old-school is NetHack? Well, the precompiled binaries are for Windows, MS-DOS, and the Amiga. But it's all open source, so someone's probably already ported it so you can play using your toaster or the like. If you're looking for old-school text-based dungeon-crawling fun, NetHack is where it's @. (I consider that to be a hilarious joke if you know what I'm talking about . . .)

-- Steven Marsh