Hack
.------. .------.
| HACK | | UNIX |
| 1.0 | | |
'---+--' '--+---'
| net.sources |
+-------+-------+
|
.-----+-----.
| @ d |
| |
+## .---. ##+
| | ? | |
'---'---'---'
|
17 DEC 84
ASCII illustration
A dungeon passed from one programmer to another.
Early 1980s: Fenlason’s game; 1984: Brouwer’s Hack 1.0.
By Jay Fenlason and collaborators; Andries Brouwer.
Hack began as Jay Fenlason’s response to Rogue, with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jon Payne. Andries Brouwer then substantially rewrote it. His own archive fixes one useful date precisely: Hack 1.0 went to the Usenet group net.sources on 17 December 1984, spread across fifteen postings.
Those postings matter as much as a box on a shop shelf. The game travelled as source code. People could play it, port it, repair it and send changes back. Enough discussion followed to earn it a separate newsgroup, net.games.hack.
Brouwer’s Hack already had a companion dog, shops and different character roles. Its dungeon was becoming a place where objects and inhabitants had relationships beyond an exchange of damage. That tendency would grow considerably in NetHack.
Hack is therefore both a game and a junction in the archive. Fenlason’s early program, Brouwer’s releases and later ports are related versions, not interchangeable names for a single surviving executable.
Sources
Andries Brouwer’s Hack archive
NetHack guidebook: credits and ancestry
Hack source and credits, December 1984