RevivedHack

Unlike Rogue, Hack was a game I had never played before I started porting it. In fact, it wasn't until an early version of RevivedHack was compiling and running under Windows that I experienced this wonderful game from the mid-1980's for the first time. Before that I had played, or tried to play, NetHack, Hack's direct descendent. I quickly found that the arcane knowledge that one has to learn by trial-and-error just to survive in NetHack was far too daunting for me, unless I was willing to invest many hours learning all its secrets. Some players turn to spoilers, which are profuse on the Internet, but I decided to go back in time to see what the game was like in its more primitive state. What I found was not an incomplete game with little to attract players of modern Roguelikes; instead Hack turned out to be a very well-balanced and challenging game.

Hack was originally written by Jay Fenlason and friends. His game was inspired by Rogue, and was intended to be an improved version of it. Unfortunately, his source code has apparently not survived, and only derivatives of it exist. One such derivation was Andries Brouwer's Hack, which was posted to Usenet in December of 1984. Brouwer released versions 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and finally 1.0.3 for the UNIX operating system. They were distributed through Usenet as complete source code or patches against a previous version. They were later ported to MS-DOS (PC Hack) and Amiga. Version 1.0.3 is currently distributed with operating systems in the BSD family.

The MS-DOS ports were made by Don Kneller. His port of Hack 1.0.3, PC Hack 3.61, is the basis of RevivedHack, integrating his bug fixes and most of his changes. Apart from the actual porting, I made many of my own changes, adding color to the text, optional support for graphical tiles and sound effects, and new saved game and message display code. I also collected bug reports from old newsgroup messages, and fixed those bugs, as well as others I found while playtesting.

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