Eric Raymond first noticed the game sometime in the late '80s, attracted by his general love of fantasy role-playing games: "I've been a fan for a long time, going back to the original 'Dungeons & Dragons' in 1973." In addition to the player's guide, Raymond brought some important contributions to the code and gameplay: "Probably the most significant user-visible things I did were adding color support and blindfolds to the game." Nethack aficionados remember those blindfolds well -- wearing one gives you clairvoyant awareness of every monster on the current level, to great tactical advantage. (Only after first killing and eating a magic Floating Eye, of course.)

With the DevTeam coordinating these revisions transmitted from literally everywhere in the world, the game greatly expanded. And owing to the constant peer review native to open source, its architecture still grew increasingly stable. Of the thousands of times I've played it, despite its wild diversity of game play, I can recall maybe a mere handful when it crashed.

The DevTeam soldiered on, even after Miller's death in 1994 from cancer-related complications. An expert in Husserlian phenomenology who lectured at Stanford and MIT and worked for a time at groundbreaking Xerox PARC, Miller was well-loved by his DevTeam colleagues -- even though few had ever actually met him. "I still have a copy of the e-mail he sent me more than 10 years ago asking me if I wanted to join the DevTeam," Collet writes wistfully. "I considered him one of my closest friends and wanted to meet him eventually. I'm still kicking myself for not doing it. I miss him badly." In his memory, Nethack's Gnome Town level has a cheerful candle merchant named Ichzack -- a reference to Miller's contributions to the artificial intelligence of the game's intimidating shopkeepers and also, to the philosopher's illuminating guidance of the DevTeam, in life.

During Nethack's inception, it was unthinkable that computer games would eventually become a market of several billion dollars. It was even more inconceivable that the shaggy-beard ethos of open source would one day claim the keys to the economic kingdom. So many people who have loved this game for so long have, quite unexpectedly, fallen into insane amounts of money. So I ask the DevTeam: "Say a hacker who's suddenly become wealthy from a Linux-related IPO approaches you and says, 'Here's a million dollars. Let's make a full-blown, graphics-rich version of Nethack to rival Diablo. Interested?'"

Among the DevTeam members interviewed, the question provokes some interest, but far more skepticism. While the rest of the world has made the Windows and Mac GUI-interface their home, many in the DevTeam steadfastly remain on the ASCII-only Unix terminals through which they first played the game. Janet Walz worries, "Several of us don't work on platforms that are ever supported by fancy graphics libraries, so it would be difficult to continue the tradition of programming what we wanted to play." Collet, now a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, perhaps expresses the DevTeam's fundamental reservations best: "We work on it because it is fun ... Take the fun out of working on it [by making it a job] and, most likely, the game won't be as much fun to the players either."

Meanwhile, other open-source RPG projects proceed without real financing, driven mostly by the desire to create a living world. Raymond cites WorldForge and Time City as having potential in that regard. But he's a little doubtful that the open-source model will burgeon in the professional game industry, since "games are an exceptional case; the economic logic that makes opening source a compellingly good idea for infrastructure software like operating systems ... applies much less strongly to games." According to Raymond, the cost of failure associated with a software bug in a game is far less than in a Web server program or other critical infrastructural piece of software -- so there's less to gain from opening up the code to public view.

But "Playing the Open Source Game," an essay by British game designer Shawn Hargreaves (referenced in Raymond's writing), argues that many games no longer succeed or fail on their programming: "The role of the programmer now consists of writing good tools and trying to make life as easy as possible for the artists and level designers, rather than leading from the front with state of the art technology."

For all those who've loved Nethack -- many of whom find themselves now, to their own surprise, at the forefront of modern culture -- this must seem like a heartening suggestion. While most current commercial games can hide the papier mâché flimsiness of their construction behind flashy visuals, this also suggests we've reached a point where such graphics are good enough to actually enhance Nethack's ability to enthrall. Perhaps Slashdot will someday announce the formation of an ambitious new development team, eager to breathe visual life into this ancient dungeon that still teems with the genius of its many creators -- difficult to conquer, in play; in design, even now, near impossible to surpass.

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