Spelunky (Boss Fight Books Book 11)

by Derek Yu

NetHack is the successor to Hack and adds new content, as well as a charming graphical tileset. Once, while playing NetHack, I came across a troll in a spike pit. Trolls are not friendly creatures, and although they’re easy to kill, they have a nasty habit of reviving after death. In this situation, it would make sense to leave the troll where he was—stuck—but for whatever reason, I felt compelled to pull him out of the trap with the #untrap command (one of the “extended commands” that is not mapped to its own key on the keyboard). After doing so, a little heart icon appeared next to the troll’s sprite to let me know that he had been tamed, grateful for the rescue. Stories like these abound in NetHack. There is, for example, an entire spoiler page that details all of the ways that a cockatrice can turn you to stone. Just touching the corpse of this deadly creature petrifies you, so if you want to pick one up safely you need to be wearing gloves. Why would you want to hold one, though? To use it as a weapon, of course! But even with gloves on, a dead cockatrice is worrisome, since you could easily fall on top of it while descending the stairs or because you stumbled while wearing cursed boots. The vastness of the game’s possibility space and the fact that each possibility is handled elegantly, without bugs or inappropriate messages, has led NetHack players to create a mantra that’s now applied to other games, as well: “The DevTeam Thinks of Everything.”