The original Hack roguelike video game, written by Jay Fenlason, was thought to have been lost over 40 years ago. The source code was recently found, and someone has rewritten the PDP-11 code for modern PCs. So, you can now play the original Hack game on today's PCs! A working Linux compile is available now, and the dev is currently working on a Windows version.
If this interests you, you can get the source code and the Linux binary on the dev's GitHub page. Also, a 30+ minute interview of the two people responsible for the exhumation was posted on YouTube yesterday.
Here's the YouTube video link. The interview starts at 6 hrs, 43 min, and 18 seconds, and wraps up at about the 7 hrs, 17 min, and 12 second mark. (About 33 or 34 minutes in duration.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8DSq8qSJ44&t=24198s
And here's the link to the GitHub page:
https://github.com/Critlist/protoHack
Yeah, I know, I might be the only one here who finds this interesting, but I might also be wrong; There just might be *ONE* other person out there who thinks it's cool.
Pretty Crazy
I think its interesting though I can't really bring myself to really get into playing ascii based console-y games these days too easily - I do really like its derivatives though especially dungeon crawl stone soup
Woo hoo, I got a comment! I hereby declare this thread to be a complete success! ;-)
Yep, I agree that from a playing perspective, this discovery isn't all that exciting. I was looking at it in more of a historical context; It helps to fill in some missing information regarding the development of the hack/nethack branch of the Rogue family tree.
By the way, I tried compiling the source code on my Linux machine, but it didn't work for me. However, the pre-compiled binary file *did* work on my system.
More of this! Only by remembering the past etc etc